Hello reader, and welcome to the blog page of my newly designed website. This will be a place for me to share thoughts and anecdotes, try out novel grammatical experiments and syntactical leaps, and to promote my projects and myself in general.
I will also use this platform as an alternative to Twitter, from which I have backed away recently. Why, you ask? Wellsir…
A few months ago, when the possibility of Elon Musk buying Twitter and then welcoming Donald Trump back to the platform was first demanding the public’s attention, I had feelings of… discomfort. I’m thankful for Mr. Musk’s efforts to promote solar energy and I appreciate the way the dangerous autopilot feature of his fancy electric car provides a lesson in hubris to early adopters, but I would also say that Elon Musk enjoys annoying strangers more than is reasonable and is perhaps too quick to accuse heroic cave divers of pedophilia. He bugs me a little, can I say that? The idea of spending a portion of every day at a party he’s hosting, well, it just made me kinda queasy.
And as for Donald Trump, the fact that he’s no longer President of the United States is so great! and the fact that he’s no longer on Twitter is… even better? The unavoidability of his constant messages may have been the biggest day to day detriment to my well-being during the grim years that a disgraced game show host ran our country. The hostility, the casual criminal confessions, the mid-morning threats of nuclear war, the strategic misspellings and various other dumbnesses, I hated it all so very much.
Wait, stretegic misspellings? That’s what I said! I know you’d prefer to believe that the errors in those tweets were genuine mistakes made by a genuine idiot, but honestly, how does a person end up spelling hamburger as “hamberder”? How would that occur? I say things like that were misspelled on purpose to draw comments and quote tweets. Engagement! Impressions! As I tried to explain on Twitter at the time, when you’re dunking on Donald Trump, you’re playing his game.
As I write this, by the way, I notice that people I follow on Twitter have just started tweeting out screen shots of Trump’s “truths” and adding their own withering jokes. The trend seems to have started with his “why are people so mean?” “truth”, which was the right combination of weird, dumb and trolly to go viral in just the way Mr. Trump hopes to do. He didn’t need Elon Musk to make it back to Twitter after all! Oy.
So what’s my point? What is my point? Oh yeah. When it looked like Elon Musk and Donald Trump were about to come storming into my online life in a major way, I knew that my mental health would not hold up well under the dual strain and I knew I would have to flee Twitter. But the idea of that frightened me. I’ve had a Twitter account since 2009, when a Facebook friend told me my topical wisecracks were wasted in the internet backwater of high school friends and family members I had established there. I took my act to the big time and I’ve been so entertained, informed and enlightened by the experience these past 12 years. I’ve made friends, heard from fans, consumed life affirming compliments, promoted my critically acclaimed TV show into a serious ratings disappointment, thrilled to celebrity airline customer service complaints, encouraged people to send Jill Stein $5 for a Pennsylvania recount, marveled at the strange wonders of the Conway’s marriage and, most meaningfully, attracted attention to myself whenever I needed some!
What a ride. But then it seemed I’d soon have to leave it all behind.
I was trying to wrap my brain around that when I read a tweet by my friend, the hilarious Jen Kirkman, who announced a while back that she was only going be using Twitter to promote her projects from then on. She would no longer produce any other content for the platform. I thought “that’s smart. I’m gonna do that too”. Incidentally, I went looking for the exact wording of Jen’s tweet but it was taking too long to find it because she’s sent out so many more tweets since that one. Jen might’ve changed her mind about the whole thing actually. But I’m sticking to it. Yes, it’s been months since I’ve shared a bon mots or a call to action or one of my trademark all too relatable observations about the foibles of modern life. Ah me!
See for yourself. My twitter page is nothing but ‘look at this thing I did’ and a very occasional ‘look at this thing someone else did’. No jokes, no hot takes, no cold takes, no takes! Nothin’. And it’s been a nice break. Sending out a creative expression as a tweet so often results in bruised feelings for me when I don’t get the likes I feel I deserve. And then my feelings are further bruised when I re-read the tweet later and realize the people were right. It didn’t deserve more likes. In fact, it had no reason to exist at all. How deflating! It has been delightful to remove all of that from my life.
But I discovered something strange and unexpected. It seems that after 12 years of tweeting, I have quietly trained my brain to compose tweets all the time. In the early days of my Twitter self-banning, I kept coming up with dumb, trivial, concise notions that were designed to be shared with the world. I kept thinking “well, maybe I’ll tweet just this one thing”, but instead, summoning really very impressive will power wouldn’t you say, I opened the Notes app on my phone and tapped my tweet in there.
The reason I’m telling you this is that I have decided to use this blog as a place to put those untweeted tweets, a place to share small thoughts without living under the tyranny of the like button. Of course I realize that fewer people will see these words and that’s all right. This will be less stressful and, when 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is, inevitably, invited back to Twitter, I will be way ahead of the rest of you in weening myself from the tweet teet.
Since these drolleries of mine will no longer technically be “tweets”, it has been necessary to come up with a new name for them and I have settled on…
Twarts
This is, obviously, a portmanteau of “tweet” and “dart” and it’s meant to communicate that these missives are similar to tweets except that they’re sharper and more exactly aimed. That’s a twart. Posts on this blog that are conceived of as twarts will be labeled that way, like so:
Okay, great. Enjoy my twarts. Thanks for reading all this. Please feel free to like or dislike this post. I’ll never know!
All the best,
Andy Daly
