Let’s start off with the good stuff.
I found this on Reddit: https://twitter.com/loneblockbuster. The setup is this is the last surviving Blockbuster Video, and they do a post every day with a spot-on sense of humor. Absolutely hilarious. Go ahead and check it out and give ’em a follow if you’re a Twitter type person.
I have a Twitter account (Shekky Thermopylae, or @ShekkyT if you must know), but I hardly ever use it other than to post an occasional joke. Social Media’s a huge time drain for a guy like me. I might tell myself I’m just going to glance at my feed for five minutes, but then I’m transported forward in time an hour or two without anything accomplished but a refreshed contempt for cat videos. Seriously, it’s like Professor Farnsworth’s chronitons are doing a number on me. There’s a link in the preceding sentence if you need a reference. So, I try to stay clear of the feeds unless I literally have nothing else to do with my time, which is pretty much never.
Still, I found myself inspired by what @loneblockbuster is doing. Doing a daily comedy one-liner has gotta be tough. I’m seriously thinking of making that my challenge for September.
It’s scary, but that’s what challenges are for.
Anyhow, to get back on topic…Twitter and its most famous user, Donald Trump. Now, I don’t want to hear your opinion on President Trump, and I’m sure you don’t want to hear mine. I’ll just say that when I see all the cool kids picking on one guy, I have a nigh-uncontrollable urge to stand up for him, even if he’s someone I can’t stand, and leave it at that. That’s not really the point of this post. The point is, has there ever been a platform more custom made for a guy like him than Twitter? I mean, he can sit on the john, type a couple of sentences into his phone, and make the whole world go insane. With the press of a button, he can bypass the media and his own staff to get an unfiltered message out. He’s got thirty-two million followers, but that’s not the end of it. Every one of his posts gets picked up by every news agency on the planet, expanding his reach worldwide, and he hasn’t even flushed yet. That’s just unimaginable!
Now I don’t know if he’s playing three-dimensional chess or four-dimensional CandyLand, but, damn, that’s a kind of power that beggars belief. For good or ill, power’s power.
Oh well, I guess I’ll just keep pluggin’ along, producing quality content in the hopes that one day I’ll make enough off my book sales to cover my bar tab.