At Long Last, I Deleted Twitter

And My Nieces Will Be Just Fine

**By “deleted” I do mean I deleted my account and not just deleted the app from my phone. The latter would likely be far shorter and far more readable. If that is what you wish to read, I cannot help.

To be clear, Twitter didn’t ruin my life. The natural and rhetorically appropriate follow-up to the lede would be, “I ruined my life,” but that would be disingenuous as I haven’t actually ruined my life, only made things difficult for myself and refused to put in the work to become a happier, more fulfilled person.

Not that Twitter helped with any of that either.

As much distress as Twitter has brought me, I did, at times, enjoy myself. I liked tweeting. I liked sending out unnecessary little nothings. Thinking about them, although I hate to admit it, those nothings are intrinsic pieces of who I was. They’re reminders of who I used to be and the spaces I occupied — meaningless to everyone else but slightly less meaningless to me. They’re reminders of fundamental existential truths, that I used to find things funny, that I used to not challenge but befriend the void and shout into it the goofy little thoughts I had and imagine it rolling its eyes back at me, which I found endearing and would encourage me to keep going.

It so happens that in this case the void is an endless, miserable galaxy that wastes all of my time, and if I choose to look at the void with anything but the exact, self-centered focus required, I am assaulted with other people’s shouts, at the void and at other people, and it all makes me want to explode, even more than I already do,

Even as my brain fatigues exponentially and critical thinking becomes more and more grueling, I know how detrimental my relationship with the void is, and I know that if I have the option to live in the moment — far from the void, near people with decency and other human values — then that’s what I’d like to do.

In the new, idyllic space I dream of on the other side of the void, far enough from the void in space and spirit that I’m not even tempted by it, I may know myself and I may know who I used to be, and have come to terms with how pointless all of my time spent by the void was. I like to think I could thrive and accept myself and live peacefully. That’s all wonderful, for me.

But how do I explain who I was to my nieces?

How will they know who I was? Once they’ve learned how highly I value the abstract concept of truth how will they know my truth? Who will show them the spaces I occupied? I want them to know. They don’t quite exist yet, but they have to know.

I also want to delete my account.

Family legacy. Personal misery…

I know what I have to do. I know I have to take care of myself and I know the healthy choice is to delete my account forever.

I also know that before I do that I have to teach it and all of its lessons to my nieces. This isn’t about me.

I close my eyes and strain my core, like I’m passing gas and blowing my nose and making myself as small as possible. I repeat the word “nieces” in my mind, over and over. My repetitions snowball into phrases, reeled off without thought. “Come, my nieces.” “Come and know me.” “Set me free, my nieces, set me free.”

The curtain before my bedroom window rustles. My goosepimples blossom. I begin to sweat from the temples. The sweat freezes into little droplets. The little droplets fall from my skin and float into the midnight air. My dog barks. I hush him. He sneezes. I bless him. The curtain rustles again.

I blink. There they are. There they all are. My nieces past, present, and future. This really only pertains to my nieces future so I tell the others to buzz off. I blink again and my nieces present are gone. I SAID BUZZ OFF. The nieces past follow. I remember I don’t have any nieces past or present and I am confused. Who were those little girls? My confusion fades briefly, only to return in new, grander forms.

There they are, right in front of me, their faces not quite distinct, their qualities impossible to define, but their presence so potent that I can feel their beauty,

My head continues to spin. I can see them all, over there, together, but I cannot pretend to know them. A single niece emerges. She takes a few small steps my way and I cannot pretend to know her either, and I can see her more clearly than the rest but no more exactly. In fact, the closer this niece comes, the further away the others feel.

Girls. Can you hear me? Oh my god, look at you! I can’t believe it, there are so many of you. Thank you for…wow, I can’t believe it. You’re here.

LEAD NIECE

Thank you,

for being here too.

CHORUS OF NIECES

We come to his home in the dead of night,

His quarters are meager and

No more hospitable than the elements that

Ensnare him, just beyond his window,

But his welcome is warm enough

To sustain these ever-unsettled travelers.

Thank you.

LEAD NIECE

Thank you.

CHORUS OF NIECES

He will insist in his manner of gratuitous,

Unctuous gratitude -

It is for such a quality that we call him Uncle?

So…god, I don’t really know where to start. I wanted you to come…well for you. I’m Dustin. You don’t know me yet but I’m Dustin. I’m your uncle. And you’re all my nieces, right? This is crazy.

CHORUS OF NIECES

He says what is known to all,

Or does he not hear us call him Uncle

As we hear him thank us twice?

And it feels kind of weird jumping right into it, but there’s a specific reason I wanted you here. Actually, do you even know what Twitter is? How old are you? Do you know why you’re here?

LEAD NIECE

The timeline you know as the only,

Each instant passing in array,

Is not from where we come, and thus

Until we be born we be of age immeasurable.

The summons of our uncle rouses us

From our pre-eternal sleep,

And at once we know him,

And his world, and the facts of his world,

But the emotions and motives within

- as with all matters of soul -

We cannot claim to know without

The all important finding out.

In this fathomless realm, if you can convince

Yourself to believe, your words, no matter

The depth of obscurity, are known,

Although we must make certain to

Avoid a dialogue of we two back to back,

Sharing words but plucking meaning from our own trees:

By this do you mean X?

Yeah, that’s the one. I don’t call it X, but not like as a statement though, it’s just stored in my head as Twitter. Like I type in twitter.com and it takes me there. You know it though?

LEAD NIECE

Yes, and well.

Ok that’s good, so I don’t really have to explain it.

LEAD NIECE

As you claim such complex ambivalence,

Finding within yourself the explanation

You’re quick to avoid

May with it bring insight into why you suffer so

Oh. Ummm. I guess…you know, social media…you just post what you want…I don’t know, you know what it is already.

LEAD NIECE

Unborn as we are

We recognize the difficulty

Of speaking a point

Sorry, I don’t know how to describe it! There’s a lot to it, I don’t know its history. It’s an app, you know — you say whatever you want, you follow other people who are saying whatever they want. You read and talk. I don’t know, it’s just a thing people do. Post stuff, character limit, follow people, that stuff.

LEAD NIECE

You say it was Twitter that ruined

Your once unruined life?

No, I specified — well I guess you hadn’t appeared yet, but I specified that it did not ruin my life. I hate it but it didn’t ruin my life. Sorry, I plan on laying everything out for you, it’ll make sense.

LEAD NIECE

Hence you preserve your hatred

That it may taunt you until you lie in

the untauntable earth beneath?

For then you will be safe from yourself?

No, not exactly. I would like to erase everything and be free of it all. But that’s not fair to you. There’s a lot to learn about me through my tweets. Any hope you have of knowing me gets much thinner without this resource.

LEAD NIECE

Look. See the nieces behind me,

and the other living audience absent from your home

And note the open ears and able mouths

And forget not the rarity of our entry,

For you, our uncle.

To speak with our uncle -

One might call it a dream,

But here we stand in wake.

We can talk, to familiarize in and of selves,

But we must focus instead on

This website that did not ruin you,

But ignites in you

Spades of obsession?

I’m trying to get rid of my account. I’m going to delete it. But if I delete it now it’ll be lost forever. And I don’t know, it’s not like we’re going to live next door to each other, I don’t know how often we’ll get time together. So I don’t want to delete it until you’ve seen some stuff, so you can get to know me. And then that’ll save us time later, we won’t have to talk about all this stuff when you’re actual people.

CHORUS OF NIECES

To produce an idea foolish And justify it so, we think The thinker must already know: The greatest conjurer alive Could not from an untrained eye hide This parade of vanity. And should by ungodly luck He avert the gaze, up struts Uncle, to refocus every stare Upon his lecture — Perhaps he seats them too, With no intent to ask the questions People do, or stand upon Expected ceremony.

Lo, he explains his defense And paints a world wherein To understand one’s neighbor One needn’t look them in the eyes, Nor risk acceptance, But study instead the artifacts they leave.

In Uncle’s dream he blinks, About-faces, and from his files Renders an uncommissioned mural Portraying his tweets. Look — As Uncle pauses and turns again To pull the file most important: The handprint left in paint upon his shoulder Matches his own.

Remember this, should you In Uncle’s words find inspiration: Clean your hand before Patting yourself so fervently On the back.

LEAD NIECE

To the cynic who says,

“Family heeds his call,

Should not they break bread

And know one another

Without crutch, and perhaps

Evenly?” do you reply?

Well, I’d tell them what I told you. I was just about to delete my account, so I’m seizing an opportunity to share, not manufacturing one.

LEAD NIECE

And when deletion ushers in

A better you, with it comes peace

With what deletion means?

For it is of we nieces’ minds

That to delete is to for good elide

And to force into action

one’s memory, forevermore,

As the deleted is no more.

You wish that we know you

Through this exercise -

Or is it exorcise? -

And that shall never bring regret?

To be understood, nothing more.

If not for us you’d be

Rid of this demon by now,

But you suffer prolongedly

For nieces?

That’s it, that’s pretty much it. I don’t feel understood generally. And you’re all very important to me. Even though only one of you is actually talking to me, I love all of you. I don’t want there to be unnecessary distance between us. So before I hit delete I want to ensure you’ve gotten from it what you can. I mean you saw how hard it was for me to describe Twitter, which can probably be described pretty easily. Imagine me trying to describe a person. I’d delete it whether you were here or not. It just turns out you are here, so why not dive in?

LEAD NIECE

Please forgive,

There is much we do not know.

The nieces sniffed a sliver of cake,

And in their eyes you had and ate,

But their senses are not yet mastered.

So too did they perceive an act,

And on you a costume –

Uncle, a man greater than

His playthings, but insistent on

Making sure the ensemble knows

How deftly he once played?

The audience will recognize the hubris

And foresee the final act,

In it his death.

No no, not at all. I’m not proud of myself at all. Well, I mean I do sometimes think I’m a clever little boy, but I hate myself. Make no mistake. And…well years ago someone compiled my 100 best tweets…ok it was me, I did it. But that was just for fun. You know, it’s important to make yourself laugh. It’s not easy to do, it was just a little fun.

LEAD NIECE

The import of joy!

We will evermore know that our uncle,

This man of wit and woe,

Marches not only to rhythms of his own,

But for them.

Perhaps his rhythms and

All stages thereof -

From thought’s kernel

To imprecise production

To a lonesome laugh,

Shared with none,

Heard by none -

Can buoy his tenuous morale.

And yet:

He tells us he eyes

This encyclopedic construction

For the nieces he will know and love.

Our noble uncle and his

Insistence on caring for us

Before himself.

Let us hope such kindness

Does not cast him adrift.

CHORUS OF NIECES

He dangles before us

The weight of his identity,

And this before we have

Identities of our own.

Not yet even able

To breathe the air of his world,

We are assigned homework.

He primes us at once

To not come to conclusions of our own

But study his unwarranted tome.

Wherefore can this man not be,

And simply be,

But must instead curate what was?

The air around him

Will speak at length of him.

After all,

Is it not his air?

Beyond the sermon,

We will find his truth —

And it will not ask

To be curated.

LEAD NIECE

For now you wish us to gather

At your feet and you will regale us

With your tweets?

Oh. Actually no, I’m not ready. I don’t even have the tweets in front of me. And I like to take my time with things. Like I’ll work on something one day and then not touch it for a month or so, and then spend like an hour with it, then a few days off. You don’t need to stay and wait for me to prepare everything, it’ll be a while. Waiting on me to do anything, really…kind of a losing game. What’s your timeline again? Do you want to watch me write? That feels boring but…you can if you want?

LEAD NIECE

If this is your wish, the nieces

Will ensure it is so. As with anything

For Uncle Dustin.

This is as you hope to be addressed?

Our one and only, esteemed Uncle Dustin?

No I think just Dustin would be best.

LEAD NIECE

Dustin…

Dustin in both essence and name.

It is not uncle that defines Dustin,

It is Dustin himself who tackles

This task.

For now…that corner there?

Shall we wait in that corner?

Or on your bed? We will

Be soundless, if you wish it.

You know what, I’m actually kind of creeped out by you being on my bed. It’s not personal, it would be true if you weren’t my nieces. And my bed is also my desk, so no. How about I’ll write and then after every…I don’t know, I’ll let you know when it’s done. I think it’s best if you don’t just hang around here, but what kind of powers do you have? Are you going to watch me write from somewhere else? I’ve put no thought into this. I was just going to write it and give it to you but now that you’re here it feels weird to just send you away.

LEAD NIECE

If our vanishing suits you best

We will comply and leave

You so suited.

The power to summon us

Is yours; when your readiness

Matures, by no pressuring eyes

In the corner or atop your bed,

Or even if before your final key stroke

You wish to host, we are yours,

Blood-bound, at beck and so too

At call.

Ok that’s probably best.

LEAD NIECE

The terms agreed,

The moonlight slicing through just so,

We nieces exit into ether

And will revive when says our lector.

But not before our farewell.

Farewell. I…I love you all. Very much.

LEAD NIECE

Though it comes from hearts not formed,

We love our uncle too.

Awesome will be the day

We learn his lore, and awesome

The days after, for the learned we.

Yes good…ok goodbye.

I blink and they vanish. My dog barks. Is he communicating with them? Do they already know each other? I feel strange about all of this. But I remind myself: this isn’t about me. This isn’t about me.

CHORUS OF NIECES

He christens our departing vessel —

Ever the slightest moment,

An instant folded into itself,

Here, then not —

And thinks himself alone.

Alone he is as man

He laments again and again,

Though he does not know the depth,

But alone of niece he is not.

Our bond is formed

And cannot be broken by sudden egress.

In human solitude he will bathe

In his folly. He will play

And may almost drown,

And when he concludes

There may be a product for us,

As he claims —

Or for the modern world,

As we suspect.

But our vessel has not left the port;

We remain, for our study now begins.

We shall watch as he forges folly

Into finely packaged fact,

And see how far he can stretch

Himself and his feeble tales

Into chapters worthy of reading.

We watch — true, we have our doubts,

But chances aplenty lay in

The spaces he stretches through.

We will know him,

Though whether it mirrors

The knowingness he hopes

To implant within us,

We do not know.

I last tweeted over a year ago. “Where the Halloween parties at?” It was mid-September. I don’t know, I was probably drinking.

Also prominent here is an awareness that followed me from my first tweet to my last: that not only did I have very few followers but none of them actually cared what I was tweeting. This worked as a reverse-filter and neo-nihilistic engine that powered a great deal of my tweets. None of it mattered. Seen or unseen, there was no point. From time to time I’d be genuine, or I’d promote something, but even then I knew there was no point.

So on September 17, 2024, “where the Halloween parties at?”

No point. And then nothing.

That registers as Tweet no. 2,695. I’ve probably deleted a good hundred or so, but those 2,695 remain. For my 88 followers. (I follow 211). But starting there and working backwards won’t make sense.

Look no further than my pinned tweet.

Exactly what I was trying to explain earlier, about understanding me. I want to be understood, but on my terms. I am not to be tasted at random. I am a full meal. Or I was. Now I am inedible. Toxic. But hey, 11 likes. Or hearts or whatever.

Is it possible to download all of my Tweets? Or is there a way to scroll to the bottom that doesn’t require actually scrolling to the fucking bottom? I’ve mentioned two of them and I’m already exhausted thinking about how much of an endeavor this is going to be. Jesus. No no, I’ll push through. It’s not about me. It’s for my nieces.

(Ok ladies, I’m scrolling and I’m laughing. It’s such a joy to tickle yourself! Nobody gets me :( )

Yikes, this is a deranged scroll. After each micro-load I’m met with some real bullshit. Some real nonsense. But then you should know about me and nonsense..

Wait a fucking second, it stopped at December 22, 2022. I can’t scroll any further. Let me investigate.

My nieces must be wondering about my progress. I squint — nothing doing. I try to clear my brain but there’s build-up too stuck to clear off. I close my eyes and imagine an empty plane, just my nieces and myself. I spread my arms and they all jump into them for a hug, fitting perfectly.

I open my eyes.

LEAD NIECE

Hello Dustin, brother of our begetters,

Most junior of the Marks in moons

But not so in size nor tweets

Ladies, so good to see you! Ok at 11:25 last night I requested an archive of my data. Twitter said I’d be notified when it’s ready.

Now it’s 8:48 pm, almost a full day later, and I still haven’t gotten my archive file, so I thought we could talk for a second. You can ask questions or we can just chat.

LEAD NIECE

At last you extend to us, and how funny,

An empty hand to shake,

A true and meaningful gift

Rather than a present to hide behind.

And talk we will, but know we have

Tracked your keystrokes, each one

More indulgent than the last, and we offer

Beyond our empty hands and eager ears,

A handkerchief to soak your tears,

For you’ve only begun and already

Are plagued by exhaust.

CHORUS OF NIECES

Perhaps he too should track his strokes

And recall how he deems the act so pointless

And yet continues on, in obsession.

He settled for, and within,

These hollow acts.

Perhaps the walls within this chamber

Of his own complacent design

Bring comfort and safe dwelling

But few passing by can mistake

the lonesome wails for anything but

The revving engine of the sadness he’s mechanized.

Uncle’s familiarity with the clamoring cries

Does not replace their essence

With a less pathetic design.

LEAD NIECE

I must speak truly:

Your nieces watch and wait,

And with few tweets to read they wonder

What man places his value

Into nothings for nobody.

Nobody cares, you claim,

And make no mistake there is no shame,

Though the tweetscape is not your world.

The neighbors beneath make merriment,

And above hush their infant to sleep

Yet here sits a grown man

Disengaged, unintrigued by

The laughter below or cries above.

Our camp senses little beyond

The pervasive sadness

Lazily propelling you laterally.

Oh. Well, you know…I don’t know. How old are you again? There are things I probably shouldn’t get into before consulting your parents. But Twitter, it’s more complicated than that. It’s an open forum and thousands of empty, lonely, sad, meaningless people get to share their thoughts. To me it’s funny to share double-meaningless things. Like, not exactly as a joke but not exactly not as a joke, if that makes sense.

CHORUS OF NIECES

It does not.

I’ll have examples for you once the download finishes, I’m sure. And one thing to note is that life is hard, and there are some really meaningful chunks of day to day life that make life…meaningful. And that’s nice, and a little exhausting. So putting blinders on and drowning out the meaning for a few minutes can be refreshing. Not everything has to be deep.

CHORUS OF NIECES

He justifies dutifully his acts

Yet echoes claims that all of this

Over which he labors brings joy,

But we remember with acute certainty

Why we have been summoned

And the roles he has cast us,

An audience compassionate in captivity

To glean lessons from, and applaud

If he had his way, this protracted threnody.

I want you to know that I did, sometimes, enjoy tweeting, and I’m sure as I go over some tweets I’m going to sound like my own biggest fan. There will be some unhealthy, completely delusional self-praise. And more important, my contributions are wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of Twitter. It’s the looking and scrolling that’s the problem. It’s the reading and watching and time wasting. That’s the most destructive part for me.

I don’t want the option to waste my own time that way. It’s so tempting and I can’t take any more temptation. It’s still lurking. It may make me laugh but it’s an unwelcome distraction and often a tool to avoid the things I ought to be doing. Because there can be no rejection if I’m talking to nobody.

CHORUS OF NIECES

He speaks of nobody.

We have not yet decided

Whether that is us.

Nor what it would mean

If it were.

LEAD NIECE

Then in our report we shall still

Consider these retchings as fundamental

To our uncle as the onyx sheen of his hair

Or arc of his shoulders as he fails

To stand in proper posture?

And we are to celebrate these strident

Expulsions which share his blood,

And welcome the thousands of them

As family, sharing too our blood,

Rather than inane debris dumped

In a wasteland that does not welcome

The dumper or his dump?

Right, that’s what I’m saying. It may all be for nothing in the moment but looking back it’s a little scrapbook of incredibly stupid things that either made me giggle or things that I’d otherwise completely forget about. It’s a time capsule of things that came from within me. I just don’t want to be tempted to view it directly from the source. And I don’t want to be a part of that community. It is bad for me. And yeah, it does make me sad.

CHORUS OF NIECES

Being not born we must

Wonder if what the universe

Has in store for us mirrors

These complex, overwrought emotions;

If the way of man is as he claims

And we too must one day search

A dying earth for plots of soil that will

Accept our capsules of drek;

If the healthy links we see

Between one man and all which is

Not this one man are stories

We’ll forever tell ourselves to ease

The sting of human existence.

LEAD NIECE

This is the universe’s way?

You suffer for joy and reach into danger

To grab what morsels you can?

And your kin reach into their dangers,

And we into ours?

Until the danger reaches back

And grabs us all, pulling us

Into misery’s heat?

The millions of tweets each moment brings

Are begotten by millions of lost souls

Who, years, later, will open

Their time capsules and hope to crack

A smile and distract from

The bad, bad world?

No I don’t think my struggles are quite the same, a lot of people don’t deal with this and don’t have to overthink something like using Twitter. Not to say I’m better or more interesting. I mean maybe it’s normal. I don’t know. You tell me, you’re the magical beings here.

CHORUS OF NIECES

He sees within us magic,

A fool’s instinct. He attributes magic

To that which he does not know

And that which he does not understand,

For his two feet have trod all paths

Man has trod,

And his two eyes have observed

All along the paths.

How else would he find himself

So high above the clouds

On his perch of wisdom?

He knows not us from his conquering of the world

But only as his nieces.

LEAD NIECE

We will respect you as uncle

If you insist so, but we are not of magic,

We are your nieces.

You literally appeared out of thin air.

LEAD NIECE

We are not of magic,

We are your nieces.

Right…ok sorry, you’re not magical…

LEAD NIECE

We are your nieces.

Yeah, I get it, you’re my nieces…

LEAD NIECE

We do travel — as you know

Time does not pass for us

As it does for you -

And while we speak I will

Take the opportunity presented,

All thanks to your summoning,

To ask if this Dustin as we will call you,

Without the Uncle, from your own lips,

Would find interest in offering

Any further utterances to us,

Barring talk of Twitter,

Which we are soon to be as well versed in

Than any niece has ever been,

Born or not?

Oh, of course, I have so much to tell you. But I’m deleting my twitter account for good so now is the opportunity to chronicle that. I’m not deleting my other memories so I’ll still be able to talk to you about other shit. Er sorry, about other things.

CHORUS OF NIECES

His logic absolves and

The timing is true.

But no! The slowth of his

Archive summons yet yields

No chronicles, and opportunity

Presents an empty plate.

With no chronicles, in his singular focus,

He puts the plate away.

LEAD NIECE

They find agreeance,

Yet the words lighter than

The chick’s feather,

For you have before you

No tweets, but opportunity

To chronicle all else.

Yeah I hear you. I wasn’t trying to be distant, that’s just why I brought you here…You can go. Or we can talk. Whatever you want.

LEAD NIECE

Then perhaps, your kindness notwithstanding,

It is distance you need

And our excitement to know you

Blinds us of our pesterance.

We will distract no further,

For we know the frailness

Of your focus.

If you will allow it,

The nieces have labored

Over a joke in the style

Of turn of phrase.

Sure.

LEAD NIECE

Ok then, we will be leaving.

Until we tweet again.

She grins and for the first time I see her as an equal. I look beyond her to see if the others are proud of their joke, but as I begin to refocus my eyes I feel my phone buzz, and in that instant they are gone.

I check my phone. I’d missed several emails, but the only one that matters is the one that just came in. My data is ready. I look up to share the news, having already forgotten their sudden departure. I scan the room and it is only me, for better or worse.

The archive comes in a 119 MB zip file. Is that a lot? There are folders of data and assets and fonts and media and countless pages of code. I do not read code so I consult the internet. I check the folder again and am relieved to find a lone HTML file. I open it and feel dumb for thinking I was going to have to use the code. It’s my Twitter page, and only my Twitter page. My tweets, filterable, sortable. It’s perfect.

I scroll myself back to 2018 — a simpler, also bad time — and am immediately drawn to my second tweet. “I would like my relationship with Twitter not to be adversarial,” I claimed. “Validation is always welcome but I’m not sure that’s what I’m looking for. Maybe being uncertain will make the orientation smooth and me less volatile/bitter. We’ll see.” We did see, and to be fair it wasn’t a terrible orientation. I eased myself in. It felt fun, light. And while I couldn’t tell you exactly when, it became adversarial.

I began so confused. Part of why I’d chosen to not be on Twitter was because of how unnatural it felt, and that was one of my first big obstacles. I can be noncommittal and I’m afraid of being judged as/for only one thing. Girls, if you’re going to start something, do it with purpose. This applies to all things: a relationship, a puzzle, a movie, a shower. It’s ok to be confused, but make sure there is intent for your confusion to land on. Always remember that.

I thought I needed structure so I arbitrarily paired each day with a category, which looking back I really hate. These early ones are rough on my ego, I must really love you silly little ladies.

See, here’s an absolutely catshit, hacky joke. This isn’t me, I swear it isn’t! I think it isn’t who I was. And to clarify, at some point in my 20s I stopped laughing altogether :/

IMPORTANT: At the moment I have some other things I’m working on that require focus and care. This thing doesn’t not require those, but I’m not going to agonize over the prose. Do you know what prose is? How much stuff do you know? I’m not even sure if I’ll edit any of this. Don’t judge the writing itself, that’s not what this is about. K?

And another hacky joke. You know, maybe a kid would like it. Maybe an adult would even like it. I look down on it but if you girls like it that’s fine!

Ok, there’s no point in trying to hide it. The truth is…I never wanted this. It’s always kind of been a thing for me. Frankly it’s still a thing, but I have to work with what I’ve got. I don’t want to be a father either, but being an Uncle always felt like a burden. I knew your parents were going to have kids eventually. I knew it before they did. It is what it is. Just know that I’m here for you now; it doesn’t matter that it’s in a way I hoped I’d never have to be. I do have to be. Oh, quick note on your other uncles: fuck ’em. Hehe, don’t tell them I said that! I don’t even know them.

I realized that the easiest thing in the world is to take pictures of things — dumb things, weird things, normal things, any things — and caption them with, you know, whatever. But again, I am noncommittal by nature. There’s an arrogance to it too, that I can’t let some thoughts go unsaid. Instead of just picking one thing I invite the internet into my head to pick what they like most. And look, one like.

See, just caption something that diverts from the actual purpose of whatever the thing is. It’s dumb and easy. I’m not proud. Then that begs the question: what am I proud of? I don’t know. And I’m not just saying I don’t know — I really don’t know.

Here is an early example of an earnest opinion. You could argue this is better use of the platform than bad captions and cryptic nonsense, but it felt unnatural. The thing is, as I acknowledge in the tweet, nobody is seeing this tweet and nobody cares, so I’m really just putting it out there for me, or so I can feel cool about making sure people know a certain thing I like. I like lots of things but I don’t tweet about them. It’s icky, and the ickyness only fortifies the walls I put up. That said, you should check him out, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m curious to see where laughter ranks in your parents’ priorities. Or rather, laughter at things that are actually funny. We can go see him one day if you want, and if he’s alive and I still want to.

I don’t. I can’t shake the awareness of people’s engagement (that’ll continue to show). And what’s the point of this? Invulnerability, that’s what. You all may not like this stuff but you can’t hurt me — that’s the message. Very untrue though. Other people can hurt you. They can ignore you and they can say mean things and they can slash your tires.

Side note: how cute is my little picture to the left? That’s a nice smile :).

Let me take a moment to tell you little girls something important. I’m not perfect and I’ve said my fair share of derivative things, but if you want gifts from me you’ll avoid telling — or even enjoying — overdone, memey jokes like the soy milk spanish one. There’ll be more to come, I’m sure. Here you can see me FLIPPING THE CONVENTION ON ITS HEAD with a bold and unfunny STATEMENT of a tweet.

Ah, more sincere promotion. And look, five likes. This is my brother — for some of you he’d be the father, for others just another uncle — ‘s podcast, which was good. And I lost a follower? Floundering right before your eyes. I had no voice.

Imagine the thrill of waking up and seeing an account called @mulaney__ is now following me. I was, for two seconds, elated, and then just bummed and confused. Some sort of fake account. But they didn’t follow everyone — they wanted me. Still flattering in its own way. They wanted me.

Little did I know how much karaoke I would do in the coming years. If you’re anything like your parents your voice is just fine but we all tell you it’s great. There’s nothing wrong with just fine. Karaoke isn’t about how good your voice is. Be careful asking what it actually is about, I have a lot to say. Just try to enjoy yourself.

This was right after Finding Frances. If you haven’t seen the series yet, I’ll show it to you. More earnest thoughts on tv/comedy on display. To be fair, Nathan For You was an incredibly formative show for me and the absolute least I could do was show my appreciation. I never did write out my feelings, I must have been busy. But girls, if you say you’re going to do something, do it.

Imagine caring any less. Imagine thinking this was interesting and worth anyone’s time. Floundering. No voice.

When people ask you what your Uncle Dustin is like you better say clever because what a clever boy he is. Smarmy also works. So does lost.

An empty question, but to be fair, hate-reading is the only way to read some of these. I was nobody. But you have to start somewhere. You have to paint a tree really badly a bunch of times before you can paint a really good tree.

A tweet truly just for me (you’re noticing the trend). For a while now my favorite band has been the Arctic Monkeys, who have a song called “Despair in the Departure Lounge.” There I was, at the airport, reading Nabokov’s Despair (I love Nabokov, and look how I shoehorn that little intellectual brag into the tweet), and rather than soak in the moment I had to document it for a disinterested crowd. It’s all so empty and pointless. Life tip: if nobody asks what you’re reading, don’t tell them what you’re reading. If they ask, then you can tell them. Everybody’s reading/watching/doing something. Don’t be presumptuous. That said, do be curious and kind. Do ask what other people are reading. But don’t ask just so they’ll ask you. Ask because you care. Or if you don’t care, don’t ask at all. And just because you care doesn’t mean you have to ask, you can keep to yourself if you don’t want to ask, but if you don’t ask you won’t learn, and if you don’t learn you won’t grow. I hate all of these tweets I’m showing you but I’m proud of the advice I’m offering. I’m glad I can be of value to you. You may be discouraged from using me as your moral compass, but if you’re old enough to read this you’re old enough to make your own decisions.

I genuinely didn’t realize there was so much annoying posturing on my page. “Wipe” was a British year-in-review show. So annoying.

Look. Look how I immediately self-deprecate. Immediately they have to know that I know I’m insignificant. Not a good way to treat yourself. At the same time, tweeting is already insignificant and I was doing it to an insignificant number of people. Captions are easy though. Single ingredient my ass. They list the damn ingredients. I didn’t even bother joking. It’s just stupid. Always double-check your work. And ask yourself: “does the world need this?” This applies to these tweets and this bad pet treat company.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to dwell, but what the shit kind of animal is that in their logo? It’s a Garfield-looking guy but that’s no cat. And it’s no dog either. Huh.

Oh my god I’m so much better than everyone else because I DIDN’T make the obvious joke but instead I let everyone know that I COULD HAVE made the joke if I’d wanted to. I could have. Anywho, there was a game called Words With Friends, aka Words 2, which was like scrabble but online and branded differently. This was a bot. I imagine now they’re all bots. You’re probably a bot.

Shit you don’t even know the song! That one’s not really on the list of songs that would naturally transfer through generations. Jesus, how do I explain this song? Just some…I don’t know, it was a big song for a while. It’s not from here. I rode the bus with this girl named Emma who was like Norwegian or something and I think she knew the song before everyone else because her Norwegian family shared it with her (assuming the song is Norwegian…whatever the song is, that’s what her family is too). I forgot about Emma, she was cool. She was in eighth grade when I was in sixth. I also rode the bus with this dweeb named Alex and good god he was annoying. He would always bring up the translations of certain lyrics and how something something something I fucking hated listening to him. Now HE’D be an AWFUL uncle, if we’re judging uncles by how normal and reasonable they are as people, and how annoying they are.

Girls, do you see what’s happening? Do you notice a change? There’s no trying to impress anyone, there’s no clever boy pulling levers. Just some dumb, meaningless tweets. And dumb and meaningless though they may be, I prefer these to Maiya Ha name song anti-joke. This is a much better spirit to be in. I AM NOT SAYING THEY ARE INCREDIBLE TWEETS, or even that I like them at all, but I prefer them to the first phase I showed you.

CHORUS OF NIECES

As we follow the scrolls we see

this man who types

Until his fingertips surely swell

Is no didact;

He is a performer,

And in this scrawl

He rehearses his

Role most vain.

We would hope to

Know an uncle’s love,

And were ours leading

This course would he not

Stop, a time or two at least,

To confirm our understanding?

Or if we tire?

No uncle as professor would

Neglect us so,

So it must be uncle as performer,

And it must remain uninterrupted.

And when uncle claimed his wish

Was for his nieces to know him,

Did he misspeak?

For the only call and response

He seeks is his own call

And the echoes of his voice

Through the clouds.

Then are we the sky?

We continue with more. Is it a real question? Not really. But maybe. Is it necessary or genuine? Absolutely not.

Ok, now I’m way more interested in the direction we’re heading. I also think this tweet is factual. There was a two or three week period where I was eating a lot of apples and it probably happened then. I was being extra annoying about my apple phase and I’d carry one around Manhattan in my hand. Like, carry it on the train, ride the train, get off the train, eat the apple. That sounds like the behavior of the guy doing the tweeting before (me), but this guy (me) opted to go dumber, which is good. Why wouldn’t I just put the apple in my bag? I usually had a backpack with me. I could have just used that.

We’re back to phase one :(. Clever boy captioning things, pay him no mind.

Mmm, some extrospective introspection. I meant it, I wanted to know. I imagine the answer wasn’t fake stories about people ordering lunch, but that must have been all I had, and that’s sad.

You can tell I wanted to joke around, and I’ll take this over posturing, but this is so open mic-y, which is one of the meanest things you can say about someone. I saw something, isn’t that wild?? But, nieces, hear me out…imagine ordering a sandwich that way lololololol.

This is a cheap one. People love dogs and people love sex. I had endless dog pictures and every now and then I’d take one and know I could easily exploit it. Dumb and shameless.

I believe this. You may not know this but I was once a mediocre comedian and this came from somewhere in his brain. I never did comedy about turkey chili, but you can see how I might have. Or how a truly awful comedian might have. Or how someone funny and innovative might have. It was just a thought that I tweeted. So much easier than tweeting a joke, but then I do often wonder what the difference really is.

One day you’ll realize the ways temperature can enhance or intensify sex stuff. It’s a full sensory experience at best, really. I don’t know if I was making sex ice — as I recall I’ve never made ice explicitly for sexual purposes, and I don’t know what I’d do to the ice to make it special — but the tweet is a real “look at me, aren’t I random?” bomb. Something I’m now realizing is that every single tweet I put out should have included the hashtag #PeopleNeedToKnow. Why else would I tweet it? My special sex ice is almost ready, which the people need to know. Was I sending a message to someone? No I don’t think so, that would make even less sense, but someone somewhere needed to see it. Someone liked it. Crazy.

I think when I had nothing to tweet but still felt compelled to tweet (**more on that shortly) I’d rattle off some lyrics from the 2000s. Going through my page I found many such examples. It’s a bit of nostalgia for the other tweeters to happen upon, and it’s a little tongue in cheek in the least potent way. Oooh, some cryptic, emotional lyrics — what could Dustin be going through? Nothing, really, just looking for attention.

**I guess I haven’t touched on this compulsion yet. It’s real. Frankly it’s part of the desire to delete this shit completely, so I won’t be able to tweet, no matter what, unless I take the necessary four steps to create a new account. I run around dressed as a man who feels secure, but I am a deceiver. Some moments are worse than others but I often find myself needing to say something. Actually, do you know what it is? It’s really that I want to be thought of, anywhere, by anyone. There’s an unaddressed fear of being forgotten and sending out a random tweet helped me assuage that. The engagement/view statistics Twitter offered proved that, if anything, I wasn’t tweeting to no one. Of course there were diminishing returns to extreme levels, but 1 is greater than none. 1 is greater than none.

I sure don’t, and didn’t, but what a random thing to say. It’s my guess that someone has tweeted that exact same statement before, but do I think someone who actually goes to Duke would have tweeted that statement? Not sure. Hmm, is it better for this tweet to come from someone who doesn’t go to Duke or who does go to Duke? Those are different degrees of stupid. Too expensive of a school anyway. I do like North Carolina, in theory.

This is captioning excellence. Or it could be. It’s caption potential recognition excellence, but through my filter, which the people (myself sometimes included) don’t like. The damn towel looked like a wifi sign. I don’t mind #DriFi, if we’re being honest.

Just a bit of fun. One day years ago I found the website where my graduation photos were and they came with some OUTRAGEOUS background options. Graduation is one of those things that looks joyous, even if the joy isn’t actually there. I don’t know if I’ve seen anyone look sad or lost or angry in a graduation photo. And I don’t know if I’ve seen anyone look those things on Cinco de Mayo either. It’s a funny option! Really strange industry, this specific sort of event photography. Realistically this particular background is only being selected, and in turn paid for, by someone like me: a rascal and a joker. Of course at that time I didn’t have the money to spend on an unnecessary joke picture of me. Hence the screenshot. I’ll have to tell you about my graduation another time, it was quite a day. Before the procession there was a cop checking people for weapons and stuff, and my phone was in my sock and he found it and threatened me (Houston cops will kill, make no mistake. Remind me another time, maybe later in the graduation conversation, to tell you about my D.A.R.E. officer, who killed a guy), and there was a very special photographer there for, if you can believe it, just me! Because of my other life as a newspaper person. Pretty dang cool. They honored me in the paper — the last time anyone would do so. Hmmm, I just reread the bit above where I say “Graduation is one of those things that looks joyous, even if the joy isn’t actually there.” I don’t actually know what I mean by that.

Holy crap, we’re not even a year in yet. It’s clear how much I love presenting myself as someone worthy of this kind of shit, so naturally I did that kind of shit. There was in fact a countdown to the anniversary. Nobody else participated, but details like that don’t change the fundamental truth: that it happened. Truth is…well truth is very important, girls.

This tweet reminds me of the very early days of twitter, when I didn’t really know what the platform was. I’m talking real early days. It seemed to me that it was a place for celebs and companies to…actually I don’t know what I thought it was, but I always thought of it as a way to interact with non-persons and hard to reach persons. On this night I must have taken the picture with my foot for scale, and I liked the sauce and I wanted to tweet so this was that. They responded, too. They said something about me finishing the bottle being “quite a feat” but by then I’d moved onto some other bullshit. Cool of them to respond. Also it wasn’t my home and it wasn’t my sauce.

They won’t teach you about him in school, but we all went on quite a journey together (we meaning the world plus Aziz). There was this little guy named Aziz and he did comedy and TV and grew in popularity and then some stuff happened and he went away and then he came back and I don’t know where he is now but that’s Obama’s middle name and it’s also Aziz’s middle name now. Three words, three likes. Who’s Obama, you ask? Where was he born, you ask?? No no, we’re not doing that.

When you ask your parents what your Uncle Dustin does for a living I have no idea how they’ll respond, and I don’t think it’s quite worth talking about that right now, but if we’re talking about things I do not for a living I think it’s fair to say I’m kind of a sociologist and social commentator. People weren’t talking about it, they were too in the movement to realize, but hummus really had its moment around then, and then it faded — not into obscurity, but out of the spotlight. The second part of the tweet is unnecessary, I could have just left it at the fact. I like hummus, sure, but not that much (honestly I’ve been eating a lot of it lately). Some of your parents are big Jews and I bet they feed you that shit all the time.

Sociologist, social commentator, soldier in the war against wealth inequality. They may not teach you about Oprah in school either, unless you go to a cool/bad school, and she’s done a lot for “the people” (mostly women), don’t get me wrong…but she doesn’t know what it’s like for some of us. I haven’t the slightest idea how or why I had O Magazine, but when life gives you lemons…

I think I did tag every follower in their own tweet…there were probably like 20. I do think it’s important to show your gratitude towards the people who help you reach whatever goals you’ve set for yourself. Back then a year felt like such a long time. Now I blink and another one passes. I’m 32…that’s younger than your parents, but still old. Certainly older than I wish I were, having accomplished what I have. Older than I deserve to be. Older than I deserve to be? That doesn’t make any sense but it sounds interesting and I’ll roll with it.

Give me a fucking break. One day, god willing, I’ll get to sit down with all of you and go through a list of things you should never say, like words in a Chinese voice where you swap “l” and “r” sounds, and dumb overused jokes like the little -titious one. You too can become a joyless cynic who judges people for trying to be fun, just follow my lead. Kidding, I’m not joyless! I’m having fun preparing this piece for all of you, and I find meaning in it. I’m not joyless, but I’m not likely to be mistaken for joyful. Or, if you’re wondering, for joyous.

Sociologist, social commentator, reminiscer. This is a weird one to look back on but I have so many memories of it. I wonder if you’ll ever visit Houston. You do have family there, you know, and dead family that’s buried there. It seems your folks have snubbed their noses at it, though, when the truth is Houston was a great place to grow up and is one of what I consider to be the great American cities. Houston is very much a part of my identity, even though I don’t exactly identify with any specific place or community. Quite the paradox, I know. Let’s just say my blood is Houstonian and leave it at that. So in Houston in the 90s and early post-90s there was a thing where so often I’d order lemonade at a restaurant and they’d say “we don’t have that but we have cherry/strawberry limeade” and that would upset me so much. Lemonade is the standard, they should always have that, and if they want to have a little offshoot of it that’s cool too. I never understood why that kept happening and I don’t know if it was happening everywhere or only in Texas or if it was just a me thing. The limeade was too tart for me. Sour, tart, something like that.

Oh god. I mentioned that I fear being forgotten. Well there’s a naughty offshoot of that where I don’t want people forgetting that I’m a sexual being. We all are — or at least most of us. That’s more or less what this tweet was. A reminder: hey guys, someone sit on me! Don’t forget I’m a sexual being! It’s easy to forget, sometimes, or at least it is for me. I’m not a multi-tasker — and I use the following line regularly because it’s true, but I’m both not a multi-tasker on micro and macro levels — and I tend to get locked into certain perceptions of people. The lady sweeping up my crumbs at the sandwich shop? Well she’s just a lady with a broom. Except she’s not — she’s also a sexual being. It’s a lot easier to see these dualities when you’re really horny. You’ll walk around and see it everywhere. Trust me, you will. And keep in mind, this tweet was not me telling the world I was horny, it was a blanket reminder that I have the right to be. Along with the rest of the sexual beings of the world.

Funny little joke. There were a few of these signs on the road and I had to be quick to snap a pic. If you don’t get it, ask your folks! Haha emoji. Additionally, I don’t know what kind of crazy cameras you’ll have on your phones years from now, but taking a picture of something outside from within a car is never satisfying. The thing is always farther than you thought it was and the camera never does it justice. I tried to get pictures of mountains on this same trip and they all came out awful.

I genuinely don’t know what happens! Honestly I think this tweet was underappreciated because it’s a real thing and it should freak more people out that our brains can’t really comprehend things of that scale.

I’m not superstitious but……add this one to the list. And in my classic, matter of fact style of zing, I presented the phrase in a form better than anyone else ever has. Yes, I mean that. Show me an example that proves me wrong. I am the best at talking like me, and sometimes that’s good. Do you even know what I’m talking about? I’m sorry if I’m putting the cart before the horse but that’s just where I’m gonna keep putting it.

So when I was your status (child) there were tons of shows on television and plenty of shows from the deep past, but not like an innumerable number of them. We had TV Land, a channel where you could watch shit from the 50s and 60s. I loved The Andy Griffith Show and Leave it to Beaver and Happy Days and all that (and All That). Of course I did, that’s the kind of child I was. But now, the number of shows that’ll have aired before you were born…I mean holy crap it’s a lot. With that in mind, I don’t expect this to resonate with you but there was a show called That 70’s Show — coincidentally a comedy period piece from like 1998 to 2000-something set in the 70’s — and it had a grumpy dad who would say this kind of thing ALL THE TIME. So people would see my tweet and remember that.

Before I was an uncle I was just a guy with an older cousin who had a kid with his wife, and this is that kid. He does not know who I am. I’d be shocked if you ever met him. But if you were to it would probably be at a funeral, and let’s be honest it’ll probably be my funeral, or one of my parents’. This was just me wanting to tweet and having a picture.

Just checking in. I was new to Los Angeles at the time and probably had a few new followers so I just wanted to shout out the proud few who were on the ship when it first set sail. Also trying to remind myself who they were because there were so many new faces in my life and I get confused sometimes. What a wild time to be who I was and where I was. There was a slight thrill to life at the time, but things were not good. They weren’t, like, really really bad though, they just weren’t good. And yes, I have lived in several places. You know, when I was young I romanticized the idea of moving. I’m sure it would have probably been miserable, but showing up in a new school, breathing different air, driving different streets — it felt like an alluring adventure. Instead I spent my entire youth in Houston and moved multiple times in the first many years of adulthood, each time with not the right amount of money to have for someone doing that sort of thing. It may be that we live in different cities, and the time may come when you want to run away from home and live somewhere else, but you don’t know many people elsewhere so you want to live with me, like when Topanga’s parents move to Pittsburgh but she doesn’t want to go so she ends up staying with her asshole aunt — if this happens, I don’t think you should live with me. Maybe things will change, but I don’t think it would be good for either of us. I’ll see if I can find a place for you though, or I’ll drive you back and I’ll buy you some food.

Wordplay + a lie about people’s response to the wordplay = lol. I never got around to the script. Oh, you probably don’t know what it means again, sorry. You, Me, and Dupree was a movie from the 2000s where a guy named Dupree — a real loveable mess-up, you could say — starts to accidentally infringe upon his buddy’s marriage (Dupree is homeless kind of). And you probably know 23 and Me. I had another tweet in this universe, I’ll see if I can find it.

This was me getting into some dangerous territory. You know me, I don’t do the memes and all that, but I guess I tried to do them in my own way. And it didn’t quite work sad face. I’m now realizing that maybe this was Los Angeles morphing me into a social media popularist, which maybe can be forced but definitely not by me. It’s also a little too specific of an opinion — I’ve mentioned it to several people in real life and none of them have known what the fuck I was talking about. Probably should have tried with something more general. And I haven’t seen the Baby Yoda show so let me know if it’s good.

Here’s more of the same. There was a thing going on at the time: “name a more iconic duo” and then a picture of a duo, I guess. And “going to tell my kids this was…” and you’d have like a thing that the thing you mentioned wasn’t, and then there’s the handshake thing again. Just not my lane. I tried, you know. Just not my lane. You see how I’m back to some old habits of presenting the viewer with options, only this time they’re not viable captions, they’re stupid, stupid meme things. The word for meme-like-or-related is memetic, by the way.

Do you see how many likes this got? I finally got through to people. I was on cloud freaking 9 all night. This was in a stranger’s apartment. I was watching his dog but actually I was doing this. I had the idea for this pic in the summer but never had the right mirror and privacy and all that. But I finally got it and here’s this. I hadn’t knelt like that in a long time and I remember the strain on my feet. Bodies are silly. I have the true luxury of not really caring about my body which makes stuff like this a not-problem. I am not insecure. Insecure about what? It’s just a body. This tweet was my declaration to the world: yes, you may see my body, thank you for asking. It was also a separate plea to my followers: please give me attention, please do not forget me, please keep in mind that I am a sexual being but don’t be weird about it. You cannot see my genitals in this picture so it’s ok. Ok?

Ok lol! Part 2. I don’t know if this was taken the same night or not. I feel like it wasn’t and I’m not sure what that says about me. So I have this shirt that says “spaghetti” which is a surprisingly long story but not that surprising all things considered. We won’t get into that now but there are so many damn tweets I don’t remember so it’s not impossible that it comes up later. I LOVE spaghetti and I love making spaghetti. I love it in a big bowl. This is Dustin lore, this is canon. I love a big bowl. If you were born now and I were me from 2019–2022 I’d for sure put you in a big bowl and take a picture. God I hope one day I get to make you spaghetti. So yeah I was just messing around, you know how it is. Clearly a little desperate, still riding the high from the tucked pic, but if you have two showdogs and one of them is best in show you don’t hide the other showdog just because it’s not as good. The second showdog deserves to be seen and judged, and it should get love too. And remember that all those awards are subjective. If it’s purely numbers-based then it’s not really an award, it’s more of just recognition. You don’t need to worry yourselves with awards — sure, it’s fun to have trophies and ribbons and things to brag about and put on your résumé, but that all comes from the idea that you need to impress someone and meet their requirements for what they think is award-worthy. Like with the thing I said just a second ago about the dogs. You’re just going to tell me this is the best dog? The heck are you talking about. They’re living things, they have brains, they don’t deserve to be sorted like that. The winning dog will always be known as the winning dog because some old lesbian decided she liked it; the rest of them will go about their lives and hopefully not feel inferior to the winning dog in any way, because they shouldn’t — they’re unique (your parents can explain lesbians and their whole thing with dogs). And I don’t mean ‘unique’ in the cheesy ‘you’re so special’ or ‘you’re so weird’ way, I’m talking OED, 1601, “of which there is only one; single, sole, solitary.” I’m talking none of those dogs exist twice in the world, and same with you. That doesn’t mean it’s good, it doesn’t mean you can stop working on yourself because you’re unique, just that you shouldn’t be compared to anyone or anything else. “Yeah, my favorite movie is every Best Picture winner” go fuck yourself. You watched all the movies and somehow decided that one of them was, in no uncertain terms, the best? That’s insane. Judging any art like that is insane. Judging dogs like that is insane. Judging these pictures I tweeted…I mean they’re pretty similar, but their messages are different, and to live is to communicate. I don’t think you’d like my favorite movies and I don’t think I need to include them here.

Now, I wasn’t sure at the time how to caption this. The one before it, which we can refer to as ‘tucked’ for clarity’s sake, I left blank because the picture spoke plenty loud, but back-to-back uncaptioned pictures crosses the line separating bold and arrogant. I landed on the ‘spaghetti backwards’ thing and I don’t think it’s amazing but it serves the purpose. You cannot see my genitals so it’s ok, although I got a little frisky at some friends’ home once while they were away and sent them a picture similar to this one (they either liked the original picture or they were aware of it, and that’s close enough) and I’m pretty sure you can see a little bit of my lower genitals, so you don’t get that one (I’d actually forgotten about that picture; I had dinner with those friends a month ago and they reminded me).

Immediately back to no caption, wow. This is neither curated nor censored. I just thought it was a fun little collection and insight into my self and phone. Actually, a person’s open tabs can tell you a lot about them. I have 35-ish on my phone right now and they’re…they’re not problematic, but they’re curious as hell. If you were my kids I wouldn’t give you phones. I’d let you be social and all that, but no phone. End of conversation.

I’m not going to count but it was probably at least the 700th. I don’t know what the genre is called, the whole meta-snide-self-aggrandizing thing I was doing, but I sure did hammer it in.

What are you doing girls? Not Dustin’s old tweets again, right?

But ma, this one’s really smart!

Ok…but lights out in 10.

That’s you. I still really like this tweet! You’ll need to know your Dickens and you’ll need to know…God damnit another movie I have to explain. This one also had Owen Wilson who was Dupree in the Dupree movie, and honestly I never saw this movie (Marley movie) but they get a dog, a real troublemaker, but they love it and eventually it dies. But of course you’ll need to know your Dickens.

To those very close to me — I’m talking three, maybe four people — I refer to it as tea, but to everyone else I call it green tea. Once I was on a work video call (I was taking a class for work, which…nevermind, whole different thing) and someone made a joke (bad one) insinuating I could have something alcoholic in my mug and I told them it was green tea and they laughed. Why would they laugh? That really bothered me. They think they’re better than me? What’s wrong with green tea? Fuck all of those guys, that got to me and they don’t deserve to have that kind of power. One of them had an all-time stupid mustache and one of them I met months later and he’s ridiculous in a bad way.

Right, so at this point I’d ranked my top 100 to date. Flawed list, let’s call a spade a spade, but it’s a decent general outline. My computer was old and slow and I’m not sure exactly why but writing and formatting that list almost killed it. This wasn’t a particularly popular piece — to be fair it’s pretty long — but people who judged it for its length were in for a real slap in the tits when I put out other, longer pieces. Who’s laughing now/then? It wouldn’t be a terrible idea for you to scan that list, but keep in mind I got so much better as a tweeter as time passed. That list is kind of like the Hall of Fame for minor league players. I have a ton of tweets to review from this one to my last but I’m trying to think of how many prior to this would make an all-encompassing top 100. Six? Eleven? I don’t know. That could be a fun project for you.

This is another conversation to have with your folks. I say “all that stuff” but it’s only “all that stuff” if you’re talking about the weight of the stuff, not the breadth of it. Does that make sense? He wasn’t a serial child molester on the loose, you know. It was way more concentrated. What would we as a society think about him if he was squeaky clean? Would he have made such funny and idiosyncratic movies? I wish I could give you an answer but I can’t. Your parents all lived in New York City at some point, as did I, and everyone in New York City has a Woody story. Sometimes it’s “I saw him getting into a cab” and sometimes it’s “I watched one of his movies” but everyone’s got one.

There’s a game — maybe you know this game — called Fuck Marry Kill (I don’t know how it’s stylized, and I’m pretty sure I’ve already used it here but “fuck” means to have sex with, among other things). It’s a fun and direct game: name three people, decide which one you want to fuck, which one you want to marry, and which one you want to kill. Simple. Cool thought experiment, too. I like the game and I think it’s fun to group people together who may not typically be associated. See for yourself. It’s mostly dumb stuff like names that sound like other names. I like interactive tweets and I really wish more people had responded with their picks. It’s fine though, the tweets live on here and you all can play together.

**I am bad at games like this and with hypothetical things in general. My brain can’t get there, I need max context.

I believed this in my bones, but I was wrong. Ultimately I don’t think you need to know who Henry Kissinger is — there are more important figures for you to study. Just an example of an unfulfilled prophecy. I don’t really make resolutions either…I hadn’t thought about it but I guess I just predict deaths instead.

I’m really curious what your relationships with Harry Potter will be. It was a sensation when I was younger, I mean what it did for global literacy can’t be overstated. But the writer is a bad person so maybe it’ll be phased out. I’m guessing you are familiar with Harry Potter but whether or not you actually read it is the question. Kids in your era I largely don’t think have read the books, but I shouldn’t say that because it’s just a guess. Regardless, this scenario I still find funny. The books have plot holes out the ass but this is a fun one. This stupid bitch shows up to Hogwarts IN A PRIUS. So silly.

Remember what I said about the sex ice? See, it fascinates me. This wasn’t the only time I claimed to be writing an article or working on a project or whatever about something random. That’s a cool thing, to just be like, “hey do you have a second? I’d like to pick your brain about a thing or two. Why? Oh no big deal, just a BIG ARTICLE I’m writing for a POPULAR ENGLISH PUBLICATION.” Nobody believed me though. Can’t be mad at them I guess, I mean they’re right, they’re just right for the wrong reasons.

I do need to make a point to be nicer to myself. Chicken has less flavor than shrimp, inherently, I guess? I don’t know how you measure flavor or if it’s even measurable. I love chicken, I love it on its own and I think it’s great for fried rice. It doesn’t make me weak, and if something like this scenario were to come from me liking something like that I don’t think it would be my fault. My only crime is liking chicken more than shrimp and pork. Of course pork fried rice is pretty good, and talk about having a moment (hummus), pork fried rice had a big big moment last decade. Chicken for me though, please. Let’s go get Chinese food sometime. I can teach you how to use chopsticks and how to eat soup and crack a cookie. It’ll be nice. Good documentary called The Search for General Tso about westernized Chinese food. Yeah, I actually have a lot to talk about re: Chinese food. ALSO there’s a HILARIOUS and RIDICULOUS song/music video I can show you.

I could have just said “this dog looks like this weird thing” but I’m all about complicating things for no reason. I stand by the claim. I did actually look through Star Wars characters because I thought there were a few that looked differently in my mind, kind of like some dogs I had pictures of, but I couldn’t find them so it was just this one. Wow, you’ll likely be alive for the 100th anniversary of Star Wars. That’s fucking bananas. I also might but I’m more excited for you, even though it means way way less to you.

Real problem. I gave the people a treat and now they can’t shake the craving. A burger in front of my stuff wouldn’t look as right as a big bowl of spaghetti. There’s a phrase “busman’s holiday” that refers to someone’s vacation or relaxation time involving what they do for work. I’m just trying to vacay with a burger, but my work is making the people LOL at one picture I posted and not much else. Not a great analogy, sorry.

Another thing that looks like something, but this one is FREAKY. They’re so similar. Pokemon…yet another thing I might have to explain to you. Actually I think it’s pretty popular now. I am loyal to the original pokemon. I used to catch this guy/lady in the Viridian Forest. Annoying guy, honestly. Hella strong defense. Good chicken, too. Surely I wasn’t cooking just that one little guy. That’s a snack for me. I really do love chicken. Mmmmm.

What can I say? So this could be a vague and meaningless tweet, but the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that I meant it to appear that way while I was actually making a very real claim that I was doing whatever it was that I was doing…again. Sometimes it’s nice to get things off your chest, even if it’s not entirely understood, or for that matter heard. Just saying the words helps. Like journaling, you know. I don’t know what it was that I was doing but if I recall February 2020 was pretty bad for me, so I was probably doing something that I knew I shouldn’t have been doing again. Points to me for confessing. Powerful act, confessing. You’re Jews or Jew-adjacent so you don’t do Catholic confessional. And thank woo you don’t! So creepy, sitting in a booth talking to an old man. Just confess on Twitter like I do and you’ll feel better. Hmmm, so when I delete my twitter account I’ll also be erasing these confessions. So whereas the confessions won’t be publicly accessible, the act of confessing, which I did, is what matters.

We’re back with some sincerity. Again I cut any naysaying off at the head — “I know you don’t care.” But I just want to talk and want certain things noted, I guess. I don’t know, I feel weird about it. I love the team…maybe it’s me begging for a community to find me. Or to be seen as someone with niche interests who doesn’t care that nobody cares. Do you like soccer? We can go to a game, if you’d like. I went to a basketball game with my uncle when I was like 5, that was fun/weird. One of those things where you don’t know what’s normal and what isn’t so you accept whatever happens as normal because it’s the only thing you know. In this case, being picked up by my uncle and going to see the HOUSTON ROCKETS play the TORONTO RAPTORS. Inexplicably I was a Raptors fan and had a Raptors jersey?!?! I just don’t know, I really don’t. Your parents can come to the soccer game too, I just don’t think they’ll want to. I’ll happily be your soccer sherpa. We can do baseball too. I’ll even get you a shirt. Whatever shirt you want! It doesn’t even have to be a soccer shirt, it can be a baseball shirt or another shirt.

Yikes! Here’s to hoping you don’t know what this means. In fact, don’t ask. Just know that this is a funny idea, but only if you really, really think about it. A whole movie where someone goes back in time to rename dog treats. Not your typical plot, right? No, I’d say it isn’t. Don’t even say the words on the package if you can avoid it, k?

Ok lol this is a weird one. The truth is that this was meant as a total nonsense joke, you know, just something to say. We’ve seen some random statements already and we’ll see a lot more — I loved doing that! What makes me giggle about this one is what actually happened the night before and thinking about that being the actual best night of my life, and knowing that some people who were present that night also saw this tweet and maybe thought I was tweeting sincerely when really it just happened to be the night that happened before I tweeted a thing about not that night. Ok I’m trying to remember how the night started…oopsie, I can’t. But later in the night — wait, maybe now I remember. I think a bunch of Texas people went out because one of our friends, Ethan, was in town. We started at a tiki bar, then I don’t know, then to another bar. We’re all at a big table and someone at the bar — a male someone — either motions to me or I’m being annoying and eavesdropping and chime in from afar, not actually caring but just entertaining myself. Anywho I ended up playing along and going up to the bar and getting into a long-ass, drunken conversation with these two boys. At least one of them was gay, that’s confirmed…maybe both? I don’t know. They were very complimentary of me and they bought me drinks and one of them was the slightest bit touchy. It was fun/funny! My friends kept looking over and wondering what the H was going on and I’d reassure them that it’s fine and I’m just having a laugh. Eventually they left and I was like “nah, I’m still talking to these boys.” Lolol, eventually I said I was going home and I think they were disappointed, like “uhhh why is he not coming home with us?” but hey not my problem! One of the guys ran the national live stream for some dumb online trivia something or other. But then my friends see this the next day and don’t know what ended up happening to me. Maybe I got butt for the first time and it was great. Maybe I’d fallen in love. Not everyone finds their sexuality at the same time. Oh my god lol, I was kind of a harmless little menace, always doing silly stuff like this. I hope those boys thought about me that night. At the same time, I hope I didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

Great movie! I love that movie but I used to REALLY love that movie. This style is where you loosely take a quote or a line and harshly integrate it into its own citation, I think. Just a giggle. Funny movie. I used to know every word. The movie is called Dodgeball.

In this window I was counting down to my 1000th tweet (this was tweet no. 994). I can’t help myself, I’m obsessed with the game! The tweet itself is true. 10 years prior I had my first sexual experience, although there was no kissing and no touching of any below-the-waists. I used to really wish I could go back and redo my approach to that night, but then eventually I was like, ew, I was 17 and she was 17, but now I’m way older than 17 but the memory is still 17, stop thinking about that. Weird weird weird night! I’ll always remember laying in the back of my Corolla in the empty Willow Meadows Baptist Church parking lot. God, what a weird night. Not really a story for you though. Maybe on my death bed, or once you’re a full grown up I can tell you, but not now. I didn’t have my first kiss for another 13 months.

Remember how I told you I was interested in karaoke? Well I woke up one morning and wrote about karaoke, including making a guide of things you should or shouldn’t sing. It’s a really cynical piece, but all the sentiments were true. By the time you’re old enough to sing there will be millions of new songs by billions of new artists (reverse that, I think) and I just don’t have the bandwidth to update the list, so you’re on your own. Still, the fundamental lesson could be beneficial. And a little foreshadowing…when I say don’t do karaoke during quarantine….well I ended up — and don’t get mad — doing a FUCKLOAD of karaoke during quarantine. Nobody likes the piece, by the way. They all think it’s boring and mean (you can be both).

Good life lesson alert! Know this. It’s one of those things that’s just somehow true across the board. Chefs fuck. They’re weirdos and they’re dirty, and yikes, I mean do they all have big hands or do they all have big hands? Forget about it. Please remember that you can’t just go up to a chef when they’re cooking and start talking — they’re at their job and you’re being annoying.

Watch me hedge. Here’s a great example of me wanting to express something real (the democrats must have done — or NOT DONE — something) but not wanting to fully commit to it so then adding a dumb, unrelated joke. I hated those textbook covers. They just moved around too much! I didn’t like the feel. I can still feel the feel if I try and it upsets me. We used to make our covers from paper grocery bags. Do textbooks exist? Pretty funny how in elementary school they make you cover your books because otherwise you’ll ruin them, and then after that you’re just expected to not ruin them, you don’t even have to use covers. Some people still cover them though. Fuck those stretchy things. I still have no idea what I was talking about politically.

This could get a little complicated. You have daddies, but that’s not what this is. It’s kind of a sexual thing and kind of a lifestyle/being thing. I was briefly on Instagram, the famous picture app, and it was a big laugh for me to post a picture of me with a daddy tattoo. I found an app or a website or something that would put “realistic” tattoos on a picture of you, so I used that. I posted the one good picture on the Instagram app but I put my camera roll and discarded pics on Twitter. It took a while to find the right one, clearly. Some of them are just damn goofy, but the one I ended up using…would you believe me if I told you some people thought it was real? Well some people did.

Christ, well over a year and a half on the thing and only 50. I trust you get the joke, it’s pretty simple and not that good. As it so happens, I once did a thing on Facebook (what is it with me and these freaking social media places omg (Facebook deleted long ago)) that involved tracking the followers I was progressively losing. This, though, was not that. Just a joke. Seven likes. Pretty good ratio. 14% of my followers liked this tweet, and that ain’t bad at all.

It really is. This one is like the vague confession or the best night of my life one. Doesn’t really mean anything, though it probably does a little. I’m just letting the people know.

It’s almost observational…I guess more than anything it’s intuitive. I don’t know what the future of apartments looks like but for now it’s 301 and then it’s everything else. I don’t go to a lot of different apartments but most of the units I’ve ever been to are 301s. Not mine though, I live in a penthouse. 13th floor, baby. I’m gonna live forever.

**You may also be thinking, “well that’s interesting, Dustin, but 301 feels more like the most CLASSROOM number” and you’re not wrong. 301 lends itself to that general feeling. But I said it first and I tweeted it and I’m right and 4 people liked it, and if I’m being honest I’m picturing more of like a 310 or 321 for a classroom, but that’s only picturing it for like five seconds.

I love seeing those big fat books. When a teacher has read the same book over and over again and has post-it-ed the hell out of it, you’re in for a good class. Your teachers are going to tell you to annotate your books…I always felt uncomfortable doing that. I wanted to preserve the text. Post its are useful for that though. Books can be your friends. You should be reading a lot. Right now, in your development, it doesn’t really matter what you read, but it definitely matters later.

Ok sorry girls, you should maybe look away. Not that you can see anything. Men have bushes too! This one still makes me laugh, I’m actually laughing. Do you know about Covid?

Does the name Jeff Foxworthy mean anything to you? Well your…grandfather? I think my dad would be your grandfather, right? He…I’m pretty sure he went to high school with Jeff Foxworthy. I know he did with one of the others — maybe Bill Engvall — but Foxworthy possibly too. Anywho he has the classic “If youuuuu something something something…you might be a redneck.” This ketchup is an homage to that, mixed with my classic tendency to keep a finger on the pulse of banal trends of low-quality-life people. A clean ketchup bottle is for the birds. I think I had a run of tweets about people who eat ass and this aligns with that. Life is short, squeeze that shit. I’ll come to your home and fuck up your ketchup bottles just to teach a lesson, if I have to. I will. 4th of July, count me in.

Let’s not forget that Twitter is a social MEDIA NETWORK and lots of people find things there: jobs, friends, etc.. I was looking for a collaborator but a collaborator did not emerge. I hope you know Green Day. You know, not the greatest album of theirs, but I feel like I could have ripped that beat to shreds. And am I rapper? No. Does that mean I cannot rap? It does not. Don’t let those labels define you. Just because you don’t identify as something or it’s not your life or people refuse to believe it about you doesn’t mean you can’t do it. And if people insist you’re something, it’s probably because it’s easier for them to label you as what they understand than actually get to know you on a deep level. Arctic Monkeys’ first album. Oh and if you have any skill with music editing I’m still looking for that beat…

Oh my woo where to begin. First thing you need to know is the sketch show I Think You Should Leave. Funny funny show. There’s a sketch from the first season with this Cuban man and boy oh boy it used to make me howl, and the Cuban guy says “Shut up Paul, you probably looooove your mother-in-law.” And then there’s a show called “Bob Hearts Abishola” or something like that, and that’s how it’s done. And yes, you’re right — this is meme format stuff. We’re in the dog days of Summer at this point, it’s Covid, I’m a mess, I’m going head-first into memes if I feel so inclined. I cannot overstate how much I used to do an impression of this guy.

So strange to think you’re another generation removed from The Beatles. You’ll absolutely be alive to see the last of them die, unless it happens very very soon. I was obsessed as a kid. You don’t have to like the music but you should at least be able to appreciate what they did for music. And you should like the music because it’s really good. The Beatles had four members (for simplicity’s sake we’ll leave it at that) — three of them were exceptional musicians and one of them was a drummer who named himself Ringo. He’s such a goof. His songs are all clearly his, which is not a compliment. That’s one thing about being friends, too — sometimes you rub off on each other. Even Paul, who you’ll see die, wasn’t immune to Ringo’s antics. I don’t love Good Day Sunshine but I certainly don’t hate it. You take the good with the bad. Yellow fucking submarine. Sheesh.

I said it before, I really wanted to have correspondences with actual companies or people of any repute. It’s stupid that we’re given this platform that lets us theoretically connect with anyone and yet it’s still so hard to actually connect. A secondary thing I liked was pretending to have connections with said companies anyway — what I really wanted was the actual connection, but that wasn’t going to stop me.

I don’t recall if I needed a new pair of shoes or not but I drew up a scheme wherein I’d pretend to be working with Converse on a new campaign of theirs where people (normal people, famous people, etc.) would design their own shoes, because Converse makes shoes (based on this tweet I assume I/we were calling it “Create at Home”). I posted a video or two on YouTube outlining the terms and the structure and all that, I tagged Converse a bunch and tried to make it seem not completely illegitimate. You know, I had double-digit followers but whatever (I don’t feel like explaining it but I had triple-digit followers on YouTube). Maybe if I got lucky some dumbo in their social media department would either have a sense of humor or would feel obliged to engage with anyone reaching out to the company. Yes, I checked and they were interacting with OTHER accounts that tagged them.

As a specially selected at-home creator I was to design six pairs of shoes, post each of them to the public, and put them to a vote from my followers. Converse would make the winning pair specially for me, and I think there was also something about everyone who voted for the shoe that ended up winning would be entered in a drawing for a $30 gift certificate or something like that.

So I made the video, and I designed the shoes live. This was all a lot of fun to do and I had a lot of adrenaline about the whole thing. I kind of had a little hope that Converse would AT LEAST acknowledge me (think that hot sauce company) and I was hoping people would jump on board and this was exciting for me. It was also July of 2020 and the world was coming to an end.

Look, some of the shoes got actual likes! There’s a literal six likes on one of them, that’s awesome. I posted a survey link with all the options and asked people to vote. I made a slight mistake and only put the images as the voting options, so while voters could see what they were voting on, when it came time to tally everything I could only see how the website labeled the images, which was a very unhelpful “#1, #2, #3, etc.. The survey had closed so I couldn’t see which order I’d put them in, and I didn’t remember that because I just didn’t remember that. I went ahead and picked a pair, whatever. And it looks like it was $15 and not $30. Because I was fronting it and I hardly had $15.

THE PLAN was to order the shoes, put them in some big ornate Converse packaging when they came, and make a video about that. I also wanted to eventually create and order the other five pairs “from Converse” to show how nice they are as a company, but I absolutely didn’t have money to do that so I just did the one. I also ran out of steam and didn’t really do anything after I got the shoes I’d made. It ended up just being a really elaborate way for me to buy a pair of shoes I didn’t need. Converse never said a word, which UPSETS ME and makes me SAD and OTHER THINGS. And that’s the story of the shoes that I have that I’ll wear for you if you ask me, and you can tell your friends that the story is real and Converse actually made them custom for me because I was chosen for their #WeAreAllStars Create at Home 2020 contest due to my…willingness to do the work, I guess. They’re cool shoes, I actually get comments on them from time to time, but guess who absolutely doesn’t have the energy to explain the story to any of the commenting people. That’s right, me. “Thanks, it’s a complicated story.” “Oh…well they look cool.”

This is a useful life lesson. Because of who your parents are you’re already familiar with passive aggression, even if you don’t know it. You’ll find that life is really weird and keeping relationships is tough and you’ll track changes in everyone you know and you’ll see their misdeeds and they’ll bother you and you’ll do bad things and it’ll bother them, and really the only thing you can control is your own actions. You’ll hurt people, you’ll get hurt. You’ll make bad decisions, you’ll learn from them, you’ll make some that you won’t even know you’ve made until years later. You’ll question if anyone really knows you, or if anyone can really be known at all. You’ll fall in and out of love. You’ll commit crimes and you’ll make messes. At some point you’ll hear from someone that one of your friends was talking shit about you, and you won’t have proof and you might not believe it but you’ll feel weird and bad. If things get tense and you’re asked “hey, are we good?” or are at any other point under any other circumstances asked “hey, are we good?” you are not allowed to answer “yes” or “no” or anything declarative like that. Throw that shit back to them. This is tennis. Make them either make a mistake or play you a friendlier ball so you can smash it home. Make them sweat. Understood? And don’t use this on me, I don’t play by these rules.

Others may disagree but to me this was tweetable, no doubt. Strange the things that stick with you. School lunches. Paperwork? Standardized tests? I’m not sure how much I really used this number, but it was mine. It’s also within the motif of the numbers of my life, which is interesting. You know, because my phone number starts with 713 and ends in 9333. All the people who have schooled in HISD and no one else has that number. Of course I was a district legend, but the district itself has yet failed to recognize that.

I’d guess that Jews represent a disproportionately higher share of views of this movie than the average movie. They’d show it to us on the bus on the way to like the food bank or some weird weekend retreat. I’m a big fan! There’s something comforting about it. Is it a great movie? Not for me to say. Is it one of the greatest movies ever made? No, but that’s also not for me to say, even though I really think no. It’s nice though and I’m sure you’ll watch it at some point. I know a lot about the movie, if you should ever be curious. Oh I forgot about the fucking rabbis in the family! Yeah you’ll definitely watch it.

Remember, they don’t have to like you but they do have to be annoyed by how clever you think you are. Smarm is one of the few universal currencies. Bear in mind, I love showing people that I’m a very clever boy but that does not mean I like or respect myself. They CAN all be true but they do not have to be. Did I know who Dvorak was before writing this tweet? I refuse to answer that.

Here’s a classic Dustin tweet. They were my first concert, Maroon 5. Did you know? At the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo — the largest in the world, or something like that. Great first album, though I’m not sure I buy that ALL of the songs are about Jane. We’re also in the territory now where some people kind of liked engaging with me. This one got four likes and that’s nice but I don’t think it was an anomaly. I probably lived in the two-to-three like range then so four was good but not astounding.

This is some basic, relatable stuff. Once you learn the word “blowjob” it’ll be hard to not confuse it with “blowdryer.” I guess for some it’s not that hard, but if you have a bad brain it’s hard. I think the joke probably should have used a less common word than “bumpkin” but it is what it is. Can’t just leave it at that though, have to sign off to remind everyone I’m aware of myself.

Frankly, picturing him watching TV at all is a little strange, even though he watched plenty of it. It’s more the mechanics of it, like him sitting on a couch. His shoes are probably off, right? What kind of socks does he wear? I bet they’re nasty. I don’t know, maybe that’s part of the allure. Maybe I need a little bit of strangeness to get there. He’d have things to say about Fleabag, that’s for sure. He’d use words like “postmodern” and “Byzantine”. Oh, and the media will have you believe that men are cum machines and can do it on command, but that’s not the case for all of us. There’s a lot of other stuff that goes into it; the conditions need to be right and I need to feel however I need to feel. It certainly takes more work for women. There’s more precision required, and discernment. Anywho, it can take a surprisingly long time to learn certain things about yourself — preferences and the like. The truth is once you learn them there’s nothing you can do to unlearn them, you just have to lean in. If that means picturing David Foster Wallace watching a TV show then you’re going to be doing a lot of picturing David Foster Wallace watching a TV show. Not that you need to know, but it’s not a sincere tweet. My imagination is not sustaining in this specific regard, I’d have too many questions and I’d probably be quoting along with the show. Look, four likes and a public reminder that I am not asexual.

They look so similar! My brain just registers that shit on its own, I can’t really help it. Kids these days…some of them don’t even know what West Virginia looks like. They’d see the outline of West Virginia and be like, “what’s that?” and they’d see the outline of Afghanistan and they’d be like, “what’s that?” and I’d look at them and wonder why I’m hanging out with two stupid-ass kids. I hope you’re not dipshits like everyone else. Knowledge is a powerful elixir. Drink up.

Ah, family. Of course you’ll recognize these folks! Surely you know the story of Chanukkah but you may not know that the story is mostly bullshit. It’s really a story of military victory. The oil didn’t last for 8 days. Do you know why it didn’t? Because it’s oil and it functions and burns like oil. This picture was taken pre-Covid so there wasn’t a need for masks, and good thing too because there aren’t many pictures of me from this time with clean-shaven cheeks. Have you noticed how my popularity is creeping up? I wasn’t gaining more followers but this one got five likes easily.

Straight up LOL I designed this set way way back in 2020. I’ll wear them together if you want. I’m serious! I will. It’s incredibly unlikely you share my sense of humor, though, so you may prefer not to. If it’s easier for you you can wear yours and I don’t have to be around, or I can wear mine and you don’t have to be around, or you can wear yours and I’ll wear another shirt with something random. We should totally tag-team this, though. It kind of reminds me of an idea I used to have about a shirt and a trout but I don’t want to get into that now.

Oopsies! Did I do that? It’s kind of funny. If your parents allow it I can speak more on cunnilingus but until they do I’ll press pause and savor my six likes. Oh, it’s a New Year’s Eve thing, if you didn’t know, as well as a clit thing.

Classic jokes. If you’re still following the trajectory you’ll remember some early tweets from phase one where I’d give the audience options, and you’ll see that I’m essentially doing the same here, but this time it’s so much better. It’s dumb, yes, but it feels so much more natural than the early stuff. Just some little jokes, not a big deal. Some people think of me as a joker, and when you consider the hard evidence here it’d be a hard claim to dispute., but not all undisputed claims are true.

Time to let the cat out of the bag: Uncle Dustin was a podcaster. I say was, but once a podcaster always a podcaster. And no, not that kind of podcaster — a way less accessible kind of podcaster. I’ve written about the podcasts ad nauseum so there’s no need to get deep into it now, but we’re entering a spammy promotional Twitter era. Tweeting a link to the first ever episode is nice. Tweeting a link to the second ever episode is nice. What happens when I’m on episode 66? What then? Will the people be tired of my links? Yes, they will. At least I’m playing it cool. No “wow, years of hard work finally paid off, thanks to all the fuckers who helped produce this, please like and subscribe and share this with your friends and hairdressers, your engagement really helps the brand grow and if you want more content you can donate to my buymeacoffee.com page.” Quite the opposite. I did not answer any questions. Playing hard to get is undefeated. (It should be clear but those are links to the first two episodes of my (first) podcast.)

Really, I don’t intend to bore you with podcast stuff, but I had one episode that was a listener Q&A because I’m all about engaging with the people. The episode was never released (not going to bore you) but in preparation for the episode I tried to make some hashtags work, which they did not. Look how quickly my followers lose interest when I’m not giving them the classics.

One thing to note about May of 2021 is that it was not exactly a healthy time for me, nor were the several months around it, and this is not unnoticeable in my tweets. I went on a little too long of a run on the whole Song of the Summer thing. Poor guy almost certainly has no idea what I was up to. He had no clue he was on the verge of internet stardom. No fewer than three or four people saw his picture and rolled their eyes at this nonsense. His summer came to a close and I can only hope he H’dAGS and never changed. The days grew shorter and nobody claimed the autumn. I went looking for a polestar when I should have been looking inward, finding the strength to make the seasons my own.

Classic, classic, classic. The universe is a joke book, all you have to do is put on your spectacles, turn the page, and be ready to ROFL. In case you don’t know there was a show called Parks and Rec, which aired on NBC. That’s what the tweet is.

I’ve touched on it already, but in the moments when I felt helplessly compelled to tweet I was often facing counter-forces. For instance, on the one hand I’d want to tweet, but on the other I’d have nothing to say. I usually try to retain a certain ethos consistent with my body of tweets, which kind of includes not relating too significantly with anyone. That’s what leads to tweets like this. Arj Barker was just some fucker, that’s not important. Comedian guy, one of those. Weird name, Arj. Arj Barker. Deservedly unliked tweet but still representative of that particular moment in time. June 2, still not exactly a healthy time for me.

You know her! Look at this accomplishment. This was before her life would amount to bigger and better things. It’s nice to document victories like this. You push through time, enduring the bullshit and drudgery, and you often forget all the amazing things you’ve done. I’m glad we have this picture to remind us. Personally I’ve taken to puzzles over the last several years. I’ve done loads. I have opinions about brands. I have a puzzle board with drawers that swivels and all that. I could probably knock this puzzle out in like a day if I had the time, maybe three if I had other obligations. I’m not a teenage girl, though, so take nothing away from Jenna’s accomplishment.

Jesus I thought I was done with that. But this is a date tweet. Have I talked about those yet? October 1? I can’t remember. No more James Song.

If you’re going to go through the trouble of making something you might as well tweet it out. We know how I struggle with promoting myself and advertising things, so I’d often just send out a link with no commentary. I said that already, right? Sometimes, after a few days of the link getting no traction, I’d then post like a paragraph or two explaining what I did, but by then people had already moved on. I haven’t gone through the piece in a few years so maybe my mind has changed, but I remember being oddly very proud of this. From birth to publication, literally every shoe I’d ever owned. It’s the weird type of meta-editorial/expose that I love, and that by virtue of being what it is, very few other people love. But it’s kind of interesting! Consider what I said about keeping pictures of our accomplishments, like Jenna with the puzzle. Well this is kind of like that, but instead of accomplishments it’s shoes I had. As I’ve told those who will listen, yes it’s a list of shoes but it’s also a vehicle for my rants and bad jokes, which I like.

There’s kind of a pattern, no? It’s like dumb jokey nonsense but then I cap it with a complete non-joke, which serves to highlight the joke before it. EXCEPT, you know, it’s dumb and hokey. And yes I do mean hokey — I know I wrote “dumb jokey” just before so it could look like a typo, but it’s not. Strange show that Deal or no Deal. The audience is your memories? No idea what that means.

Oh my god loling about this. Kids now say “IYKYK” (if you know you know), and that’s this. Kids in your generation will probably say something else, but the point remains. After your parents sign off on me explaining cunnilingus and that big bush I had in that one pic I’ll see if they’re interested in me touching on butt-play. And if not, just stare at this tweet for a long time, and do so consistently every day for weeks — make sure it’s seared into your memory. Then just wait, one day you’ll understand. IYKYK!

Some. Things. Look. Like. Other. Things. And. I. Will. Always. Spot. Them. It’s a guaranteed successful tweet. Obviously not statistically — it only got one like — but successful in that it is a) correct, b) like the slightest, slightest bit funny, if we’re not expecting it to be actually funny, and c) didn’t get no likes. I assume mod looks will make an American comeback sometime. Not for the best.

There are a few things going on here that are all very me then (me, then). First off — have I mentioned this yet? — I always wanted Twitter to be my way of interacting with random celebs and big people. They rarely respond because they’re cowards, but they have the freedom and ability to, so I stay hopeful. I’m not sure if I knew this when I sent this tweet but I have a friend who wrote for Bomani Jones or brought him his lunch or something like that…I have to think I didn’t because then I would have propositioned Bomani and then said by the way my friend is your lunch guy, to add some legitimacy. Second, I started a WNBA fantasy league in 2022 and was desperate for participants. Can you believe that people didn’t want to play fantasy women’s basketball? I’m not asking that as a joke. Goes to show you what kind of world we were living in then. The league (Stop Asian Hate League) had an absolutely bananas scoring system and some weird-ass rules and prize structures. Bomani never responded and nobody wanted to re-join the league the following year. I’d start it back up in a heartbeat.

I missed it when looking through my tweets because it was just me saying I wasn’t going to answer questions about yet another weird link, but I’d recently gone live with my second podcast series, the name of which you can see in the picture. No need to talk about that one, except to say it was fun to make as it involved me getting drunk alone in a basement, which I would later model my life after. I also ate a single sandwich from Jersey Mike’s and…well I don’t remember exactly what happened but I think maybe I had an existential panic about it? Not sure. But I won’t be taking you to Jersey Mike’s, that I know! Turns out America loves to read. I don’t know many good kids books but I can recommend some of my annoying shit (we’ll start with Queneau, we’ll hit Nabokov hard, you can read some of my really not funny books about the history of comedy). Your grandmother, on the other hand, is at her most comfortable in a children’s bookstore. She knows them all, except for any of the modern ones and most of the non-Jewish ones. If you want to read about Chanukkah or Moses, forget about it — she’s got you covered. Oh, the money in the picture, that’s not mine. I’m what’s called “your broke uncle,” a moniker I hate, earned, deserve, and insist on being called. Do not ask why.

Ok I found the podcast release.

Oh my woo, some things look so much like other things!!! Straight up truth though, this is the most anyone (I’ve seen) has ever looked like a Monster Energy Drink™. You will NOT drink Monster Energy Drink™ ok? It’s gross, it’s bad for you, and I won’t allow it. And you will CERTAINLY NOT dress like Monster Energy Drink™ OK?? I’m not one to tell women how to dress, but I care about you (I have to…we’ve been over this, it wasn’t my choice) and the nicknames you’ll be given and the d-bag guys you’ll attract…I promise you you’ll be better off dressing like other drinks. And don’t even get me started on Jerry Springer. I wouldn’t know where to begin and it would take forever for me to even get to Baggage, which is the only reason he was brought up in the first place. Just look him up I guess.

I hate that so many of my tweets need so much explanation. Even so I feel like they’re important to show you. This one…well I just think the picture is funny. It’s from hardcore porn but to me it’s also funny. And then the guy — he’s a dialect coach named Erik Singer and he has a bunch of videos on YouTube where the stuff he dissects is in that little box. I’ve actually used this format for several tweets, just because. I tagged him in one and he responded with a confused emoji. That felt like a victory.

The victory mentioned above

From time to time I’d feel like tweeting a dumb-as-hell paradox. How would this even work?? And somehow I got a like?!?!

Ok, the date thing I mentioned above — I guess I hadn’t gotten to it yet. I love dates. It’s gonna be May May 1st. October 11th Parent Trap girls’ (Hallie and Annie) birthdays. Every June 3rd I think of this scene from Gilmore Girls, a show you’ve probably been forced to watch by now. There are more dates like this, with puns and specific associations. And now I get the PLEASURE of having to remember all of your precious birthdays, which I’m so glad to have to do, and I get the PLEASURE of having to send you gifts and cards. Here’s the thing though: my cards are always a little late. Have you noticed that? It has nothing to do with how I feel about you and everything to do with when I send cards, which is never at the appropriate time.

I forgot to say that some people compare my writing to Amy Sherman Palomino because I just won’t shut the fuck up, but those same people compare my personhood to nobody. Isn’t that odd?

It makes me laugh! I covered my email address (dustinsmark@yahoo.com) because of Yahoo! shame but it makes me laugh. Referring to gay and trans and questioning etc. people as champions makes me laugh.

This is true. As I clicked send I thought this might be the one. I thought that if it caught the right wind it could be a real thing. Because calling the LGBTQIA+ community champions made me laugh. I thought it was funny and I thought it would catch on. It didn’t. I’d never had that taste in my mouth before, almost like I was due for my flowers. It turns out nobody saw it, and the few somebodies who saw it didn’t care. Now when I call gay women champions it doesn’t make sense.

Mmmmmm, this. I can all but guarantee you’re not familiar with the Dustin Mark YouTube channel. Oh boy, let me think. I’ve walked a handful of people through the history before — and I do mean history — but it’s all a little foggy to me now, and that’s not what we’re talking about here, although if we were I’d say that it was a deluge of annoying and often deliberately bad content, the distribution of which was part of a self-destructive social experiment, part collage and part not sober me messing around (again we don’t need to get into it but there was a reason), and sprinkled within the 100+ videos were occasional glimpses of fun, good things. These three bundles of words are all titles of poems that are recited somewhere in the channel, embedded in random videos or episodes of The Dustin Mark Show. What could this tweet mean? Was I just spewing nonsense? Was it a clue???

Slight overstatement, but maybe with some syntactical changes it’ll track. It probably won’t, but if I can mess with the syntax in improper ways and with silent, implied phrases maybe it’ll track. Let’s see.

• I’ve ruined my life, (and) tweeting (distracts me and gets in the way of fixing it) so I’m gonna take a break in July.
• I’ve ruined (a lot and am feeling destructive and have little regard for) my life (but) tweeting (is the one thing I’d like to preserve and if I persist like this I’ll ruin that too), so (in order to not ruin Twitter for myself) I’m gonna take a break in July.
• I’ve (not yet) ruined my life tweeting so (to better prepare to do so) I’m gonna take a break in July (and come back with some real deranged nonsense).
• I’ve ruined my (underwear — every single pair, and never in my) life (have I been surrounded by so much piss and shit, I mean it’s on all my clothes, it’s on the carpet, it’s on the ceiling somehow, it’s in my car, and I need to clean it all up but I can’t stop) tweeting so I’m gonna (burn all my clothes and see a doctor and) take a break in July.

Yeah it’s definitely an overstatement — I mean my life isn’t ruined, just look at all the wonderful nieces I have — but we all need breaks, even from things we love. I need it to not be an option, and telling myself I’ll stop is pointless because I am weak, but telling the world something means more because the world cannot know just how weak I am.

This was June of 2022. I was trying to force myself off of Twitter. I was struggling with it before this tweet too, I just hadn’t said so. Look where we are now. I’m fighting the same fight. I hope this can help you appreciate why we’re here and why this is so hard for me.

Sad truth plus semi-joke equals…my life? Lol? No, I don’t know what it equals, besides a lot of my tweets. Just letting people know what’s going on, that I’m paying attention, that I know interest is low. Strange how the hot new pod doesn’t grow but the old dog continues to shine. Massage pod actually had way way more listeners than any of the others. I can explain why another time. But the clarifying stuff is real! People were constantly like, “you good?’ They were constantly like, “you massager?” They were even constantly like “what?” — If only I weren’t so damn insistent on not answering questions. It does help to separate the homies from the phonies though, because anyone who really knows me would know the fiction of it all. But who could know me? Who has been allowed to? A few people, but not many.

In my head there was no “followed…” to this tweet and I much prefer that version. Eating the delicious food is a bad joke that brings down the spirit and alters the voice for the worse. Bad editing on my part. I will say, the first half of the tweet is something I don’t not say, and sure it’s tongue-in-cheek and something that I only continue to say because it’s something that I once said and decided to keep saying, and ok thinking about it even more this tweet is entirely true. I’ve never been to China (no interest) and I think I’m probably super off-base, but to me it feels true. If it’s not true I can still confidently say that in China there’s way more soup than American Chinese food would have you believe. And if you look behind the scenes at one of these places, at the chefs and families making the food and running the place, they’re only ever having soup. That must be why I think it. Me? I like egg drop but the rest of it can stay on dry land. But don’t get me started on Chinese food, I have so much more to say, I really do. If you’re ever curious…I have a history and I have knowledge and opinions and I recommend the documentary The Search for General Tso to get you started. Shoot I think I already told you about that. ALSO I don’t really give blanket recommendations because that’s BS…that’s just somebody talking about something they like. A good recommendation should be curated for someone, for actual reasons. I guess I’m comfortable with this recommendation because you’re not going to watch it and it doesn’t matter.

Back-to-back tweets involving Asia? No, they’re not actually back-to-back on the Twitter timeline, it just worked out like that here. Here’s me getting off of the bitch once and for all (for six-ish weeks). What a great period of time. I deleted the bitch from my phone, I didn’t go on it on my computer. I thought about it a lot, but less and less as time passed. I had stuff to do, I needed to focus. It’s sad that I couldn’t trust myself to not be in Japan and still get stuff done, but you have to come to terms with these things and not fight them. I think in this reality I must have thought there’s no Twitter in Japan, or that I’d be so gobsmacked by its beauty and wonder that I wouldn’t have the minutes required to tweet. I’ve never actually been to Japan though, no interest.

Wow, talk about burying the lede. I released a damn book and this is the announcement?!? Even then it’s a little buried, but to clarify: I wrote and released a book. WELL, kind of… Dustin Mark THE POET wrote the book and I released it. Isn’t that obnoxious?? The e-book took a day or so to go live but it would be much longer before I could hold a physical copy. A buck-49 is a good deal for a book of poetry, I think. Oh, so the character wrote the poetry while he was being held captive in a basement (by his….god I hate to say it, by his…uncle — not all uncles are bad, I promise). He was super malnourished and going nuts. That’s why it’s bad (if you think it’s bad)…and some of it ISN’T entirely bad, but it still wasn’t me who wrote it. I will give you as many copies as you want! You can hand them out at school. You can take hundreds of them and use them as a bed. Whatever you want. HEY WAIT A SECOND…it ain’t August 5 yet. I must have come home early. Or I finally got to the part of Japan where there is Twitter. As you can see, the book was an instant hit.

The book sort of took over my Twitter around this time. Bad at self-promotion though I may be, I’d just put out a book, which felt not insignificant, and I guess I wasn’t in the mood to tweet, like, “spanking myself” or whatever when I was trying to raise awareness for a book that nobody was buying.

It came! This is the book and this is me doing the cover face. Betcha can’t guess where the cover face picture was taken. Somewhere in some forest/mountain area! I’m reminded of how much I prefer those glasses to the ones I wear now. Oh well. It’s a physical thing that you can flip through and read and annotate. Happy day.

I mean, come on. First, someone actually read it. Second, they appreciated it. This made me feel, in a word or two, very good. And there’s a lesson for you girls here. It doesn’t take much to say thanks or pay someone a compliment or just say something nice, but the effect that can have is often greater than you’d have thought. If you read a friend’s weird book and you have something nice to say, say it. It will be appreciated.

I refuse to read this note now, I’m just not in the mood. But you should. Clearly I wasn’t feeling heard at the time. I had stuff to say.

Around this time I decided to shift away from desperation and back into goofy land. Does your generation know Carrie Brownstein? She was a music…just look her up. Anywho she released a memoir called Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. I haven’t read the book and I don’t have an opinion about the book, but the title always stuck with me. I think I put out several tweets using it as a framework. Suddenly I started embracing being a poet. (Jokingly. I did not write the poems.)

Lord if that ain’t true. Tweeting is a big game of Russian roulette except all the chambers are full. Every time I tweet I shoot myself, and every time I shoot myself I bleed out a little more of my soul. I don’t know the exact data but around the time of this tweet I probably had about 65% of my soul left in my body.

Ladies, raise your hand if you know the Pagliacci doctor thing. None of you? Sometimes a different name is used. I don’t know what that other name is, no. Ok, look that one up too. One thing I like about the little story is that it’s referred to as a joke, which is great for me as a person who doesn’t tell funny jokes. Did you look it up yet? Look it up and then reread the tweet. Pretty hokey, I know. It’s another tweet that I refuse to look up because it’s probably been done before. Ok here’s a little secret for ya: one day I’d like to publish a book with 100 (if I can’t come up with 100 maybe like 40) alternate tellings of the joke/story. I have several but I will not elaborate! Je suis Pagliacci.

Not desperation per se, but frustration clearly. I don’t get these monsters who follow me. Who are they? Why do they do what they do? They’ve rewired me. I don’t expect traction anymore. It confuses me. That’s what I said in the tweet. Anyway, still no reviews…

Yes desperation per se. This guy is so annoying! Shut up man, no one wants your book!

Did you catch that, girls? That’s an example of a bad attitude. Be positive and believe in yourselves! That said, acting desperate is super annoying and I hate that this was me. And that said, it was me and I can’t hide from that, nor should I deny who I was.

Imagine you’re in class and you’re talking to your dumbass friend Annalise and she’s like, “guess what, my uncle’s band just put out an EP, it’s called some stupid album name…it’s like anarcho-folk shit, really groovy,” and then you can be like, “well my uncle…actually, search him on Spotify.” And then Annalise searches me and is like “WHAT??” and you get all smug because of it. Yeah, you search me and this is what you get. Strike that, this is what you got. Now you get a whole lot more. And I have no intention of stopping. But do you see the thing in the picture? Do you notice that there are now three podcasts? I couldn’t help myself.

Now I don’t know for a fact that anybody said this, but it’s possible that someone said this, and while I don’t think anybody said this, someone might have said this. The exhausting thing is actually being Dustin on twitter, but no one wants to hear about the sad tweeter, they want to see their own quotes, unattributed.

Remember that whole book I put out? Remember what it looks like? Yep, that’s it right there. Now go to Google or wherever people are searching when you read this and look up the best bookstores in America. Powell’s is on every single one of those lists. And there’s my book, indirectly on those lists. My book was quite new at the time, but I didn’t realize it was also recommended (in poetry). This was such a proud moment for me. It didn’t even matter that I put the book there myself, it felt real. I was in such esteemed company, and after reading some of the books around mine, I’ve gotta say, some of them should only be recommended to some really dumb people because they’re not great. My book has way more heart. Plus, it was free-ish. If someone were to pick it up they wouldn’t see a price sticker. There’s a barcode, yes, but not one that’s part of the Powell’s system. So maybe they just say fuck it and put it under their shirt. Maybe they bring it to a nice, white employee and ask what the price is and the employee looks it up and doesn’t find anything and is like, “uhhh, this book actually doesn’t exist…I guess you can take it?” and the person takes it and reads it and thinks it’s ok. Maybe a different employee (darker but still white) finds it and realizes it’s not in the system so they opt to rectify that and they add it to the system and now it’s in the system. What I DO know is that an employee didn’t find it, realize it’s not in the system, and burn it, because Powell’s is anti-burning books, they make that very clear. Someone may or may not have read the book, but even if they haven’t at least it didn’t get the burn treatment. I’ll take it.

Side note: we’re three years removed from the spaghetti/tuck pictures. Look at me. I’ve seen things since then. I’ve changed.

Oh another thing! I think the official Powell’s account liked these tweets, which is great! Add them to the list of big accounts who loved me.

Imagine going from featured author at a big bookstore to this. Deep down I’d always been the same old lost guy, drowning in my own desperate pleas for attention.

Remember what I said about how I love dates? Well look, there’s 365-ish days a year and all of them deserve a little pun or inside joke. That includes all of your birthdays, which I remember. The heavy hitter of this genre is May 1. “It’s gonna be mayyeyy” from NSYNC. I said that in the earlier one, but this time I explain it. Real quick let’s talk, NYSYNC was really really good for a little while. Then they broke up and one of them died and went to space, then they got back together and it was too late, I’d stopped caring, but not about the stuff they made when they were really good — I’d never stop caring about that. So it’s April 30 or May 1 and you get Justin Timberlake telling you “It’s gonna be May” because of how he says the word “me.” Well here’s a worse version of the same thing. The Fray (Christian band, I think the lead singer is short?) had a MONUMENTAL debut album, pictured in tweet. The title track starts out with the line “Step one, you say we need to talk,” but he’s a quiet boy and TO ME it KIND OF sounds like he’s saying “Sep one,” which is also the first day of a month, in this case September. So on August 31 or September 1 we can do the Fray meme. And then the next month, or even also the beginning of this month, you get “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” which I also played with with J**s Sng. September brings the heat. There’s even Earth, Wind, and freaking Fire! So much gold.

Oh the distracted boyfriend meme was just another meme. This is not a month meme but it was still a popular meme. Fuck, I was in eigth grade, I was so deep in young love with a young woman who…well she deserved better. I liked her, she liked me, but I was a coward and I didn’t know how to operate around her. Was I supposed to call her? Walk home with her? She lived all the way in Sharpstown, I couldn’t do that! Actually I don’t remember exactly where she lived, but it was by a golf course. I was scared of her. I didn’t want to freak her out so I never made a move, never got that nice kiss I wanted. Uggghhhh!!!!!!! I was so close so many times. I held her hand though. And then I got broken up with :(. Uggghhhh!!!!!! I was so sad. There’s a song called “What Hurts the Most” by some country band and I listened to that a bunch that night. By coincidence it came on the radio and I realized how bang-on it was so I played on my iPod over and over. Ugghhhhhh! Ok sorry I forgot, this The Fray album had come out around the summer or beginning of the school year and I associate it with that time, talking to her on AIM…god, we had such good conversations. And I had freaking braces and I was getting acne. I was weird and lanky and clever, but not smooth. It was a hell of a time to be alive. I’m glad you didn’t know me then. You’d look at me now and wonder what went wrong…

I believe this. So many people can sing. It’s still nice to be a good singer if that’s what you want to be, I’m just saying there are tons of good singers. When you’re a kid there’s always another kid in school and everyone’s like, “yeah, their voice is CRAZY” and you just go with it, but they’re also probably just a little louder than everyone else, and they’ve had voice lessons which there’s nothing wrong with it’s a good thing, but then you go to a bigger school, let’s say, and there’s a lot of that person, then another bigger school and even more, then the real world and everyone’s a fucking singer. When I was young there was some girl named Forest (maybe Forrest) who sang — I’m talking she’s like 9 — and all the Jews (she was a Jew) were so gaga over her voice and it was just like, “it’s…not that great?” But she went to LA to be on like Disney shows or something, and I think she had a background part in something, I don’t know if it ever aired, maybe that’s just what she told people. She lived down the street from me for a year or so (why such a short time?) and she and her sister or brother or whoever it was were annoying, I remember they once just showed up at our house and I am NOT OK with that. That’s my space! We didn’t like them in the first place but even if we did I’d have wanted them to ask. Also, I’m really sorry, I’m sure you love to sing and I don’t mean to rain on your parade. Keep singing! In fact, lift every voice and sing.

Back at it. And I’m not saying this is why I don’t visit more often, it’s just a thing about me — travel really does make me delirious. I often won’t know what day it is or where I am. It’s probably not a good sign that just being in another place throws me off so much, but it is what it is. That said, delirium makes me a modern poet, so I guess it’s an equal trade. You see how we’ve stretched the template out? First it was A makes B. Now it’s A makes B which makes C. This is called doing more to a thing. You know, not just leaving it how it is? Travel makes me a modern poet? Not quite.

Hmmm, not sure how to explain this one (I mean, it’s Tony Shalhoub with weird eyes, I’m talking explain what’s really going on). I look back and there are several of these, each a different pic of Tony Shalhoub with a different sort of weird eye color. There must have been a reason. This is like…you know, you saw how I’d tweet out “chicken nuggets” or something like that, just because I needed to burp something into the universe. This is kind of like that but a little weirder. It kind of suggests there’s something behind it, but I’m almost certain there isn’t. It’s exactly what it is. To misquote Garth Marenghi (DON’T GET ME STARTED), “subtext is for cowards.”

If you’re going to be my nieces, you’re going to not get paid to write for a high profile outlet and still make clear mistakes. Alternatively, if you’re going to be my nieces, you’re not going to get paid to edit a high profile outlet and not catch clear mistakes. It drives me crazy! Homonyms can be tricky, but not being tricked is this damn person’s job! I will HAPPILY tutor you on these things. I like words and syntax and grammar. Shoot me but I do! I make a ton of mistakes but I still like the stuff. I’m always here to talk about it. I’m not great at answering the phone but I’m always here to talk about it. Hold on, you girls got phones already? This world is wild.

If we’re somehow gifted the actual statistics they’ll show that this is not true, but the essence of it is true. Here’s the thing about improv: I don’t like it. But I don’t always not like it. When it’s really good I like it, but I rarely see it really good. But sometimes it is really good. Like I’ve seen some reeeeeally good, reeeeally impressive musical improv, and some good just regular improv, but few things make me want to crawl inside of my body like not good improv. Do you even fucking know what improv is? It’s improvising, you should be able to figure it out. Improvised comedy. Funny on purpose, out of the blue. Bad stand-up comedy makes me want to crawl inside myself too. I used to have a big big soft spot for bad stand-up, but then I lived it and saw more of it than any man ever should, and now it’s bad and I am one of the world’s foremost critics of stand-up comedy — an impressive role to hold for someone who does not watch very much stand-up comedy. The truth remains, though: for like two weeks I was a kind-of good stand-up comedian. Now I’m just an uncle.

Speaking of comedy. You know how I’ve tweeted a few zeitgeisty things, like the memes — pretty much just the memes — and they don’t really work out? This is me recreating a sketch from Saturday Night Live, which I respectfully don’t want to hear your opinions about. It’s James Franco in a sketch and he says all these things, I think in that sequence. Kind of funny when I watched it! Sketch comedy, along with improv and stand-up, is shameful. Some of us (SNL) just handle shame better than others (me).

As of writing this I live in the United States of America, a terrible place that isn’t 100% terrible because it affords me countless luxuries and privileges, and has always treated the white man well, but is still inherently terrible (very dangerous, fascist, etc.), growing more so by the hour. These are dark times. That said, if I disparage the troops or our great sovereign commander here you will have one less uncle before you know it. Double that said, at least then I’d die doing something I love: rambling on about myself. If any of your relatives not on my side of the family are socially conservative or support literally any of the practices that are happening right now (you are too young to be burdened with the truth, but one day…) you can tell them I said to eat my ass and then tell them I’d like to have a talk. And please forget whatever they’ve told you. Look at how much I know. Obviously I’m right. Trust me. And PLEASE don’t get me started on Isr

Looks like I loved Japan so much that I just had to go back. If you forgot, that’s code for “get me off this damn website.” You know, I still think of Twitter as a website rather than an app. Wonder why that is.

Look how concerned I am about being forgotten. Please, you can still talk to me even though I’m fake in Japan! More desperation, this time with bad jokes. Isn’t that pathetic? My phone number probably is still somewhere online, but I’d made a video years ago called “My phone number” where I recite my number to the camera in a kooky way. It’s not up at the moment but maybe one day it will return. In case you’re wondering it’s 713–725–9333. Honestly I’m thinking about the video and it’s silly and I think I like it.

I must be back from Japan because I am angry on Twitter. I hate it! (I love it a little) (It’s complicated, as you know from the chapters you’ve read by now) (I can’t help myself)

Listen girls, I have a very important lesson for you. For any given practice, you have to know the rules before you can break them. This refers to…art and language mostly, I guess. It does not apply to, like, laws or anything. I am a proud master of the English language, which is why it’s ok for me to have my dumb little fun with it. See how I use improper syntax because it makes me giggle? I have this right. You have no such right. Study up. If English isn’t your favorite class then I cannot relate to you, unless it’s history then I think I get it. And no, electives don’t count, everyone likes those. Remember Fleabag? I’ve mentioned it already (to make myself cum, remember?). Hot Priest (I wonder if his hotness holds up. I think he’s hot, but I’m of the time. Lmk.) never has tidy hair. And he’s a priest! We’re a clergy family and the clergy of us would never show up to clergy work with bed head, but Hot Priest drinks and fucks and has bed head. Maybe it’s all just one big device to make us think certain things about him. Hmmm I wonder. Nah I just think it’s sloppy. Ooh ok another question: would he be as hot if he didn’t have bedhead? Probably not! Lmk. ChatGPT, please produce a picture of Hot Priest without bedhead. Thank you, please send that to my nieces with a picture of Hot Priest without bedhead. Oh this tweet was also a few years after this season came out.

School looooooved telling us about the liberty bell and how it’s cracked. It’s a fucking bell, people don’t use bells these days. Of course it’s cracked, everything’s cracked. Anything made in that time is cracked. It makes sense. When school tries to feed you obvious stuff and pass it off as interesting, feel free to tell school to miss you with the not interesting stuff. There’s so much to learn and they shouldn’t be wasting your time telling you a bell is cracked. Or if they haven’t gotten to it yet, as soon as school brings up the liberty bell just shout, “yeah it’s fucking cracked, we know. NEXT.” and you can tell the principal to eat my ass. A worse person would make a joke there about my ass and crack, but I hate anyone who would do that. This is also more observational-comedy-temptation. “You guys remember the liberty bell? You guys remember school?” The great Bob Mortimer does a character on Athletico Mince where he does shitty observational comedy that always ends up referencing his brass hand. Countless people do faux observational comedy shit, but this one’s incredibly obscure and for not just that reason very funny.

Obviously I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, nor did I care to. I’ve grown pretty fond of it, though, and there’s nothing more Christmas than a gaudy, fictional high school dance. I’d take the hell out of Cho Chang to the Yule Ball. Oh, this is from Harry Potter, by the way. Crazy how I just expect people to know that, even though you’re a new generation and we have different cultural touchstones. And not to say that I like Asian girls. That was also a thing when I was younger, people think Jewish boys like Asian girls. I don’t know exactly where that came from, I see it occasionally but not everywhere. For me? Not interested. God, who would I actually take to the Yule Ball? Don’t take this the wrong way but not Parvati or the other girl of the same race (forget her name). Hermione I obviously can’t. Ginny def not. One of the French girls would be sick, but let’s be realistic. Lavender Brown? Katie Bell? Definitely not Susan Bones’s chubby ass cheeks. That’s not body shaming by the way. Anyway the real answer is obviously my wife, I’d take my wife to the Yule Ball.

Genuine question, I don’t know of any. Psychedelia doesn’t just mean drugs, it’s a style and I like it, it’s funky. Cause look, I’ve seen a lot of Christmas movies by now and there are some good ones and holy woo there are some bad ones, but I haven’t seen any psychedelic ones. I’m a curious guy (I’m actually not, relatively).

The two not-realistic things I dream of participating in are Celebrity Jeopardy and the Legends and Celebrities Softball Game sponsored by probably still T-Mobile during the MLB All Star weekend. I’d loooove to be on Celebrity Jeopardy. If the show was bold and creative enough they’d scout me. I’m not exactly nobody…really, I’m not. Am I famous? No, not really, but I’m definitely a guy who’s done some stuff, and when I watch Celebrity Jeopardy sometimes they have contestants I’ve never heard of, but I just take the show’s word that they’re celebrities. Also some of the celebs are straight up boring. I’m not, I’d be all over that. I’d be buzzing in and making smart jokes. I don’t know the booker though, that’s the main issue. I’m also not giving my winnings to charity; I am the charity.

I don’t know why I tweeted this then, but now I can see its function as a lesson for you girls. If you see a guy who looks like Jack White, don’t go to bed with him.

(for reference)

Don’t think any less of your grandparents but this is dumb as hell. I shamed them a little when this happened but I felt bad. They probably don’t love that I shamed them again, publically, but it’s warranted. When you’re young you think your parents know everything. Then you grow up and you realize we’re all dumb and lost. Except for some of my friends who are really smart, and some of their parents. Can you see the actual message from the email in this? It’s just age math and someone saying nobody can explain it. What? Shut up.

One thing I really love doing is classifying cities. Mainly with food. I don’t know why, I just like doing it. It’s just a feel thing. It didn’t take long after moving to Denver that I learned it’s an ice cream city. Houston…well Houston’s different, isn’t it? I refuse to classify it as a specific food town because it’s different. Isn’t it?

At this point I think I probably had between like 65–75 followers, which is either way too few or way too many, but I wanted to set a realistic goal for myself. Man, those Colts teams…that’s a football team, if you didn’t know. Peyton Manning, the guy in all those commercials, used to throw dimes to Marvin Harrison, and Marvin Harrison was such a nice, humble man. Good role model for you girls. Just because you score touchdowns it doesn’t mean you have to be a bad person. You can be a good person. I believe I did get to 88 followers. Marvin would be proud, or at least pretend to care, because he’s a good man. Their coach, Tony Dungy, was also a good man. Edgerrin James, Reggie Wayne, Dallas Clark. Dwight Freeney?!?! So good.

True. Everyone. This is a thing a lot of people don’t know: I”m kind of decent at a few accents. Whenever I break out the Irish one people are like, “huh?” and I smirk back at them. I have a friend from Dublin. That’s just a fact. Me and two of my rascal friends used to go to a hip bar in Brooklyn where you could dance or talk to people or whatever — I think maybe three times we went — and we were all big cowards, and this one time there were these two Irish girls and I think one of them came up to me and was like “my friend fancies you” which was INSANE because that had never happened in my life (actually there’s a weird 7th grade story where something like it happened but it wasn’t good), and then I tried to act cool and the friend in question and I barely danced for like 15 seconds and that was it. That was the only time I’ve ever danced in the wild, I think. I tried to suggest that the initial girl go talk to one of my friends…I think that happened. Anywho, “my friend fancies you” is firmly in my wheelhouse, but that’s hardly the tip of the iceberg. Lots of young Irish people live in New York during the summer. I worked with a few of them. The male Irish friends of mine used to speak very bluntly about how unfortunate-looking many Irish girls are, but that’s not a conversation I was interested in participating in. There are different regional accents within the Irish accent and I’m not good enough to know those yet.

So annoying and unnecessary.

LOL true.

Do you know what this is referencing? The top one is really lame and I don’t like it. I dislike the bottom one less but I’m still lukewarm on it.

He looks like it! I’m telling you, show me a picture of anyone at your school — boy, girl, teacher, whatever — and I’ll tell you who they look like. You can bring me for show and tell, if that’s allowed. That sounds uncomfortable to me, but I’ll do it. I really will. Ok it sounds uncomfortable but it also sounds hilarious and memorable. That’s good Celeb Jeopardy banter too. “I hear you were a guest at your niece’s school for show and tell?” “You’re right about that, Ken. I bet you don’t know where that idea initially came from…” Here, girls. It came from here.

I remember watching the first episode of HBO’s Girls and thinking, “that guy’s got a stupid-ass goatee.” But eventually it grew on me. In the first ep he’s shirtless and he has no hair on his chest and he’s sweaty. Years later there was a hit show that swept the country called White Lotus, and in season two there’s this little bitch, pictured left, stealing Adam’s look. This is a version of me pointing out things that look like other things, but in this version I include my judgement and am very mean. The character went to Stanford and also had a big neck, much like the actor. All that said, it’s not nice to make fun of people’s appearances.

Reading this now I genuinely don’t know if I meant this as a dumb dumb misuse of “donuts make me go nuts” or if I just meant to say exactly what I said, because exactly what I said is, as it happens, true. Donuts are one of the foods I have issues with, and not the bad kind of issues. No, I have the good kind of issue with donuts, the issue where I freaking love them and if I eat one I will have to eat another and then another and then another, and I will end up feeling terrible. They have so much sugar and they’re so bad for me but I love them so much. This was a thing when I was a teen, but when you’re a teen your system is at its most forgiving. And then one day when I was a sophomore in college someone brought donuts and I went wild and took down way too many. Going into that day I knew donuts were a weakness for me, but after that day I absolutely knew I was not to be trusted with them.

Ok, here’s another where I guess you have to check with your folks, but long story short most men can’t do a certain thing to themselves because they can’t bend enough, but if they remove the magic rib they have better access to the thing. I was just joking about that because I thought it was funny.

You’re going to hear many different urban legends throughout your lives. Some will be presented as urban legends and some will come as claims, like “my friend’s sister knew someone who…” or something like that. When it’s the latter you can categorize the person who told you as a liar, or just wrong, and move the story into your list of urban legends, which I assume you’ll keep. You’re going to hear the same ones over and over, so be prepared to handle that as you see fit. There’s a famous, misattributed April Fool’s Day prank where some kids set three pigs free in a school, the pigs labeled what I said in the tweet. Then everyone’s looking for the three pig, oh know where’s the three pig, where the heck could this three pig be. So there’s your explanation. Then the devil thing is something Baudelaire wrote, which we can add to the list of things I read to you. But do keep in mind: Baudelaire is not a thing, Baudelaire is a person.

It continued to bug me how not curious my followers were. Give a little, you know? I didn’t even have an answer but that’s not at all the point. For all I know there’s a very reasonable explanation. I haven’t actually thought about it.

Provided your parents are doing their jobs and keeping you sober, you don’t know a lot about drinking and being drunk. There’s a famous saying dating back a long time, probably Baudelaire, that goes, “beer before liquor, gonna get sicker, liquor before beer, in the clear.” There’s different wording depending on where in the country you’re from, but all versions have the same message: if you drink beer before liquor you’re gonna get sicker, but if you drink liquor before beer you’re in the clear. In this tweet I was basically telling the world that for me it’s all good. Gimme all of it, any order. Look, I don’t have a problem or anything, but maybe I did have a problem, and also it’s a joke. Ah, another thing — rhyming axioms like this one are bullshit. You can just mix up the words and it means the other thing. So stupid. I have a friend who says “tails never fails” in regards to flipping coins (a pastime of ours), but I was always like, you could just say “tails always fails” because that also rhymes. It’s not the only thing that rhymes, you can just do it the other way. It’s all meaningless. Beer before liquor, not getting sicker, liquor before beer, not in the clear. See?

You girls missed a very fun, very odd, very specific era of the mid-2000s internet. This, I guess, is my homage to that. Instead of memes and meme-like things (do you remember the word I taught you? Memetic) everyone loved LISTS. And other things, but lists were huge. And there was a lot of innuendo, some of it actually making sense, some hardly making any sense. So someone on Myspace would post a big picture of a list called “16 reasons to date a lacrosse girl” (I omitted the “a”) and it would be like, “1. We love balls // 2. We hold 2 feet of stick for hours at a time // 3. No water breaks” etc.. And then if you’re a boy, as I was, you see it and you’re like, “damn, these lacrosse girls are freaks.” But of course it’s all transferable. Reasons to date a soccer girl, reason to date a theater girl, reason to date a twin. It was a miserable time but in hindsight I miss the simplicity.

**Bonus tip: never tell everyone online how much of a ho you are unless you’re ready for the consequences (kisses).

Sometimes I’d just tweet what/how I was feeling. Can’t really explain this one but I stand by it. Man as pizza is a seldom used device, one that on that day I was experiencing. What kind of pizza do you like? Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Do you ladies like PIZZA?!?! You do??? What’s your favorite kind of PIZZA?!?!?! I know some of your Jew parents don’t allow pepperoni in the house so maybe we’ll have a secret little pizza lunch date sometime soon. Sound good? Some of your parents probably also can’t take the heat from the pepper, and that’s not a euphemism. How do you feel about anchovies? Me neither. Do you know about Italy? Have you had Detroit style? Oooh, just wait. I like this tweet.

I’m sure you hear your parents talking. There’s a lot of, “what’s he going to do, he has no practical skills?” or “we’re not going to give him any more money for slots, he needs to get a job. And don’t tell me he’s not going to spend it on slots, he’s absolutely going to go spend it all on slots!” Here’s the thing: I do have some practical skills, I just really don’t want to do most things. There are a few places I often think of and think, “I could work there.” One is the airport. Every time I’m at an airport I think, “I could work at an airport.” The other is a school. I don’t know what I’d do, but I could find a place. I was joshing a little in this one because I have no intention of working at a school, but I could if I wanted to.

Usually the case. The burrito is a gift to humanity that comes with endless possibilities. I love a good burrito. Damn, I really could do for a burrito. You girls…well I don’t know if you have access to any good burritos, or if you’ve developed those taste buds yet, but I pray the day comes when you and burritos click. Ugghhhh. Sometimes it’s all about transparency. I wanted a burrito. I tweeted that. Case closed. That’s what was happening. Open book. Read it, close it, feed me, read it again. Some of us are books, some of us write books. I do both and it’s really not a big deal.

More trying to get real people to interact with me. And this one worked! It took a few months but it worked. M1onTheBeat is a drill producer in England (drill is a subgenre of rap, you will not like it) and he’s derrrrrty, his beats are so fat and his shit is so tight. And it’s not like I have the voice or rhythm to rap, but I can write a little. At the time I was thinking, like, what could it hurt? All I need’s my pen. That’s what M1 does, he makes magic. Right, so months after tweeting this, the goat himself liked and retweeted it. That’s as good as a handshake as far as I’m concerned. That’s him saying, “yes, you do gotta, and you will.” So you know what? I will.

I didn’t know it was a thing at the time but it’s called engagement farming (I’m not sure if this is engagement farming). I can tweet what’s in my heart all day long with no traction, but when I really need some likes I can tap into what the people really like. This is another life lesson for you but the main things that people like are dogs and colognes/face creams. Neither of these things are actually mine, they’re just pictures I’d taken out in the wild. Check out the number of hearts I got. Five. I felt so good that day I can’t even describe. You’ll learn little tricks like this to get your confidence up. It’s a little cheap but whatever gets you through the day…

No idea!!!! Usually I know what I’m talking about, even when it makes zero sense. In this case I don’t have a single clue. Just an example of my classic irreverence. Almost as if I want to alienate people. Hmm, is that a thing I’ve been doing both consciously and subconsciously for years? (yeah)

Me and my damn book. I went on a mini tour where I gave copies of my book to people (was traveling for a wedding) and I got this picture of me in a big room. It was around this time that Elon Musk — do you know this Elon Musk man? — was the new-ish owner of Twitter and he was fighting with the masses because he’s an asshole and the masses hated him. There was a whole “free speech” issue at the core of it which is unquantifiably important but also just like, whatever, and Elon was super “pro free speech” but also a “ridiculous piece of shit” and he banned certain accounts and stuff and said that some accounts were dangerous and what if someone tweeted his assassination coordinates which is not a thing, but it’s a funny turn of phrase. That makes this particular tweet a biting bit of political satire, but not like actually.

There I go, tweeting about Harry Potter again. This one’s from early book one (which had a different name in the US than in its homeland of Great Britain, if you didn’t know) when Nearly Headless Nick (ghost) goes to torment/introduce himself to the newly selected Gryffindors and Hermione (knows literally everything about Hogwarts but somehow not this) says “nearly headless? How can your ass be nearly headless?” Boy she didn’t know what she was in for. There’ll be a time in your life when you ask a question because you’re either really curious or you’re trying to act smart/make someone else feel stupid and then you get countered with some raw truth. That’s what happened. Nick cocked his head off, but not all the way. No matter how hard he tried he could never get that shit all the way off. It’s a classic Hermione quote.

Aspirational. Accountable. I’m not great at finishing things but I’ve found that if I tell people what I’m doing and that I’m going to finish it I have a way harder time justifying not finishing it because it’s not just myself that I’m disappointing anymore, it’s me looking like a liar and/or disappointment to others. In this instance there was something I was gonna do…I must have really wanted to make sure I did it. Really hoping I did it.

Surely you girls recognize this man and this fire from the pictures. No?? Really? Ok well…weird, I’d have thought it’d have been explained. Well this is Mark Twain and this is his manor. It’s where my sis (you know her! Hehe, maybe you know her as mom? Or as the hebrew word for aunt?) got married. I got, in no uncertain terms, Twain’d that night. Cool house, shame to see how commercial it all is now.

Best may be an overstatement but I think Uline is a highly underappreciated company. They supply so much stuff to so many places. There’s that bad coffee chain Dunkin’ Donuts whose motto is “America Runs on Dunkin’” but I genuinely do think America runs on Uline. If you ever need general supplies, that’s the place. Also, Dunkin’ Donuts…people are going to tell you how good Dunkin’ Donuts is, but hold up, it’s not nearly as good as they say. It’s really not particularly good at all, but it’s fine and that’s not worth arguing right now. Their coffee, like just a plain cup of black coffee, is bad, and so is most of their stuff. Their donuts, they’re not even good donuts. But we are not saying that their apple fritters are not good because their apple fritters are excellent and they might end up being the singular thing that kills me. Right now I don’t live by a Dunkin’ Donuts so I am safe from death, for better or worse.

Bonus anecdote. Every morning before getting on the train to work I’d pick up an iced coffee with almond milk from Dunkin’ (probably large but I don’t remember). I’d walk in, “hi, could I get a large iced coffee with almond milk?” and leave. This was one of my fully automated interactions. Another was Chinese food, although that one I would actually vary from time to time. For the most part it was, “hi, could I get a sesame chicken with fried rice?” and sit and wait. Because these were so deeply automated I’d sometimes mix them up; I’d walk into Dunkin’ and almost order a sesame chicken by mistake. I never actually* did it, but I caught myself several times. That would have been embarrassing.

More dates! Classic movie date. “On October 3rd he asked me if it was October 3rd. Yeah, that’s the date.” Funny movie, you should all get together and watch it once you’re 16. Scary stuff though too, you really get to see the horrors that we humans, particularly woman teens, are capable of. So let’s see, we have October 3, June 3, September 1…I feel like there’s at least one more. It’ll come to me.

Again, accountability. Plus, declaring things is just kind of fun. When you have hair like mine everyone’s always telling you to get a haircut. Guess what: no. I’ll do what I want…I mean it’s my hair. I actually just got a haircut and zero people have noticed. People have stopped looking at me. I don’t envy you though, girls. As I mentioned, I have a pretty relaxed relationship with my body, and on most days my hair looks, by the majority of people’s standards, not great, but more often than not I don’t care. I hope you can love yourself even if your hair is fucked, it’ll make your life so much easier. If you want to obsess over your hair that’s fine, just let that be your one thing and be chill about everything else. You can’t have three or four things that you’re crazy about. Hair can be expensive though, so it’s nice to pick something sensible, like posture.

I actually just got a haircut a couple of weeks ago, and I saw the lady cut some of my hair so I know it was technically a haircut, but it does not look like a got a haircut. Nobody pointed out that I got a haircut, which is something that people do. “Hey, you got a haircut.” Yeah, I was there. In this case I was there but there’s no conversation to be had about it. UNLESS someone says, “hey…you didn’t get a haircut,” and then we have a way weirder, longer conversation ahead of us.

I just had to keep reminding people I had podcasts that could be listened to. It felt more sincere and less shameful to come off as this nebbish outcast rather than someone who promotes themselves proudly. It’s exhausting, and if I had to guess I’d say that my podcast listenership hadn’t just spiked big time. I lied.

This is a classic sequence. I go from reminding people about my podcasts, then feeling shame and trying to distract from the shame by being a little irreverent. It’s dumb, very dumb, but imagine it were true. That’s how I would announce it to the public? And one person would wish me luck? Yes, I’ve thought about it and that’s what would happen.

Look no further than my pinned tweet. All of my tweets are related. They’re intertwined, engaged in a beautiful, fruitless dance. Making callbacks to your own stuff on a forum where no one pays attention to you is called being passionate and committed. AND if someone were to have wanted to assassinate me, there probably aren’t too too many cock doctors’ offices to try, so it qualifies as coordinates.

Yes, for a time I was Mr. Churrasco. I can’t explain further, it’s just kind of who I was. I’m not so much Mr. Churrasco anymore, but he’s dormant somewhere in me and if someone starts talking about churrasco he’s likely to butt in and remind people who the big dog is.

Chuck means Charlie. I was doing a Charlie Brown puzzle and I couldn’t stop.

This is the same night. I’m desperate for attention. This is from a movie.

This was verbatim. Your gramps is always good for these kinds of facts. I can picture where we were walking (Target) and I assume he must have seen either peeps or hot tamales but I can’t say that with certainty. It’s also strange to me that there is a single person developing things like this, and I’d love to know what his days looked like. Anyway, people love a silly family quote or story and this one got two likes so clearly I’ve recovered from yesterday’s goose egg. Oh and a reminder, these are not all of my tweets. They are not close to all of my tweets. These are just being used to tell the story of me, but not the complete story of me.

I love this, I’m just telling people what’s going to happen. Pete is a fun name to say, and an easy one. I do not like saying the name Patrick very much. Pete is better. I doubt I’d immediately assert Pete on a random Patrick I’ve just met but once there’s some familiarity I’m going 100% Pete.

I have to speak a lot of Spanish at my job (Spanish teacher) (I’m kidding!) and it catches people off guard. The LatinX community probably judges me more than any other minority I’m regularly around. I hear them talking about me behind my back. “That gringo’s lips are peeling.” “Look at this fucking dweeb.” “I’m gonna kill this guy.” The reveal that I know some Spanish is big…if I do it after they’ve been talking shit it gets tense, like hey assholes I know what you were saying. I’m not usually craving that energy so if they’re talking shit I’ll keep it all to myself and then just feel bad alone.

In my opinion there should be more tweets like this. The world is random, let’s engage. I don’t know if I have but I can definitely see myself typing my own phone number into Twitter’s search bar. If someone had tweeted this with my number I’d comment. I’d say it’s my number, what’s up? And maybe we’d talk further.

You’ll learn this one in school. There are a lot of things people will ask you to do because they think you’re ignorant and they want you to look stupid. If you twist it around, though, you get a nice compliment, and if anyone ever says this to you you should date them. Bonus points: go tell your parents to close their eyes, bite their lips, and pretend to shake dice. Lololololol. They love you and have plenty of time for you, they won’t be annoyed.

Here’s more telling it like it is. Everyone bitches and whines about how Google and all these big tech companies are stealing their data and blah blah blah blah blah. You know what? Google knows me as well as I need it to and it helps me out. My life is not worse because Google uses my data. They can have it, it shouldn’t go to waste. Mi data es su data. That’s me talking to big companies.

There was once a bad comedian who did bad things — I don’t remember exactly what but it was rapey stuff if I recall. One night I had this dream. When your subconscious gives you nuggets like this you have to share them. People love this stuff.

I decided to add a bad and unnecessary tag to the original tweet to highlight to everyone that my brain is always working and I’m always thinking of things. I’d just gotten one like and thought I could create some momentum, but it backfired. Let this serve as a lesson to sometimes just let things be. Not every molehill has to be turned into a mountain. Sometimes you’ll try to make it a mountain and you won’t get likes and all of the sudden you’re sad. No surprise, people don’t think you’re funny. I mean, were you ever actually funny? Why are people friends with me? Chris D, this comedian, had a little role on the Netflix show You, which was way too on the nose, but I don’t like to talk about You too much because it’s about a creepy bad guy that I have WAY too much in common with.

Ok listen up. A lot of what I’ve been tweeting is silly and doesn’t really mean anything or offer much, but, as is the case in most of my work, there are kernels of truth and beauty scattered randomly. I do a lot of puzzles and I genuinely tell people this because I genuinely believe it: puzzles are all about finding interesting pieces. Maybe not finding, more identifying. If you can keep reminding yourself that you’ll eventually finish the puzzle. I can teach you more about this but it’s hard to do here. A lot of it is visual. I also recently realized, while doing a very hard puzzle, a secondary thing that “puzzles are about” but I forgot what it was. It wasn’t something that negated the interesting piece thing, it was just kind of a sub-focus that could be used as a primary thing if the puzzle called for it.

And now we’re back to the nonsense. One thing I like is vague questions like this that don’t quite make sense. I don’t know the answer and probably never will, and that’s ok.

I’m trying to remember if this was a break I wanted to take because I needed to focus on something or if I just needed Twitter out of my life for sanity. I opted to not go back to Japan this time; instead, it’s whatever weird lie this is. An obvious flaw is saying that I’ll be off Twitter “til that’s done” because that could mean anything. That could be the very next week. It could be the next day. There’s no way of knowing, it’s a lie, and I have a clear out. Accountability is not objective here.

Ok I just saw the next tweet and there’s our answer. The link doesn’t work and I have no clue where it led.

I am pathetic and I am weak. I couldn’t do it. I tried to take a break for a reason but I wasn’t strong enough. And look at how I joke about it, using the break as fodder for the nonsense. It’s pathetic. But hey, I got right back to it with something I felt passionate about for a little while. I struggle shaving my own neck. I can do it but I can’t do it perfectly, plus it’s a risky endeavor. I could accidentally end up shaving off my whole head of hair, or at least a tiny little spot. Friends SHOULD shave each other’s necks. They should just offer. I’m being completely serious when I say this is something I’ve thought many times and do believe. My friends have seen my neck, they know it’s overgrown. Actually though, now that I think about it, I didn’t really have friends that lived nearby, so I shouldn’t get too bitter about mine not being good friends. I do believe in the principle though. Ant means ain’t. It always has and you should have been able to figure that out.

Guilty! I love eBay. I wish I had more money so I could do more on eBay. I mean there’s only so much you can do on the site — you can bid on things, or buy them outright, or sell things, and other stuff — but all of it is good. I love the bidding game. Buying things is cool but I’ll just throw bids around. It’s good for the community. My eBay watchlist, Jesus. It would overwhelm you but it would not confuse you. I’ve had some eBay projects before — isn’t that odd, eBay projects? What’s an eBay project? I don’t feel like explaining right now…none of them ever became anything, but all of them could have been interesting.

Classic format. Remember the Songs About Jane tweet? Same thing. Your generation didn’t grow up with Whose Line Is It Anyway? which sucks for you. Instead you get older, skinnier Drew Carey, who is still great. I really like Drew Carey. “Scenes from a Hat” was a segment on the show. I say segment, it’s more like a game. This is not what I’d call a good joke, but I did technically type it out and tweet it.

Immediately following the bad-but-original joke I put my scientist coat on and blend it with a bad-and-hella-overused joke. Add the shrimp-fried-this-rice joke to the list of things I never want to hear you say, or never want to hear that you were saying not in my company. I evoke the shrimp just enough for people to understand. We’re trying to see who’s paying attention. Someone was, as we can see, but they did not care to go back and also like the tweet before it, which is understandable.

Here’s proof of my commitment to truly inaccessible tweets. It was the first day of the MLS season, I guess, and that season we had a handful of players with long-ish, luscious curly hair. There’s a soccer statistic called xG, which represents expected goals, which I will not explain. Imagine being one of the four people in the world who would like this tweet. Where are they? I’d like to know. And honestly, I probably wouldn’t like those people, I just want to know who they are. Oh that year the Dynamo also adopted the motto “hold it down,” which I, well, I guess the word is dislike, but I was proud enough of my work to add the hashtag and give those four people a chance to find me.

Girls this little run of tweets is a little inappropriate but none of this is about the maturity level, it’s about you getting to know me without me having to be around and talk about stuff. This one was for me, more than anything. It made me giggle. I think years prior to this people were pussy-fying words, or maybe I’m just thinking of badussy, but still. I hate to say it but I just giggled at “clickin and typin and microsoft excel” — and I haven’t even gotten to the compussy part. Ok I just got to it. Interesting.

Obviously I had to take it too far. At this point the betting odds would favor me beating the hell out of this stupid joke. QWERTY is a keyboard thing, complitoris is a worse extension of the compussy thing.

Ok I’m so so sorry but I giggled again. And I don’t even know why, it’s not a good tweet and I rolled my eyes when I started reading it. Maybe I lol’d because it took me like five seconds to understand what I was even saying. I saw lattussy and I was like…lettuce? Lattice like a pie crust? Latte just doesn’t lend itself to this, but that’s only if you play by everyone else’s rules, which I don’t. What could I have said instead? Mochussy doesn’t work. Cold brussy? Macchiussy? Maybe I did pick the right one.

And these are just SOME. I’ve never worn the one on the left, I think I got it at a thrift shop (I’ve never been a good thrifter…I’ve never really been a thrifter at all, I’ve been to maybe four or five in total and bought three things?). I should probably mix up the patterns and colors, but this is a good sample, and you can tell this is useful to offer because two people liked it.

Along Came Polly would be a good family movie night movie. There’s a scene where Ben Stiller’s character Reuben goes absolutely hog wild on Jennifer Aniston’s (Polly) toilet. I might have tweeted this to make myself feel better more than anything, because I’ve absolutely, ABSOLUTELY done this. I don’t know if “we all” have, but I sure have. There’s more to the movie than that, and I don’t think knowing that this happens will ruin the movie. It’s worth watching, even if your parents say you’re too young. Aaron literally wrote a musical about AIDS when he was like six. Was he too young for that? An argument could be presented that he was, but he still went ahead and did it. And he’s kind of successful now so it didn’t ruin him or anything.

I’m not a hater, nor am I a businessman. This tweet is to make exactly one specific person laugh (a friend), with potential residual awareness. Amanda Haight, who I hope googles her name and finds this, is a lady who went to the same college at the same time as me, though she does not know me and I don’t really know who she is either. But we have a mutual friend and I remember names of random people really well. Know this about me. Not important names, like when I meet someone and then have to address them two or three minutes later. I remember the random ones that do not matter, like a guy on a friend of mine’s little league team 25 years ago, or a nurse who gave me allergy shots twice and then I never saw again. I did this a bunch more times, each time worse than the one before it.

This feels like I just had the picture, or came across the picture, and wanted an easy tweet. I would also guess that it was not a “T” day in accordance with the throwback rules. All that said, I think I must have been making a fuck robot, because I remember those denim shorts specifically since that’s the pair the doctors had to surgically remove from my asshole (and intestines). I’m joshing! One day I will tell you about Odyssey of the Mind and how creative I was as a child.

This one I’m ok with teaching you about without your parents’ permission. Hickeys are gross — they kind of scare me actually. You create a vacuum or something over someone’s skin and then suck and it raises or pops some blood vessels or something. Real vampire shit, it creeps me out. Do not do hickeys — don’t get them or give them. I probably could do it to myself but I would never do that on purpose because yuck.

Girls, there’s a term you may or may not have heard by now called “voice of a generation.” Anyway, Bill Maher’s bottom lip is, and always has been, a massive frustration for me in regards to the stated face skin and lip skin proportion. Let’s take a look. See that? I don’t know the scientific term for lip skin but there’s way too little of it on his face. Now some people have tiny lips, but their lip skin and face skin meet where the lips and face meet. In Maher’s case, the face skin encroaches into the lip. It’s so weird. I can’t not see it and yet somehow I’ve never heard anyone voice a similar opinion, which further emboldens me to otherize myself.

This tweet presents as a nonsense tweet, but there’s truth in it. I’m not proud of it but I used to be one of those guys in school who mostly looked down on anyone younger. I guess in some cases I wasn’t looking down but I definitely felt like younger people were younger than me in more than just age, or something like that. Let’s say I was in 5th grade — I’d see a 4th grader say something they think is smart and I’d automatically think it wasn’t that smart, or that they’re just posturing to the older, smarter me. Unfortunately I held this terrible outlook far too long…not quite as long as the date of this tweet suggests, but I was desperate to feel good about myself for such a long time that I took any chance I could to feel better. Now I realize it’s all the same. Certainly as I get older and the percent of my life that each year represents lessens I see age differences as negligible, but I also see myself as fallible and often very dumb. I also factor in that people much younger than myself have put in far, far more work into their stuff than I have, whereas when I was a 5th grader there was not a 4th grader I knew who had worked more than I had, because I was doing the right amount of work and now I am not. Don’t get confused though, I am not talking about children like you. I do still like you and I respect you as people, but not as my equals.

So real. In fact most of you are probably named Delaney.

More. Maher.

Those are all movies, by the way. I’m trying to use pop culture as a way to further exalt Houston, which by now we know is a kingmaker. Turns out it’s a dogmaker too. Dogs can be kings.

Since this tweet came shortly after the Houston dog tweet it shows how influenced I was as a tweeter by rhythm. In the previous tweet I said “where the real dogs from,” which must have bounced around in my brain until it came “where the wild things are.” Does that make sense to you? And then, obviously, the real question at hand is “where the Buffalo Wild Wings at?” and that’s funny. Oh by the way, you don’t have to find the things that I say are funny funny. You don’t have to pander to me. I probably wouldn’t laugh at your tweets either.

I don’t know if your generation will hear this, but when I was younger it was shouted at me everywhere I went. No one achieved success without first paying their dues in the radio streets. This includes your grandfather and Oprah.

These were the official HISD buses I rode through middle school. 6th grade 2081 was seen as a cool bus throughout the school. It was busy — way more crowded than I liked. I usually slept on the way to school, which no one else did so I missed out on the social opportunity of morning, and on the way back it was packed and I sat wherever I could fit. Maybe I sat with Greg, maybe with Matthew Yang, maybe with Mollie. Not with Alex I., that’s for sure, he was so annoying. It also took like two months for the bus to figure out the right route to take and we were routinely 30–45 minutes late to school. My first period teacher would be so mad but it’s like, I literally took the bus, don’t be mad at me. 2079 I don’t remember liking (I’d still sleep on the way to school but my body was changing and I’d wake up with an embarrassing secret), and 8th grade who knows, but those were my buses. Ask me about my 2nd grade bus one day, I have a really scary story about it.

Damn if this isn’t true as hell. I want you all to live in the moment and take risks. Take chances. Be yourselves. Don’t do drugs too early. Time is undefeated but if you make the right decisions you can stave it off long enough to live a fulfilling life. I have regrets that I’ll always have to live with. Regrets are the children of time and thinking or decision making. Make time mate with something else, like love. Time and love have children called happiness.

In terms of physical similarity I guess I was onto something, but I think it lacks some spirit. You can tell that I forced it, which never leads to a good tweet. I guess I was still pretty lost and I’m not sure it was about to get any better.

Look at that, the same day. I was phoning it in because I thought I had to. I was hoping I could close my eyes and a tweet would appear and I wouldn’t have to think or care about it. But that’s not how tweeting works. That’s certainly not how living works. On top of that, I don’t owe anyone anything, besides human respect and money. I was flailing publicly.

I’m not trying to come off like an old grouchy fogey, but delivery used to be special. Now people are getting an $8 taco delivered and paying $4.50 for delivery and $3 for tip and it’s all just too much. I can count on one hand the number of times we got anything delivered when I was growing up. Actually though I changed my mind, delivery is ok and it’s a job creator. I’m just still adapting to the times and I’m bitter that I can’t justify spending money on extra fees.

More genuine curiosities. This question should be asked and it should be answered. I’ve never been to Top Golf and I don’t know exactly how it works, but let’s say there are 20 tees (I think that’s low). Well each tee needs to have…I guess at least…50 balls? That’s 1,000 balls. But what if I’m golfing like crazy and burn through my 50 balls in a couple minutes. I want another 50! Those are probably available at the desk or nearby, as they should be for any tee area, so that’s another 1,000. I’m thinking they also have a basement or supply room full of new balls, maybe different colors for holidays or experimental balls. Maybe there’s one full set that they’re going to transition to and one small partial set for some tests. There are also probably balls that need to be washed or repaired. Has a Top Golf ever run out of golf balls? Because yeah they get retrieved from the grass and brought back but if every ball is launched onto the grass simultaneously then the golfers will have to wait, and that’s bad service. Let me know if you ever find out.

This is called the old acting dumb and making a dumb and overused joke thing. I bet someone has done this and I’m sure if I searched it on Twitter or online I’d find countless things like it. I’m better than that. But am I? I essentially did the same thing. Because mine was tongue in cheek, does that make me better? My default belief is yes, but surely that’s incorrect.

Here’s the nod to the audience. I’m saying, “yeah, I know this is all a little wild, even unprofessional, even troubling, even upsetting, maybe even incriminating, but I’m still chillin.” I absolutely try to keep my worklife and private life separate from my tweet life (don’t shit where you eat, as I always say), but I do worry about being found by someone not in that circle. I don’t want to be judged for my tweets by someone not in the know, just as I don’t want to be judged for my shitty personality and life by someone who follows me on Twitter. And I don’t have a sponsor, FYI, but imagine my twitter was found by my boss and then I tweeted this and then immediately my boss, who was already not feeling it, found out I was a recovering addict. Well it’s a good thing I’m deleting the bitch. There are some people I’d prefer to be familiar with my tweets, like you girls, but everyone else should mind their own business.

Here’s a glimpse behind the curtain. I typed those things, thought about tweeting them, didn’t tweet them, but didn’t want to erase them. You can feel the struggle through the screen. Girls, I was drowning. In times like those it’s so important to have a support system and my support system was tweeting. It was the problem and the fix. It was killing me.

Girls, you should always believe in yourselves. As they say, no one else will. Just please don’t be the people who incessantly talk about everything they’re going to achieve and how hard they’re working. It’s very obnoxious! It’s great to have goals and I’d love for you to achieve them but the world doesn’t need to know all the dumb things you’ve sacrificed or your daily routine. There’s plenty of it on Twitter and I will not miss it. Another similar-ish thing that I don’t like: when couples are like, “we’re going to take over the world together” or stuff like that. Like shut up lady, what the heck are you talking about? You maybe make the most money on your block but you have bad taste and you’re annoying as hell. You’re not taking over shit.

We have to wonder what’s behind this. Was I trying too hard? Was I not trying hard enough? Did it not matter how hard I was trying because the public wasn’t interested one way or another? I don’t know, but I wore it like a badge of honor. Indeed that tweet did go unliked and I extended the streak to 30. Again, do things because they bring you joy or meaning or whatever. I tweeted for Me. (Me really wanted attention and likes, but Me also didn’t mind 30 ignored tweets. Ask folks about edging).

Look at this — the second major-ass bookstore my work has appeared in. Powell’s is one hell of a bookstore and arguably a better bookstore, but there’s magic and global fame to The Strand. Interestingly, both stores have windows where you can sell your books but in both stores I decided to just leave the book illegally. At Powell’s there was nobody on duty — lunch break or something — but there were very much people on duty this time. Something about the thrill of the reverse steal. Keep that one in mind if you’re ever asked about my character. Am I a thief? No, I’m a negative thief. I sneak things IN. That is good.

Amen. I don’t hate any and all key changes, but I do hate a lot of them. Just do the song, we don’t need the confusion. Maybe that’s me as a man with ADHD speaking and I just can’t handle the abruptness of the change, but I really think it’s just that it sounds worse when it goes somewhere new. I’m not a music scholar or theorist, but the net value of a key change is negative. This is a conversation I’m open to having with you.

I don’t mind sharing this because it’s an anatomical analogy. The clitoris is a tiny woman’s part. It’s very sensitive and very important, and that’s all I have to say about that. I felt moved to say that my heart has such a relationship vis a vis my soul. Nothing crazy there, just a thought. There are a lot of ways I could have elaborated that would be quite inappropriate, but your parents cannot get mad at me for this. THEY’RE the ones who need to grow up. I learned the words “penis” and “vagina” very young. It’s all fine.

You understand now, right? And look how I’m always looking for variety, always looking to improve upon what I’ve already done. You’d be a fool to argue against this one, it’s pretty dang true.

Once I get rolling it’s so hard to stop me. See, I feel like there are people who don’t like my approach here but to me this is what Twitter is for. I was figuring something out and this was my place to share. It’s not needless repetition; nobody has to stop after just one tweet. This is the place where you can share what you want. Momentum is so important to me in how I function. Focus is so difficult for me to harness and if I find it I have to hold on to it and ride it until the wheels fall off. If I dropped the whole clit thing prematurely I’d never arrive at its natural conclusion, which I guess is this baseball tweet. I might have tweeted another clit analogy, I’m not sure at the moment, but I don’t feel bad about any of it.

Man I tweeted so much about Harry Potter. Why is that? Maybe it’s that it’s the largest pop culture phenomenon that I was a part of/am very familiar with. It hurts me to see that 140 people viewed this and only one voted…it takes two seconds to vote. Whatever. That’s not the point, the point is that it’s an interesting question. I really don’t know what I believe. He was alive for years and that’s a lot of time to be able to kiss someone, but who would he have kissed? He was a little freak, nobody wanted to kiss that. I can’t imagine he kissed anyone at the boarding school because he was sad and scary. Ok, I know at Hogwarts he was Head Boy or whatever, he was an impressive kid, maybe even hot or jacked, but he was still a little freak. That probably would have been the window for him, when he still had the innocence of youth, and when the people around him were horny schoolgoers, because after that he went loony and developed a name for himself as, you know, a big murderer. I have the same question but if he had sex rather than kissed, and that one is harder to imagine. You have to keep in mind that with the horcruxes and all that he wasn’t a full person, and his main passion wasn’t carnal in a sexual way. I just can’t imagine. Turns out the people think he did kiss someone…I’m still making up my mind, but I respect the vote.

File this one under “really useful things to remember.” On a surface level it’s good advice — gloves are gross — but on a deeper level it’s universally applicable. What is a glove? Define it for yourself. Ask yourself why we wear gloves. Ask yourself how you feel about your own gloves. Ask yourself if you think it’s appropriate for someone to stick their hand in one of your gloves. Do not confuse this with one party offering their glove to another. This is not the same. We’re talking about straight up sticking your hand in someone else’s glove. It might as well be one of the ten commandments. Don’t covet thy neighbor’s wife or sheep or whatever it says. Kind of the same thing, my version’s just a little more eloquent.

There was once a man named Mitt Romney. He and his wife owned a dancing horse, and he was a politician (Mitt, not horse). He ran for president…it’s a long story and I couldn’t possibly tell you everything you need to know. Basically he was asked about equality stuff and he tried to seem like a good guy by saying he was trying to be fair and his staffers brought him binders full of women, but instead it came off really stupid and misogynistic, because it’s binders full of women lol. Some people are so…what’s the word? Out of touch? That’s not exactly what I’m looking for but that’s the idea.

Here’s the beginning of a funky little mini story. Read the tweet. Huh? What’s this now? That’s how I felt too. This lady (Connie Song) says that something I’d written several years prior was “referred to on the Drew Barrymore talk show RECENTLY” and I’m like, what’s this now? This Connie lady then wrote about that, which I probably read but I don’t remember reading. Some folks were telling me she’s a bot but I can always smell a bot and Connie isn’t a bot.

So I have to lean into it and believe that this is a thing. Obviously it’s time to relish the fame, and the two people who liked this tweet were impressed. Mind you, I hadn’t seen this clip or episode but it’s good to believe people. I asked this Connie what episode it was on and she “couldn’t remember.” The point is, you can make a difference. I’m just me, writing silly jokes about pillows, and I managed to inspire some people. How nice is that? Also, these ladies love me. I was in an episode of Paris in Love, a Paris Hilton series about her getting married, and then like 18 months later I’m essentially on the Drew Barrymore Show, which I’m told is a long-running, big fun show. If you do good work, it will be found!

We STAN a random debate guy. Who is Ken Bone, you ask? He was at a presidential debate and he asked a question. He had a red sweater and a moustache. That’s the extent of it. The internet liked him, he had a kind face. What he up to, though? I don’t know, my followers refused to inform me and he deserves better than to be googled by me.

It’s called misdirection and I use it a ton. You see it a lot in magic, which is the one true, honest art form. Look at my left hand, look how interesting my left hand is. Haha, my right hand has been doing something different this whole time. That’s how it works, I couldn’t possibly explain it better than that. Those are all movies, by the way — Saving Silverman, Forgetting….you get it. But what exactly does it mean to tickle one’s own tushy? Does that mean finger? I don’t know, I left it ambiguous for the reader to decide for themselves.

More Potter. I’ve grown, I don’t have to pretend to be a wizard anymore. I’m proud of who I am.

Typically this wouldn’t be a big deal because I get A LOT of questions right, but this was a bonus round question which means it’s speed-based and the winners get MYSTERY SHOTS. The speed aspect is a real fucker because everyone’s typing on their phones and it’s a really flawed layout and the wifi can be finicky and there are plenty that we got instantly but it’s out of our control. Somehow, though, I knew something about Taiwan, which shocked me a little. I won’t let myself leave out the fact that these days we almost always get a bonus question right. It’s been a long time since we didn’t, actually.

I took this screenshot because — I don’t know, maybe I got confused. Upon further inspection, though, it does demonstrate the randomness/lawlessness/indifference with which I operated. No likes, no thread, just thoughts.

For me it’s the Lonely Island but hey, I’m a product of the time! The Good Neighbor guys are fun. The Please Don’t Destroy guys are not funny at all, but we shouldn’t hate them for that, we should pity them…they’re most certainly NOT the clit of SNL, if you know what I mean. And then of course there’s your grandfather, myself, and a live bear.

This was a trippy moment, but not trippy in the classic sense. Maybe uncanny is the word. You’re walking around one day and you’re like, “that looks familiar.” And it looks familiar because it’s your head, just with someone else’s face and hair. Kind of puts things in perspective. You’re special, each and every one of you, but we’re all in the brotherhood of man. There are only so many shapes a head can be.

Girls, you should have seen me then, I was a stud. I was running around, playing sports, jumping and diving, sliding and screaming. I felt invincible, though I absolutely wasn’t. Between 11 and 17 I broke a ton of bones…I don’t know how many, maybe 9? But I was trying things, you know. I was being physically vulnerable. The pain never bothered me, it was the missed opportunities that stung the most. Now walking down certain staircases gets me short of breath. The David of time hath struck this Goliath and now I lay in the field, bleeding out, the townspeople pissing on me and taking pictures. But at least I have my bones.

I like imagining there is such a file. And now we see that I actually can stop tweeting, though at the time it was pretty true that I couldn’t. Again, you can see how lost I was and above that how aware of that fact I was. Such an endless, frustrating cycle.

I don’t want to talk to you all about this one, I’ll just say that it’s in line with where I was as a tweeter.

There’s a dual function to this tweet. It appears to be one of my famous vague questions, but it’s also very much a statement of opinion: I do think Turkish is the ugliest race. I don’t feel bad about thinking that, either. You’ll develop opinions like this throughout your lives and you’ll be compelled to keep them as secrets. Those are good instincts, do not share them. I only do so because I’ve tarnished my reputation already and nobody takes these tweets seriously. It took years to get to this level of freedom.

I told you before that I love finding things that look like other things and you thought, “ok, sure,” but look at me now — I’ve been doing it for years, through varying moods and trends and favors. I can’t stop, it’s so natural to me. The thing that changes is how I present them. This time it’s as if there’s a convention for people who look the way they look. Not my finest work.

Nutting I didn’t want to talk about but this one is safe, just as the clit was safe. Ballbag is just a funny thing to call ’em and it’s criminally underused. I hardly ever say it. That’s how much I like it, that I’m scared to use it unnecessarily or in a context it’s better than.

Girls I’m over here loling, I don’t know what to tell you. It sucks that there are so many things like this that I have to keep my mouth shut about, but maybe ask your science teacher.

I’ve always been a scribbler. Some people identify as doodlers but I don’t have the visual art gene and doodling makes it seem like I’m drawing pictures. I’m never drawing pictures, I’m either writing words, letters, or a lot of straight lines. Since leaving school I’ve become less of a scribbler, and even less of one in the past five-ish years, which is a shame because it’s a nice outlet. I like looking back at old notebooks and seeing the scribbles. This was one of them. I don’t know where or when it’s from but I like it as a logo. You know Jesus, right? He knows you, that I know. And he loves you.

I hope that this is finished in your lifetime. John Mulaney is, of course, a very famous comedian probably in his 50s or something when you’re reading this. I’m the annoying guy who loved him way before anyone I knew knew him (even before I Love the 30’s, if you can believe it). He drinks from mugs in a very interesting way, or at least he did while he was addicted to and using lots of things. I work on this from time to time, maybe once a year. I have lots of his interviews downloaded and will cut the clips and slap them together, but I never get around to finishing it. And then, naturally, he’s on more talk shows and there’s more to download. I don’t have a deadline set but that would probably be a smart move. Oh, this is the type of thing I’ll sometimes do. I’ve made various unnecessary supercuts. I did Harley Kiner calling Cory Matthews “Babboon” on Boy Meets World. I did Herb Brooks taking off his glasses in Miracle. There have been a few. You’ve got to have the eye for it and I’ve definitely got the eye for it. Some of us just do.

To be fair it could well cost that at some point in your lifetime, but I can get a Chipotle burrito or burrito bowl for under $10 and this dumbass Ethan Chlebowski is making it seem like you can’t. You fucking can, dude, you’re just trying to get views. If you’re spending $20.24 on a single Chipotle item you are absolutely wilding. I hate this guy. Don’t let the internet mislead you, girls. I don’t like watching people getting lied to. For that reason I shut my eyes real tight when I lie to someone.

Funny, I was just thinking about this yesterday, though it’s a mostly forgotten story. Yes, it’s true. I withdrew from an American public university after two years, then effed around with my sibs for the summer, then didn’t know what I was doing so I went back to Austin and very temporarily stayed with your Uncle Nick (Indian guy) and was going to get a job while all of my friends focused on their studies. I did accept a job doing something like this…wow, what a weird time. I was up all night the night before I was supposed to go in for training and I was having a mini panic attack and left the guy a voicemail and said I’m so so sorry. I actually think I got as far as in the car to go meet him but couldn’t do it. Nick had dead mice in his apartment, and a few live ones too, probably

Did I already talk about this? They do. Way more than any other race I spend significant time around. Even insignificant time around. I don’t know what it is but they think I’m one big joke.

I don’t really know who Bo Bice is, though I think they competed on American Idol. I also don’t remember if I tweeted this because they died or it just felt tweetable. I now understand that joking about someone else’s death isn’t funny, but back in May of 2023 I chose doing so over tweeting exactly anything else.

Another just true thing. People kill over all sorts of nonsense. This guy stole my boat, I’m gonna kill him. These people put my dad out of a job, I’m gonna kill them. This guy is a big threat to my gang, and he comes from another really dangerous gang and every passing day that he’s alive he grows more powerful and we are in more peril, I’m gonna kill him. No, all of that is unnecessary. It’s just natural beauty. As Keats tells us, “beauty is truth and truth is beauty” so I guess truth is worth killing for also. WRONG! I said NATURAL BEAUTY, not JUST BEAUTY. Be very careful with this. Natural truth, is that a thing? I know Nature Valley is a thing, those are granola bars. Also though, the truth is very important to me.

There are just all these damn things that people say all the time. Like they’re not even sayings, they’re just…things. Phrasings. Mistakes. Corrections. Terms. Things. OBVIOUSLY ATM machine is redundant and obviously anyone who says that is wrong, but pointing out the wrongness of that is just so passe (accent) and life is too short for the passe (accent). We all know it’s redundant, you’re not interesting for telling us. In a different field, those in the know know that ATM also stands for “ass to mouth” — you know the drill, talk to your folks. That’d be so wild if someone in the world has been saying “ATM mouth.” What a dumbass.

I’ve already skewered my dad/your papa a couple times so it’s only fair we give meemaw a go. The quote is real. We’ve been over this, people love family quotes. I wish I remembered what the sandwich in question was. Three people found this tweet likeable, a vast increase from the recent usual no people. Note that by saying “fucking” it creates the sense that I really don’t give a shit. This is called using curse words for emphasis and it’s a useful skill.

As if I have to explain it to anyone at this point. I am my own worst enemy. Help me! Can anybody hear me? Help me, please! Hmm, June 2023…I have a general sense of what I was working on. Crazy that I can track when I completed things by when I was off Twitter, almost as if they’re related. There’s still a slight slight chance that this is a coincidence and I keep going to Japan for no reason, but I wouldn’t bet on that. And look, this is from June 2. Dustin, just get off now. You’re going to give yourself a month to go nuts and feel bad first? That’s not how kicking a habit works. Take note of that, girls: that’s not how kicking a habit works.

I am not proud of this one, but I did tweet it and I will not act as if I didn’t. Classic formula, pitiful execution. Sick of people at the bank trying to talk to me, while we’re on it. Chill out, I’m holding money and I’m doing business and it’s not good customer service to bother me. I’m trying to focus. I’m also truly not a joke teller. Nor am I a story teller. These claims are not, of course, completely absolute, but they are generally true. I tell people I’m not a story teller and they almost always misunderstand me. That’s not what I’m saying. They don’t get it. That’s not my relationship with telling stories. They don’t understand, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not a story teller. And I’m not a joke. I may be a mess but I am not a joke. See, not a joke.

The more not-good TV you watch and internet you have access to the more you’ll realize that there are a fuckload of people on the planet and a lot of them are doing absolutely insane things, so my honest hunch is yes, someone has done this. I fail to understand why they would, but surely someone has. Maybe even someone I know.

Did I even mention the third podcast to you ladies? There was a third, and now there’s a fourth. Please take a moment to appreciate the name of the podcast. I get annoyingly little praise for the name. Right, so what is this podcast? Hmm, well it doesn’t really matter, it’s just more stuff. And it’s only June 17, what a time to be introducing a podcast to the world…I’m going to Japan in two weeks, aren’t I? I made the podcast image in a few minutes and I think it looks alright.

This is another thing your generation won’t get to appreciate. There was a man named RAY ROMANO. He had a sitcom wherein he played the titular Ray. He’s a sports writer, a family man, and most importantly a regular guy. He loooooved golfing and he was firmly from that part of the country where his voice and accent sound like his, and he said “golf” in such a funny, powerful, symbolic way. Rewatching the show now wouldn’t do this claim justice, I mean he sort of represented the way “golf” was said at the time. It was a living thing. Now we have phones who will say “golf” for us, and people who do impressions of Ray Romano, and there’s no spirit anymore.

First of all, it’s July. Am I in the tweeting part of Japan? Quick trip? No, just no discipline. Oh, actually I think I was either on the road or freshly back from a road trip around then. To Montana. Fun time! Anyway second of all, this is a thing that I felt bizarrely passionate about. Sometime around then Fall Out Boy (I like, sue me) released an updated take on Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and people loved to hate on it and say it was a bastardization of a classic song and all that. Now I never loved the original song, mostly because I’m not impressed by it as a song and I didn’t love it. In its core it’s a silly little historical montage. It’s a song that was semi-literally made to be used as a template and reproduced. Fall Out Boy came and did THE LOGICAL THING and revamped it from the lens of 2023 and people acted like it was a crime and that it would never be as good as the original. But it’s the same as the original. It’s the same song and I don’t have an issue with either. I think complaining about the 2023 version is the sign of a weak person without critical thinking. That’s what the song is, it’s that and then it’s the new one too. That’s what that is.

July 7. I’m supposed to be gone. I’m sinking. This tweet reeks of desperate sincerity. Look how I capitalize the ‘y’ in ‘You’, deifying my followers, as if that’s what matters most. This makes me sad. I was so beholden and so lost. I wanted to be told who to be. I wasn’t comfortable as myself. I hated myself. In Japan.

Aaron gets a big picture and story in the New York Times, and good for him. Look, a sincere endorsement. Aaron is great and very hard working. But you must know that I too have been in newspapers. You want the story? Well I’m not a story teller but here goes nothing. Back in like 2014 I showed up to work at the South Street Seaport and there was a big balloon in the sky. Ooh, what was this big balloon?? Probably a camera for one of the million things being shot in New York at the time. A New York Post “reporter” shows up at the door of my WORK and asks if I saw the big balloon and if I was scared. No I wasn’t scared you numbskull. He tried to suggest that other people were scared. Was it the Russians? Was it the Chinese or the North Koreans? Was it a weapon? No, probably not, and I know that balloons are for some reason used for weather too, so maybe it’s that. Mhm, mhm, he writes it down. Later that day the Post publishes what that complete moron wrote, including things I DID NOT SAY and some other claim about me that wasn’t true. So frustrating!!! This is partially why I still am super frustrated with my high school yearbook. They misquoted me a ton, like every year. They were so full of shit. I even gave them a lie and told them it was a lie and they were like, “fuck it, we’ll run it anyway.” That’s true, I can show you. There’s no integrity these days!!! The fucking New York Post, what a rag. Don’t read that shit. If your parents read it tell them I say it’s a rag, then say something mean from your heart. Get creative, have fun with it.

2000s commercial, food item called manwich, nobody cared :(. (Bad tweet, desperate)

This is funny to me. Every time I released an episode I tweeted a link, well aware it would be ignored. 2,500, that’s a lot of tweets. It wouldn’t have been a shame in and of itself to be a podcast link, but it would be so much more fun if it was anything else. I don’t know what it ended up being, but there’s a good chance it was a podcast link because I was putting out a lot of podcast episodes, for reasons it’s hard to explain at the moment. Nobody liked this tweet. They didn’t care if it was a podcast link, it’s all the same to them. Everything I say is an unclicked link.

CHORUS OF NIECES

He said this would help us know him.

Yet for all he has shown,

He is still choosing examples.

Lol this is a classic Dustin zinger tweet. Remember when I paid homage to the country jokers and the “if yoouuuuuuuuuuuuuu do blah blah blah…..your white ass might be a redneck” shtick? Bang, even shorter. Imma put my cup on that! You may have that catchphrase and use it as your own.

Ask your parents. All you need to know right now is that I’m debunking more cultural…I don’t know, not misconceptions, more just uncertainties. Nobody has supermanned anyone, ever. That said, I recently was talking about this (genuinely) and it turns out that in my head supermanning has always required party number two to be asleep, but not everyone thinks that and it’s possible that supermanning can happen to an awake person, in which case it probably has happened. Still, most of us don’t know anyone who’s done it and the point stands.

I don’t know what to tell you. I’m trying to give you a sense of what was going on at the time and this is what was going on. I was trying to start a discourse. Nobody bit, but that doesn’t mean the attempt wasn’t worthwhile. Or that I didn’t want an answer. You can ask questions. If you don’t know something but you want to know the thing you’re allowed to ask. You should be encouraged to ask but there will be people in your life who will try to suppress your curiosity. Tell them to stop that. He who cannot ask may never know. He who never knows may never have actually been. Think about that.

This was a fun era to be aware of the crumbs my brain was dropping wherever it went. My notes would be words, phrases, titles. Names. Emotions. Things that should never be said. Things no one has ever felt. Ideas that could cut like a knife. Thoughts that would drive a sane man crazy, and a crazy man crazier. I probably still have the same phone, I can show you.

Eye roll, right? Just…it’s just not cute. I was so deep inside my own twitterverse and I really thought there was value in tweeting this out. To be fair, my tweets were being generally seen many more times than the number of followers I had, so there were people who could maybe be encouraged to follow me. But it wouldn’t make a difference and I hate the person who tweeted this.

I ended up using my free trial of Zazzle plus. I meant to use it for way more than what I ended up using it for, but I didn’t have the money to maximize the value. I think pretty soon you’ll see what I’m talking about. But…isn’t this twitter thing supposed to be a community? Shouldn’t someone have stepped up and helped me out? Everyone’s always using someone else’s Hulu account info, I mean come on. Someone has Zazzle plus and kept it from me. So selfish, I hate when people act like that.

Guess what girls, I wrote another book! That’s right, as of that point in time I’d written and published more books than any of your other uncles, and certainly more than your parents (and no, we’re not counting plays, that’s not the same thing at all, even if they’re published as books). This book is, believe it or not, longer and weirder than the one before it, and, believe it or not, is only like half in English. I can’t help myself. Never could. Certainly couldn’t then.

There’s the Zazzle shirt! Low-ish quality, unfortunately. I intended to buy a bunch so I could sell them or give them out or leave them at Goodwill or whatever, but I only ended up with one. Then my Zazzle plus trial expired and all of the sudden I had to pay more for the shirt itself, and more for shipping, and it would only be worthwhile if I bought a bunch of them but again I couldn’t afford to buy a bunch of them so I just have the one lousy shirt, which is cool, and I’m all about an easter egg and a fun little artifact, but all these secrets keep dying with me and I want to be heard!!! Who am I kidding, you don’t even care enough to ask what the words on the shirt mean. Why would you? I’m just your ~CrAzY uNclE DusTyn~ with my weird, custom shirts and my Danish books. Pay no mind to Uncle Dustin, right? Or to his weird custom shirts or Danish books. I get it. And please don’t ask out of pity, none of us need that.

LMFAO I died in the podiverse and here’s printed evidence, that’s funny! There I am, alive, holding it. Quelle a confusing little world this is.

I think about this from time to time. I went to the Denver zoo. I mean the winter here can be pretty rough, what are all those monkeys doing? Naturally there’s no perfect climate, but surely there’s a best one. Geez, the world as it is is already so inhospitable, maybe a cold, cold zoo is already a step up. But if you’re creating zoo…you’ve gotta think climate is a pretty important thing to consider. Animals need oxygen, but not too cold or hot.

This is a repurposable joke/format. Blah blah, if you buy this now you can get it JUST IN TIME to not be on time for something. I come up with these from time to time, people like them. I’ll then tell people that they can use them too, and how to use them, but I don’t think they ever really do that.

You can’t even give away books these days! It’s crazy! It used to take like months for the town ink guy to write out the book. You’d practically have fights in the street over the latest book. The person who got to read it was the coolest fucker in town. Now I write a conceptual masterpiece and everyone’s too busy buying their little normal books. I am the great expanse. I am unexplored territory. We know how a lot of those other books go. We know what happens. You can go online and see. You don’t even know what my thing is. People are scared to engage, it might shift the paradigm, it might be too much. It might interrupt their normal, boring routines. Here’s a real, rhetorical question, which I will answer because I know the answer. Has anybody read this book in full? No, nobody has read this book in full. And that’s TWO countries worth of people who haven’t. Pathetic. Oh now you want to know what the shirt says? Fuck off.

I’m sorry for saying that to you. Anyway there was another big sitcom called How I Met Your Mother and the don juan of the show had a famous catchphrase: “something something, legen…wait for it…dary.” I don’t remember if he says “wait for it” or if he just pauses really big, but that’s what he would do. And there are commercials for the Liberty Mutual company (a bank?) where a man says “Liberty bibberty” and I did a mashup of them and came up with this, which…I’ll be honest, I don’t hate it. I mean, if we’re operating in twee little bits and goofs, I don’t mind it. If we’re talking big, significant things then yes, this was a waste of words. Holy crap, it’s already January of 2024. Maybe I’m spoiling the surprise but I’m close to being done with Twitter…

It’s a word I used a lot in like a two month window, don’t worry about it.

This is not a slight at my BEAUTIFUL SISTER and her BLUSHING HUSBAND but showing reverence towards one of my favorite shows of all time. Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place. Ugh, I love it so much. You know, I’m not a large-scale recommender, I don’t tell just anyone to check something out just because I like it. I’m very thoughtful with my recommendations, it’s all personal. Bespoke recommendations, really. Those I’ve recommended the show to either now love it or never cared to actually watch it. This is NOT my way of recommending it to you, I just told you that’s not what I do. This is reverence. I already talked about recommendations, didn’t I? This is all one big blur.

Freaking Valentine’s Day thought nuke. I want you to really think about this one. Just when you think you’ve thought about it enough, think some more. Is it? Is it ok? Is it?

I ask because I haven’t found a way to put it into words, though I haven’t extensively thought about it, and also because it’s a dumb silly question that only just makes sense as a question. Like, that’s not exactly how we ask questions, but it’s still a question. If you’ve forgotten, I’M from Houston, so I should know, but it’s not that simple. It’s a question a lifetime in the answering.

Filler, that’s all this is. I’m getting a little tired of the filler (some of it makes me LAUGH though). This is that kind of deep thing people will say or tweet, except it’s me saying it and it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Same day as the Houston tweet. None of it matters. It seems that for me the hardest part of going to sleep is having to stop tweeting. I mean I really had a problem (problem: too many good tweets haha). You can ignore the parenthetical, it’s stupid. Or you can agree with it! The choice is yours. The duality of choice. The perspicacity of the desperate man. The persistence of memory. The Plaza in June.

Look I love Aaron but this is goofy and needs to be joked about way more than it was. It’s a marquee that literally says “Houston Jews who went to HOLLYWOOD” and that’s so funny. Calling the city La La Land is already like, ok buddy, but “Houston Jews who went to HOLLYWOOD” is its own thing. Naturally I made some edits to the marquee to joke about myself: Houston Jews who blah blah blah, podcasts and books, Danish, high triglycerides, all that shit. None of it was funny or interesting. I never stood a chance. It says “Houston Jews who went to HOLLYWOOD” and it’s a big lit-up marquee in a newspaper and it’s so funny.

I loved making promises — no not promises, just big claims — about stuff I was going to do or make or share. Sure, the way I presented whatever this is was a little tasteless, but I was only referring to it the way that felt most truthful to me. How long is 130,000 words? Well let me put it this way. You know this thing you’re reading? It’s a whole lot longer than this. See? Long. This never happened, I never gifted such a pussy licking, but nobody really remembered that I’d made this proclamation so it’s all good.

Random statement, out of left field, how random, 2/5 stars for this tweet. It’s an almost true tweet. In reality I wanted to get a Boar’s Head shirt, I wasn’t actually trying to get a Boar’s Head shirt. Consider that I went on eBay and saved certain Boar’s Head shirts, I still wasn’t exactly trying to get one because if I’d have actually been trying I would have gotten it. I’d still like one. It’s a nice little symbol of a lot of things and I like the look.

Untrue, I do kind of know how it turned out: pretty ok! This project too took a while to make and I now have to live with the fact that very few people in my life have listened. It’s on Spotify, it’s on Audible…it’s everywhere, really. And it’s free. But no, you can’t give these things away. It’s pretty funky. It’s not technically good but it’s funky and weird and I haven’t revisited it in a second but I think I’m proud of it. Oh, in case it’s unclear, this is the audiobook version of the first book. I couldn’t do the second book because I died, remember? Continuity? You understand?

I’m just trying to promote. I worked so (a little) hard and I just want the stuff to be seen. Glanced at. Just acknowledged at all. The project was complete. I wanted to show it off. 36 items (episodes), two books (books), one audiobook (sound), and probably other stuff, I don’t remember. I just wanted people to see. I just wanted to tweet it out so people could see. I just…I just wanted the stuff to be seen.

What a way to end it all. If only I could relive the moment, really revel in it. I’m recalling the extraordinary moments in my own life and trying to work backwards, to capture what the ordinary beginning would have felt like. What it must have felt like. What must it have felt like? In my limited memory I’m finding it impossible to know. I want to reverse into normalcy. I want to know how it felt to not know. But I can’t. It’s all I really want right now but I can’t. The universe didn’t want to tell me what’s about to matter, or maybe it did and I missed it. Was I not paying attention? Was I asking the wrong questions?

“Where the Halloween parties at?” 9:30 PM.

Truth be told it’s not only 9:29 of that night that I don’t recall, nor just 9:31 and after; no matter how I strain and comb through time, there is no 9:30. There is no ordinary beginning to long for the memory of.

No, there’s none of that. Not in that hour, at least, or on that day. It appears now that I might have misidentified the moment altogether. The inciting incident, which brought me here, and propelled me to you, and you to me…I mean, was there even a moment? Did I do something momentous that I’m now on the other side of? Which side am I on? What are the sides?

LEAD NIECE

It’s just a website

I didn’t know I’d sent my final tweet. Not consciously, at least. And the atmosphere I’d created for the bastard I’d raised to shout into would obviously lend itself to a victory lap, a farewell tour, a parade, a saccharine curtain call leading to a bow that in the moment one might think will never end, for appropriate reasons. Instead I leave the story unpunctuated. I do so for a time and I revel in all of my dangerous thoughts: what punctuation can I embed my smarmy loneliness into, and how can I ensure such punctuation is simultaneously uniquely mine and safe from the thought that just maybe what is mine is not necessarily good? I revel for a time and find no peace.

My computer has been gradually overheating. Maybe it will die and I’ll have to do the deed another time. Maybe it will die and again I’ll find no peace. The fan gets louder and louder. I’ve never heard it buzz this loudly.

You wanted us to know you.

Well, now we do.

My body convulses. My head shakes, my neck twitches, my hands brace where they are. I tighten and eject. There is snot everywhere. I wipe the goo from the screen before me and something is different. Deleted. It is done. One sneeze. I clicked. It is done.

So there you go, girls, this is not only who your Uncle Dustin was, but this is how your Uncle Dustin writes, only he actually cut out a lot from the beginning and end because after consulting an AI bot for the first time he conceded that he was being a little ridiculous. One day he can show you that draft — it’s kind of interesting…there was a full spiral at the end that had multiple extended metaphors: there was a movie theater, a forge (this was his favorite part), and a flashback sequence involving falling off a tree and the allergic reaction from said tree, which then resulted in the sneeze. Instead you just get a rogue sneeze to end the thing. Just a rogue sneeze. I’m sorry that’s all he could offer you. A whole lot of tweets and a random, final sneeze.

I’m sorry girls, you deserve better.

There is no response. There is no wind at my window. I am alone.

All of the sudden I’m overcome with a wave of pithy thoughts. No followers with whom to share them. No nieces either. I write them down on a nearby notepad so I don’t forget. I admire my handwriting and for a moment get lost in the curvature. Another abrupt sneeze jolts me back to attention and I can once more see the pen strokes as words. ‘Wait a moment,’ I think. ‘These aren’t pithy at all.’