My Twitter FAQ

It seems downright wankatory to spend so many words writing about something that denotes brevity as much as Twitter does, but I think it's time. In no particular order, here's some stuff you should know:

Social Media. I am philosophically opposed to "social media" (and not even really a fan of the Internet itself anymore) for reasons already elaborated elsewhere. Because of this, some tweeps can't resist the perceived irony of pointing out that I'm on Twitter. However, I view Twitter as microblogging - no different than this blog you are reading now - not "social media". 99.9% of my friends are not on Twitter and, God bless 'em, have no desire to be. Like a radio tower, I'm just broadcasting in mostly one-way communication, and whether you tune in to that transmission or not is entirely up to you. Though I do enjoy the occasional banter with strangers and fans on there, I prefer serious real-world friendships/alliances to idle digital chumminess, and if we've never shared a meal or a drink together, we aren't really friends. But that's easily remedied, which brings me to...

Eating. Whenever I tweet that I'm eating or drinking somewhere, you're always welcome to join in. If it was an occasion where company was unwanted, I wouldn't be tweeting my location in the first place :)

Following. In general, I don't follow anyone who doesn't follow me, and I don't follow anyone who I consider, at my whims, unnecessarily negative, spammy, or incoherent. I don't feel obligated to follow anyone, truth be told, and have often toyed with being one of those people who follows no one. (If you notice that some tweeps seem to have immunity to my rules, well, yes, there are some lucky souls who I consider to be above the chessboard, "of both lands and both seas".)

Manual of Style. I publicly thank anyone who follows me, regardless. I don't bother to take the time to assess whether they're bots or what. And #FF (Follow Friday) is generally the only time I do mass shoutouts. I tend to do manual RTs more than the traditional kind, especially if I think it's important enough that I need to circumvent anyone who's disabled seeing my RTs. If that bugs you, the unfollow button's right over there. You'll eat what we're cookin'.

I'm interested in everything. Unlike a lot of tweeps who seemingly exist only to talk about one narrow topic, there's very little out there in the human experience that doesn't get scrutinized by my all-seeing eye. Thus, some have expressed bewilderment and even irritation that I sometimes tweet, in rapid succession, about all manner of subjects under the sun that interest me, from quantum physics to winemaking. I have all sorts of acquaintances from all walks of life. Tea partiers. Nudists. Ministers. Stockbrokers. Drag queens. NASA scientists. Parrot-heads. People from Ohio.

Politics. Because I am highly critical of Obama, tweeps tend to automatically assume I'm a Republican. I am not. In fact, I worked for the Obama campaign in the 2008 election, although politically I don't fit into either the liberal or conservative boxes. I have bigger fish to fry than mere terrestrial politicking. But in the next election, I will probably vote for anyone but Obama - a 9-year-old boy from Montreal, a flatulent basset hound, a potted plant, or even Mitt Romney. (Yes, I consider the line Obama has crossed to be that ethically unforgivable.)

Twitter is not my personal diary. It may seem like it sometimes, but it isn't. The vast majority of what goes on in my day-to-day life isn't even mentioned on Twitter.

Smartphones. I'm apparently the last man standing in the solar system who has no interest in smartphones. Half my tweets come from a laptop running mobile.twitter.com (which I vastly prefer to the unwieldy and over-coded "New Twitter") and the other half are sent as text messages via a conventional old-school cellphone. I bring all this up to remind you that unlike most of your other tweeps, I often am not looking at Twitter even as I'm posting to it.

It's all crap anyway. Twitter, like most Internet amusements, is trivial junk. Have some fun with it. Muck around with it. Poke it and see what it does for you. Don't take it seriously. I don't. (Despite having just written this lengthy FAQ about it!)

Secrets of Our Soil

"There's a world going on underground," as Tom Waits once said.

And what goes on beneath Kentucky's "dark and bloody ground" is stranger than you might imagine: Mammoth Cave mummies, interstellar impact craters, a lost city under Lexington, and more!

Pick up this month's "Back to School" issue of Kentucky Monthly magazine and re-school yourself on Kentucky weirdness with my column Commonwealth Curiosities!

Forward Motion

I'm happy to announce I'm on board with the new KyForward website as a columnist and reporter! Their focus is on stories that are useful, educational, and positive - no lurid sensationalism, no crime-porn, no snarky attacks or character assassination, and no mean-spirited celebrity gossip.

In other words, the total opposite direction of where post-Gawker-style internet media seems to be headed.

My hat's in their ring.

The Invisible Barrier

There seems to be a weird psychological barrier that keeps Kentuckians from exploring the vast majority of their state - especially between Louisvillians and Lexingtonians. In this month's issue of Kentucky Monthly, I address this mental block and exhort you and yours to get off the internet and acquaint yourself with the 120 counties of Kentucky, most of which I bet dollars to donuts you ain't been in.

Kentucky Monthly is available at fine and discerning bookstores and newsstands everywhere!

RIP Typewriters?

The phrase "RIP Typewriters" is, uh, "trending" (Dear Lord, I loathe that concept) on Twitter today, apparently because the last manufacturer of them, Godrej & Boyce in Mumbai, India, has ceased operations.

However, don't go waving goodbye to the typewriter in the sky just yet. You can still get one if you really want one. And whoever started this meme about the death of the typewriter evidently overlooked the new USB Typewriters.

I use all means available to me, and typewriters will always have a place in my household and my offices. Then again, I still write in longhand - you know, with pen and paper like they did in antediluvian times? - which I realize is so unhip in this modern age which encourages citizens to become dull-witted insensate food tubes hunched over video games, eating toxic Frankenfoods, and getting into Splenda-fueled internet-rage flamewars on Facebook with some 13-year-old kid in Tierra Del Fuego over important issues like "reality" TV shows and pop stars.

Zager and Evans, right again.

The Browning Boys

This month's installment of Commonwealth Curiosities: did you know that the original "Louisville Slugger" Pete Browning and the pioneering Hollywood director Tod Browning (the man who brought us Freaks and the original Bela Lugosi Dracula) were related? And did you know that both these Kentuckians led extremely eccentric lives? Just how eccentric? Pick up the latest copy of Kentucky Monthly and find out!

DeQuincey on Memory

When I'm not writing, I'm reading. There are a handful of books which, like the Bible, never get old and I can leaf through their secrets again and again and again and never get bored.

One such book is Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas DeQuincey. It's written in a frenzied, disjointed, stream-of-consciousness style that screams wisdom and madness at the same time. Sometimes a run-on sentence will go run the length an entire page without taking a breath. The book was written after Mr. DeQuincey straighted his life out from opium addiction, supposedly. He doesn't sound opiated, that's for sure - just the opposite, he seems downright manic.

But tonight I was struck by this passage from the book, like a bolt of lightning hit me on my head when I read it - because it just happens to echo my own philosophical position based on my own firsthand personal experiences (with memory recall, I mean, not with opium!):

I was once told by a near relative of mine that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the assistance which reached her at the last critical moment, she saw in a moment her whole life, clothed in its forgotten incidents, arrayed before her as in a mirror, not successively, but simultaneously; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part.

This, from some opium experiences, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which is probably true - viz., that the dread book of account which the Scriptures speak of is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind. Accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil.

But alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains forever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed whether the obscuring daylight itself shall have withdrawn.