The conversation presently running through my head, 10:53pm

Judes (blurry-eyed, clearly needs to sleep): Oh! Hey blog... What's up?

Blog stands silent, turns it shoulders slightly to the left and looks at the ceiling.

Judes: What? What's wrong?

Blog: What's WRONG? Did you really just ask me what was wrong?

Judes: Well, yeah... I...

Blog (angrily): How dare you! You completely ignore me for months and then you just stroll in here like Caligula taking a pee break and expect everything to be OK?

Judes: Actually, I imagine Caligula just peed right in the middle of..

Blog: SHUT THE FUCK UP! You are completely missing the point. Again.

Judes (reaches out to touch Blog's arm, who walks away quickly and rests on the vintage Ice Cream freezer in the corner): I'm sorry. I didn't think... I didn't know that it would upset you this much.

Blog: For God's sake Judes. How could it not? Don't you remember how it was at first? You loved talking to me. We spent hours together, looking at what kind of weird shit we could find on the Internet. You did, you know. You loved talking to me. And we used to laugh. We laughed so much... but now that's all gone. It's just smoke. There aren't even any mirrors. It's all just smoke now. All because of that little bitch.

Judes (defensive): Hey. Just a fucking minute. Twitter is not a bitch.Twitter isn't anything. Well OK, no. That's not true. It's a friend, Blog. It's just a friend.

Blog (scoffing): If I spent that much time with my friends, I would have fucking killed them all and eaten the bodies... and we wouldn't have even been in the goddamn Andes! It's not normal!

Judes tries to find a witty response. He adjusts his collar. He shifts his weight uncomfortably. His mind is clearly racing.

Blog: Well?

Judes' mouth opens. Dry.

Blog: WELL????!?!?!

The Ice Cream machine awakens with a loud thud. They both jump. Dust dances in the pools of light around them.

Nobody speaks.

Blog: Jesus Christ. You're trying to find a way to say this with exactly 140 characters aren't you?

Blog storms off stage. The dull hum of the vintage Ice Cream machine fills the room like a Brian Eno record that somebody forgot to turn over.

Judes walks off into the darkness, a barely-audible "Seventy-eight...Seventy-nine..." cuts through the hum. Cuts through the silence.

Twittercidal Tendencies

(image: gizmodo.com)

My name is Judes. And I'm a twitterholic.

Um... Isn't this where you are all supposed to say, "Hi Judes!"?

I've been sober for 3 days now and... well, so far so good!

 I've heard all of your stories and mine really isn't any different. I started tweeting about... what? God... 8 months ago? It feels so much longer. I loved it at first, and I had it under control. I really did. I only followed some comedians and people that I stumbled upon that I found funny. Okay. Sarah Palin too. I admit it. How can you not though? It's like going to the carnival and not eating cotton candy. The red kind. It's not really red though, is it? More of a clown-blood pink. Like her heart, I imagine.

Anyway, I'm thinking about trying stand up and Twitter was a great resource for that. I discovered Marc Maron and his podcast. This has opened my eyes and has changed my life to a certain extent.  I discovered writers and performers I never knew existed. Craftspeople writing everyday, forcing me to hone my "jokes" or "stories" down to 130 characters. Razor-sharp precision. Most of the time, the razor was quite dull, with some blood and semen on it (how the hell did the semen get there?), but I was trying. Lord knows I was trying. And now, as a result - I feel, for the first time in a long time, that I'm ready to tackle the writing thing (or so I've made myself believe). I'm ready to jump into the comedy thing. Into everything. I'm ready. I think. So I'm grateful for that. I really am. It's what happened after that. That's where it all gets a bit fuzzy.

I started checking tweets obsessively. Not just "cute" obsession like that time I covered a high school locker with Natalie Merchant photographs (boy... I would have loved to seen the look on Jamal Smith's face when he saw that...), this was turning into the real deal. I came home from work - I checked twitter whislt playing catch with my son. I went to work, I stayed logged in to twitter. Just to see what was happening. And then I started tweeting. A lot. A wiseman over there once said that my tweets were like hand grenades in the hands of small children. I took it as a compliment (I'm pretty sure it was) but it also describes the sinister side of what I was doing. I really was like a child, shirking real-world responsibilities to try dazzling with wit... ok... maybe not so much wit as pure verbal bombardment. It was heady. I became obsessed with numbers. I got lost in it. Who am I following? It felt so good. Who's following me? Holy shit! HE stopped following me? Who the fuck does he think he is? I became one with it. I was tweeting 50 or 60 times a day. I was checking stars and followers just as regularly. What problem? I can handle it! I'm not hurting anyone.

But I was.

I was hurting that aspiration I mentioned earlier. I wasn't writing. I wasn't working on anything (well... I am working on something, but it's hush-hush right now) other than my tweets. And it was like heroin. Let's be clear I've never done heroin, but it was like what I imagine heroin is like. I needed more to feel anything, and the supply was drying up. The act itself wasn't fun anymore. I started to feel I was doing it to get the increasingly evasive rush. The tweets weren't there, and I started getting desperate. I may have made a few dick jokes that I will regret later in life. And then last Friday, I hit a wall.

I sat at work, staring at the screen. Forcing myself to come up with something funny when I knew full well that I had nothing funny to say. I was watching a terrible erotic thriller and it just washed over me. I had a problem,and only I could stop it.

So that's why I'm here tonight. To tell you all this. It's like confession, but without all the guilt, touching and weird lollipops.

I don't know if anyone I met on twitter will read this. I hope you do, if you're there. I "met" some really fantastic people that have either influenced me (by their style, their humour, their insane knowledge of Fabio trivia), comforted me (by making it wonderfully obvious that there are people out there with a similar sense of humour) or encouraged me (by telling me how much they enjoyed what I was writing). For those people, I hope I can use this newfound liberasobriety to make you laugh, and maybe even a little proud, knowing you were a part of this process.

My name is Judes... and I'm a twitterholic. But I think things are going to be okay.


"Mom, just get me a Pepsi! All I want is a Pepsi!'