“What are you here for? We’re all here to go. We’re all here… to GO.”
-William S. Burroughs
Willam Burroughs, widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of the beat generation and inarguably the grandson of the man who invented the adding machine, was referring to humans being destined to leave earth for space, that earth was meant to be a way station or incubator or some such. The Italics, ellipses and caps bold “GO” are added by me to give you some feel for his unique pacing, and that voice like gravel being forced through a Pastry bag lined with sandpaper. It’s exquisite. You can hear it on the album “Dead City Radio”, the track is called “William’s Welcome.” If you are so inclined, listen to it here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACRL-DL0GNw . Weirdly the sound doesn’t cut in until the 27 second mark, so a modicum of patience rarely found in today’s audience will be required. Or just move the cursor to 27 and click it if you’re the kind of person who can’t sit with silence for 27 fucking seconds. I assure you, I am. That kind of man. The kind of man who can sit with silence comfortably for 27 damn seconds, although as anyone in my family will tell you, I am likely to be sound asleep by the 17th second.
If you don’t know Burroughs work, you might assume from the quote that were he still alive, he might have found at least some aspects of Elon Musk to be tolerable. While there is no sure way to truly know the hypothetical thoughts of the dead regarding the living, I’m pretty secure in saying he would not have found Musk tolerable, even a little and Space X would not have budged him.
One thing I can say about Burroughs in general and this quote in particular, is that he was decidedly not referring to getting kicked off Twitter. Burroughs died in 1997, almost a decade before Twitter launched. Old Bill was known to dip his toe in the ocean of “Speculative Fiction” frequently, but I don’t think he foresaw the perverse, addictive allure of the stinking morass that is Social Media. I’m not a Burrough’s scholar and I welcome those who are to correct me. If he had imagined anything like our current online interpersonal milieu, he might well have thought it a fine and almost inevitable way to contract a social disease, considering his belief that language was an alien virus, and his abiding interest in things that are seductive, addictive and potentially deadly. The OED says the earliest use of the phrase “Going viral” is around 1999 and if that doesn’t point toward a distinctly Burroughsian influence,I don’t know what does. Well, a band naming themselves “Steely Dan,” I guess. Look it up, you’ll thank me. Or you won’t, depending. If anyone in my immediate family has read this far, I’m pretty sure they will be more irritated than amused. Points for those of you who already know. Like you’re not all going to look it up now. See how I control your thoughts? That’s what a writer does. With language.
But that quote was on my mind, just those first few words before he gets into the whole space migration aspect of it because more than 30 years ago when I first heard Burroughs say those words, they locked into receptors in my brain, fit themselves perfectly like a puzzle piece of neural bias confirmation, like the virus words and ideas are, with a very particular life-long certainty of my own; To wit, no matter what you are doing, no matter what your intent is, the point, the end result, is to stop doing it. The only reason you are anyplace is to get out of that place. To GO. When you go to the movies you already know when the movie is over you leave. You get on the Merry Go Round to get off the Merry Go Round. Even if you want to stay. It’s not a choice. It just is. Nothing continues except entropy, the only universal constant is change, beliefs I contracted from people far smarter than I am sure. And though it turned out just seconds later that wasn’t what Burroughs meant at all, I mean, he could lean dark with the best of them, but in that moment he was as close to doing a Timothy Leary, Buckminster Fuller riff as he was ever going to get, But it was too late. Because what I took those first few words to mean rang a bell in my brain, rang it hard, and bells don’t get unwrung. Ever.
What are you here for? We are all here… to GO.
Which is more than seven hundred words to get to the point, which is Twitter broke up with me. I could tell you it was mutual, but that’s what the dump-ee always says. Also it was months ago, back in October back when everyone thought Musk was going to be able to worm his way out of purchasing it.
I was permanently suspended from Tiwtter, robbing me of a loud and dramatic exit that truthfully I would never have had the willpower to make anyway, and it made me very sad. And fidgety. And sort of feverish, and my skin itched and I’d look at my laptop and think “What the hell am I supposed to do with this thing now? What is this thing even for?”
I wasn’t born on Twitter, what the hell did I do with my computer BEFORE? Ok, OK, Facebook, sure, but what else? Email? EMAIL? I don’t WANT email, it seems absurd email was ever fun, that anyone was ever moved to feel anything but murderous rage when they heard their computer say “You’ve Got Mail”, I mean there’ a fucking reason your computer doesn’t audibly announce that anymore isn’t there? And YES, churlish youngsters, it did used to do that, and there’s a fucking reason they removed that feature around the time Dinosaurs were staring at the sky thinking “You know, I’ve got a hunch that glowy-burny thing which began as a twinkly, star shaped dot but just keeps getting bigger does not bode well for us. Ah, well. We had a great run, but like the man says (or will one day say), we’re all here to GO!”
I understand Twitter isn’t honestly the only thing you can do on a laptop, I’m aware know you can watch TV shows and movies on it, I figured out how to make it do that at least five years ago, I’m 60, not a fucking NEW BORN. I didn’t want TV, I wanted, I WANT to deliver a stinging comeback to some blue check mark bastard’s insipid, uniformed, bilious fascist TWEET and then I want to watch the hearts and the retweets go UP, because that rings a bell of its own kind, doesn’t it? It makes me feel like I’m DOING something about the world ending (Because it IS and you KNOW why, William Burroughs already TOLD you why, even though that’s not at ALL what he MEANT!) Watching my twitter stats go up delivers a dopamine laced, serotonin hit of accomplishment without any of the tiresome effort DOING much of anything, and that? THAT RIGHT THERE is the secret of happiness, my friends. The emotional buzz of having done a great deal, without the cumbersome business of having to do much of anything at all. Bottle that and you’ll be rich. People do.
I mean, I don’t need Twitter. I could have quit anytime, it’s just they beat me to it. And okay, yes, I might never have quit, even after Elon Musk succeeded in using his apartheid era emerald mine fortune to buy it and invited Trump back aboard. I knew Twitter was a scorpion when I fell in love with it. Everybody knows the Scorpion story, but no one ever tells you the whole truth, which is that a lot of the time we fall in love with the things we fall in love with BECAUSE they’re scorpions. Someone needs to give Rascal Flatts the news that life is not, in fact, a highway, it is a PLANK on a PIRATE SHIP! Because we are all here… to do what now? You know. (Insert “Planck’s Constant” joke here in second draft, but spell it “Plank” and only after looking up what “Planck’s Constant” actually is) (Make sure to remove notes before pushing the “publish” button this time. Or do you in some perverse way, enjoy looking stupid? Jesus.)
It’s probably for the best Twitter dumped me. And I’m not just saying that because I don’t want to seem like I’m Jonesing, and yes, of course that’s mostly why I’m saying that, but it still might be true.
Dedicated readers of my work may note that I have not written anything longer than 280 characters in quite some time. This piece is already far longer than that, and I’ve barely gotten to the point.
See, I kind of took a break from writing diary style (or journaling, for the love of Christ, eugh) after Trump lost because I was exhausted and I thought he was at last over, I thought COVID was drawing to a close and I was wrong about all of it, but I didn’t KNOW that. I thought a wee hiatus was well deserved after over a year of writing thousands of words a day. But it wasn’t a hiatus. As happens to me way too frequently, I had burned out whatever connects me to writing. The tank was empty. And I hate that feeling, and I was already on Twitter a LOT, but my Tweets had generally been tied to with whatever I was writing about, I was shaping ideas for larger (equally pointless, but larger) work and when I found the tank that held the longer stuff was empty, the 280 smartass character tank runneth (ranneth?) over, without fail, effortlessly..
You know how the love affair ended. I told you right in the title. But the ending doesn’t mean anything until you know the beginning. We may all be here to go, but until we go, we’re here. I’m doing some pithy shit with that one little quote, right? If you’re still reading. It’s possible everyone dropped out the fifth or sixth time I Stephen Kinged that Burroughs quote. “We all float down here” “Yes, yes, Pennywise, THANK YOU, we KNOW, we got it the twentieth damn time you told us, can we just please DROWN now and escape this MISERY, PUN INTENDED, MR. MASTER OF MODERN HORROR?!”
I know exactly when I started on Twitter because I got paid to do it. Well, not entirely. The budget had no money for that, but I WAS getting paid to write satirical political analysis (Oooooh, ain’t I fine?) on the 2016 presidential election. My editor thought it might be fun for me to “Live Tweet” the conventions, a cool stunt that would support and maybe even increase readership of my column.
Now I liked the idea and I said yes right away, but you should know I needed help. I am something of a technophobe. I knew what Twitter was, but needed my daughter’s help to set up an account. The idea to “Live Tweet” was hatched only days before the Republican Convention so it was a pretty steep learning curve. I’ll tell you what though. I liked it. Immediately. A lot. It was like putting on an old, broken inglove I didn’t remember I had.
I spent a lot of years doing comedy. Coaching stand-ups, teaching and performing improv and sketch comedy, writing and directing comedians. I did well enough that I didn’t need a day job for quite some time, but eventually I got older, I didn’t move to New York or LA, didn’t even try, honestly. I got married and had kids, which it turns out I liked even better than telling jokes, got a mortgage, which I liked a lot less. I was pretty burned out on performing and can I be honest? I was good, but not great, and I wasn’t getting better. I’d come to like writing and directing way more, and I knew I’d be letting go of the directing part but I could still write, right? And I wasn’t going to miss performing. I didn’t. I’d done all of it I wanted to do.
And then in the blink of an eye, it’s over twenty years later and I’m live tweeting the RNC and it’s the closest thing to being on a shitty little stage in a shitty little nightclub with a shitty little brick wall behind me winding up the old joke machine and cracking wise. and you know what? Turns out I missed it way more than I thought I had.
You read something, you think of a joke in response, you craft it, you cut, and shape on the fly, squeeze it into 280 characters, (less when I started,) and you hurl it out into the void, JUST like in a club, just you get hearts instead of laughs and applause. And people start to follow you. At first it’s friends and family, just like it was when I started performing, but soon it’s strangers, and then there’s a hundred and then there’s a thousand, and sometimes, inexplicably, because it’s NEVER your best stuff, something you Tweet hits a nerve out there and a hundred people heart it, two thousand people heart it, TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE HEART YOUR STUPID FUCKING JOKE! And because the entire time I’ve worked in comedy, a skill set which DID NOT come naturally to me, a thing I worked very hard to get good at, the illusion that I am doing something AWESOME and SPECIAL and IMPORTANT is very powerful, just… like… performing. Because here’s a shocker, no one has ever developed comedy skills who wasn’t needy or frightened or both. No shame, just a simple fact as implaccable as entropy. So even though getting up on a stage at this point is way more work than I want at all… I guess I missed it more than I thought I did.
And it was good for my BRAND, right? And I know I don’t really have a brand, the very idea is ridiculous, but that’s the thing about the internet, in a very small niche way, I do. Or I did. And with my face just a few feet away from the screen on which I can measure the evidence of my brand, it seems quite large and impressive, because I am so myopically close to it. I have been writing shit and putting it online for about 30 years. And mostly I do not get paid for it, but sometimes I do and there were even a few years where the paradigm of the internet in that moment allowed me to get paid pretty well, though that was quite some years ago now. And Twitter, see? Twitter was the shot in the arm of my Internet presence I had no idea I craved.
Listen: One time? George frikkin’ Takei hearted one of my tweets and less than a minute later he’d used the same joke as if it was his own. Should that make me feel good? I’ll admit, I was confused that it did. But when Osamu Tezuka, creator of the the 60’s anime “Kimba the White Lion” was informed that Disney’s “The Lion King” had “borrowed” plot points and visuals without inquiry or credit, he responded that he was very flattered. I’m just like that, except way, way, more miniscule insignificant an poor. On the other hand, I had direct intellectual contact with Hikaru frikkin’ sulu, so you all can take a number and wait ‘til it’s called to suck on that.
I got in a brief Twitter slap fight with Dean Cain, who played Superman in the lackluster “Lois and Clark” series from the early 90’s. For those of you who haven’t spent way too much time on Twitter, Cain, a professional boob, is part of that cadre of sad old stars who have discovered that being arch MAGA conservatives gives them something to do besides sit at lonely, lineless Comicon booths. He’s sort of like the Kevin Sorbo of Scott Baios. I wrote a whole essay about our Twitter battle, you can read it at https://maxburbank.wordpress.com/2020/07/04/my-covidiary-7-3-2020-the-universe-speaks-directly-to-me-or-how-i-fought-superman-on-twitter/ if you are so inclined.
My Tweets have been quoted in The Huffington Post, Comic Sands (George Takei’s website, where they have been attributed, as opposed to stolen), The Washington Post and Heather Cox Richardson’s essential and sanity saving series “Letters From an American.” I got hearts, responses and sometimes DM exchanges with famous people whose works I admire. Do I understand how pathetic I am being? OF COURSE I DO, but that is beside the point, which is that I am establishing that I was not just some garden variety Twitter wank, I was a fucking CONTENT CREATOR, OK?!
Well. Not really. I was a distant outlier up in the hill country at the very edge of the continent of mattering at all, which is OK. Artistically speaking, that’s my career’s natural habitat and if I’m bitter about it, It’s also my sweet spot. I mean, honest to God, imagine how unbearable I’d be if I had gotten anywhere. Seriously. Take a moment and imagine it.
I had about 4,300 followers at the time of my “Permanent Suspension” (and believe me, I’m going to get to that little bit of violence enacted on the English Language, just not yet.), which is very medium. It’s not a small follower count by any means, but there are plenty of folks with tens of thousands. For me, the number wasn’t the point (although I loved watching it go up, because as I may have mentioned, I’m needy) It was that I did not know the vast majority of them. I have 836 “friends” on Facebook, and I have some real world connection to almost all of them. Maybe 100 people friended me on Facebook strictly because they’d read something I wrote that they liked. On Twitter, over three thousand folks follow me because they liked something I wrote. And I know the writing they like isn’t essays or columns or scripts, it’s just, you know… Tweets. The number of people who read an essay or article by me and said “Hey, that was awesome, I’m gonna follow that dude on Twitter!” could well be zero. But strangers liked my Tweets, and I liked that!
Was it healthy? Was Twitter doing something for me that was worth doing? Was I building something that now won’t get built? Was I ‘silenced’ because I was getting too close to ‘something’? Fucked if I know. Except for that last one about getting too close to something. That wasn’t happening.
So okay. Let’s finally get to the meat of it. Here’s how I got “Permanently Suspended” from Twitter
“Permanently… suspended.”
Permanent… suspension is an action Twitter takes regularly if they determine a user has violated their rules. It’s a two word phrase they must employ hundreds of times today, it was crafted by people paid to establish, enforce and communicate their intentions and considering it’s just TWO WORDS LONG, you would think it wouldn’t have been too big an ask to have those two words actually mean the thing they MEAN it to MEAN, but here’s the thing, IT DOESN’T!
“Permanent” is an adjective meaning “Forever.” “lasting or intended to last or remain unchanged indefinitely.”
“Suspension” is a noun which means “the temporary prevention of something from continuing or being in force or effect.” TEMPORARY!
I have been sentenced by Twitter to a paradox wherein I am temporarily forbidden from doing something forever! A gigantic corporate juggernaut currently valued at BILLIONS OF DOLLARS which despite, or perhaps because of it’s incalculable societal power, cannot be bothered to PROOFREAD a TWO WORD SENTENCE!
That’s salt in the wound, is what that is.
So there. The part about the language abuse is off my chest. Until the next time it isn’t.
Okay, okay okay. Here’s what happened.
I read a Tweet from Joel Pollack. Not exactly a household name, so let me give you the skinny on that sad, nasty, absurd little piece of work: First of all, and not to body shame, Mr. Pollack’s head is frighteningly thin, and here is a picture so you don’t think I’m lying or just being mean for the sake of it, which OK, maybe I am, but just look at him. 
Like Junior Senator of Arkansas Tom Cotton, his skull is not as wide as normal human skulls should be. I’m not a Doctor, I can’t say for certain that Joel Pollack’s skull is thin enough to impair brain function, but I will add that he is Senior Editor-at-large for Breitbart News, a condition that I think supports my supposition that there are things wrong with his brain.
An orthodox Jew and Harvard educated smarty-pants who was born in South Africa but grew up in Skokie Illinois, a town known both for it’s large Jewish population and some very famous Neo Nazi marches and court cases, Pollack has a failed run for congress in his back pocket, after which he was hand picked to by Andrew Breitbart himself to be chief legal counsel at fascist curious, ultra right wing, race baiting media platform, Brietbart news. There he proved awful enough to outlast co-workers Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopolous and Ben Shapiro. You can do your own armchair psychiatry, but when you’re a Jew who spent his childhood in Skokie and you work for a media platform that is beloved by Nazis… there’s some stuff going on.
Aaaaaaany-hoo, Ol’ Joel had a bee in his bonnet over President Biden’s September first prime time speech on the continued battle for the soul of the nation. Here’s Pollack’s Tweet: “Biden’s presidency is effectively over. He may be in office, or — in deference to his military junta décor — in power, but you cannot be the president of a democracy and declare war on half the nation. He will never, never be viewed as legitimate even granting that he won 2020.”
“
So here’s the actual exchange that got me “permanently suspended” (AAAGH!) from Twitter for “Targeted harassment”: In response to Pollack’s attack on Biden,I responded:,
“I hope everybody is screenshotting this Tweet. I love how sure you are of yourself, it puts me in mind of the Pillow Guy every time he tells us the date by which Trump will be reinstated. You guys should hang, you’re kind of the same deal.”
NOT my wittyest repartee. A very sad rejoinder to be the last thing I ever tweeted.
Apparently, suggesting people screenshot the tweet is encouraging others to harass him. I think it’s pretty clear in context that I meant people should have proof if Pollack deleted it.
In addition, I believe Twitter took me to mean when I said “you guys should hang”, that Pollack and the My Pillow Guy should hang. By the neck. Until dead. As in “Hang Mike Pence.” As opposed to hang out.With each other. Because they share a common interest, being irritating, MAGA pricks.
There’s an appeal process, and of course I appealed. I pointed out to them that I really wasn’t threatening anyone’s lives, I wasn’t trying to incite a mob to go kill anyone, I’m not a Republican, for lord’s sake. My appeal was denied without explanation, I have no way of knowing if an actual human being ever so much as saw it. And honestly, I doubt it.
And it wasn’t long after that Elon showed up at Twitter HQ carrying an actual sink so he could Tweet “Let that sink in”, which seems like an awful lot of heavy lifting just to communicate that you’re an asshole, not very bright, and you vastly overestimate both yourself and your appeal.
And pretty much instantly hate speech quadrupled, who could have guessed. And then he did the whole blue checkmark thing, instantly taking away the thrill of being noticed by, responded to, or even FOLLOWED BY someone with a blue checkmark. So I thought to myself, well, that’s that. I don’t need to feel bad now because Twitter as I knew it, flawed as it was, is over. But…
But I also thought… Elon said he was gonna be the free speech guy, right? And he let Trump back on, even though Trump fooled him by not coming. And he let, like, fistfulls of Neo-Nazi’s back on. So surely I could get back on, right?
Pffft. Maybe if I was a Neo-Nazi. And maybe not even then. Because under Elon, almost nobody works for Twitter anymore unless they’re held hostage by a work visa. So who the hell is going to look at my case and reinstate me?
So here I sit. De-platformed. Censored. Silenced for my beliefs by techno-elites. Morally inferior to Nazis. And it’s been two and a half months and I wrote some long form stuff so it’s all good. I do miss it. That’s sad and small, but I might as well be honest about it. And I think my reach has been reduced, but my “reach” wasn’t that big and the only thing about me getting promoted was Tweets. It would have been nice to choose my own exit, but I might not have. I mean, deep down, I knew when I started I was only there to go.
I understand that was never what William Burroughs was talking about. But as Twitter made clear to me by concrete example, an author’s intention is hardly the thing that matters most. It’s how what they say gets interpreted.
maxburbank 