Graveyard of Tweets
Unpublished until now, these are drafts of tweets that never saw the light of day.
idea for a sci-fi novel: a huge colony spaceship bound for a distant uninhabited planet with 5 million people on board, and 2.5 million are therapists, one therapist per person
Wow. Interesting. Is that it?
a consistent personality is my chosen artform. instead of paint or clay, canvas or ink, my materials are not saying or doing what I wouldn’t say or do, and if I ever do anything surprising, that's simply who I always was just waiting for the right time to express itself
Not even remotely sure what I was going for there. Good thing I never tweeted it.
william makepeace thackery: act 1: “william.” the status quo. the ordinary world. act 2: “makepeace.” heroic quest. impossible dream. synthesis of will and goal. the struggle we long to see taken up. act 3: “thackery.” catastrophe. dissolution of will into lyric. hint of violence. an open-ending that makes you want to rewatch the whole thing.
This tweet made me realize that my main modus operandi as a writer is to find a metaphor that no one would ever consider appropriate or interesting and try to make it an extended metaphor until it works. That didn’t work in this particular case, but the fact that it didn’t work is what helped me better understand what I am ordinarily after.
just realized names are three act structures. first names are act 1, our individual self, our status quo. middle names are the weird unknown territory we uneasily navigate. are we even this name at all? it tests us. last names are act 3: a destiny, a group identity we, tragically, or comedically, must come to accept
I actually like this idea a lot. It helps that I already tried this joke once and so there’s more context for it. I could never quite get it to a place where it could stand alone and resonate with more truth than it currently resonates with. luckily I dumped it into here where the list format gives it a little more context.
[on a first date] I’m confident enough in my masculinity to appreciate the m.c. escher-esque structure of christopher nolan films more than most people
Not sure why I never tweeted this. It seems like something I wouldn’t have held back on. Not that it’s good, it’s just so on brand that I can’t figure out why I didn’t let it rip. Maybe because I sensed that there is a much better joke in here and I was saving it for when or if I could give it more attention. Either way it’s dead now.
dreamt sauron, as one tiny part of his attempt to take over middle earth, ran a literary imprint out of the bowels of mt. doom, giving a platform to anti-elf/anti-human screeds billed as edgy autofiction “novels,” and some of the lit-bros in gondor were like "hey the writing is pretty good though”
This one has numerous problems. I’m not sure what it’s trying to say, and that’s a problem because it definitely feels like an attack. I also hate that it seems to be criticizing a certain type of writer, which is a bad look for a tweet that can’t figure out how to make its own joke without going over the character limit. I suppose the extended metaphor attempt is there and some kind of anger at the petite fascist writers is sincere, but it’s just not good enough to make up for its straw man argumentation and lazy invocation of literary arts terms, not to mention my endlessly sad attempts to lord-of-the-rings-ize things
god: welcome to eden adam. everything is nameless. your job: name everything
adam: ok what's the rate?
god: the what?
adam: how much are you paying me to name all this… stuff?
god: uh, nothing. I thought you might enjoy it. naming is fun
adam: naming is labor
I think this one must have been too long. And I could never figure out if it was actually funny. It also feels lazy to say “_____ is labor” as a punchline, but re-reading this today I think enough time has passed since calling things labor was a popular meme/discourse, so maybe it could work today on that level. Still, like most of these tweets, it feels like too much setup for not enough payoff. I’m not sure if I read this as a tweet out in the wild I would want to read any more tweets by the author.
TETRIS knuckle tats on one hand, JENGA knuckle tats on the other hand
I know it’s lazy to say “this is lazy” but this actually is lazy. Knuckle tats are just so overdone and culturally inert as a concept and as a meme. For knuckle tats to work, the content of the joke has to be almost divinely inspired. This is really low-effort cheese. And worst of all, I have made this joke before in better ways. Why did I ever think it would work to rehash it? GTFO
innovating, collaborating, and creating a better world? sorry, that’s not a personality
desperately trying to recycle memes 12-48 months after they have died — blank is labor. blank and blank knuckle tats. saying something is “not a personality” — is not a personality. this is the doldrums of tweeting for me, and these are the bits of driftwood I am clinging to as I succumb to dehydration and starvation while knowing that no rescue is coming
If you sell your soul to the devil in youth, don’t fret. when you are dying, you find your soul again, and your soul disappears from the devil’s collection. it is by dying that, throughout the ages, humanity has continually defrauded the devil
This is more like it. Not that this is a good tweet or thought, but at least it’s trying to offer up something more than a dead meme. Points for effort I guess. There’s something in here, sort of, but the setup is rickety, the wording is way over the limit, and there’s just not enough thought or truth behind what is being said. it belongs in the graveyard, but I don’t experience shame when I visit its tombstone
have never even sent a text message without also touting the superiority of post-structuralists to the bourgeois barbarians of the so-called enlightenment
I think this was a meme for 5 minutes back in 2020? Like saying you have never sent a text without doing XYZ and XYZ is some elaborate-ass shit. I don’t remember though. Either way it’s just not clear what is being said and nor is it funny. I do like the idea of calling the enlightenment thinkers “bourgeois barbarians” though… maybe this tweet was just me trying to crowbar that equation into some more accessible narrative context. either way it belongs in the ground
always carry an emerald in your fanny pack so when something good happens you can pull it out and say “this enchanted emerald made that happen” and when someone asks you how you got that emerald, you pull out another emerald saying this emerald is responsible for that emerald, and so on until you run out of emeralds, but carry enough emeralds so that it will be unlikely for you to run out before whoever you’re talking to loses interest in how many there might be
I don’t know, I actually like this one. Before I convince myself otherwise, maybe that’s a good place to stop.
Thanks for this! Such a rare privilege to get a writer’s insight on the outtakes.
I love the three-act structure of a name thing!