Southern Discomfort

Last night, after hanging for awhile at Randy’s, my husband dropped his cell phone from his motorcycle, while going (he claims¹) 65 mph. Evidently, after paying a toll on the Powhite Parkway, he’d forgotten to re-attach the Velcro strap of the bag in which both his change and his phone had been stored, so a little while later, the phone tumbled out.

This won’t be the highest quality image of what’s left of said phone, as I’m too lazy to find my own camera and deal with memory cards, etc. I used my phone to capture the image, which takes shitty pictures relative to, well, my husband’s, which had included a 2-Megapixel camera:

(And no, he hadn’t uploaded any of the 50-odd pictures and videos from the phone to Sprint’s website before the phone went boom. Fuck.)

Naturally, he was pretty bummed by the time he got home (not least of all because Mark had texted him while he was at Randy’s asking what he was up to; Jeff had replied and was awaiting Mark’s reply at the time the phone took its fall). Whereas I’d been hoping to be next in line for a new phone under our family plan (we have a few phones on staggered 2-year contracts, one contract of which has expired, making us eligible for the ‘new customer’ price on a new phone with contract renewal), that’s clearly going to be deferred for awhile, as Jeff’s phone is irreparably damaged.

So, late last night, as Jeff was checking out his replacement phone options, he decided to look at our last several months of bills, to investigate some overcharges and other irregularities.

That was when he made the startling discovery that in the last billing cycle, the total number of both incoming and outgoing text messages from my phone alone (which, thankfully, is on an unlimited text message plan) exceeded 5,000.

That excessive message count is chiefly owing to my use of Twitter, via the following functions:

1. Having SMS alerts set up for those users I find most amusing (the collective lot of which can generate more than 50 text messages a day);
2. My own rather obstreperous output;
3. The fact that I’ve gotten sucked into an elaborate ritual of “favoriting” others’ messages (due to the obnoxiously addictive wonder that is Dean Allen’s Favrd, a kind of “Greatest Hits of Twitter”), which one can do by sending a text message “fav username,” which will attach the requisite gold star to that user’s last update. This, then, registers one’s “vote” for that message, so that if at least two others also add it to their favorites, it will appear on Favrd; and
4. Sending and receiving direct messages (via the Twitter command “d username”) to and from individuals, which can be quite handy. (For instance last night, when, at the grocery store, I was able to read an email from my pal FarkerPeaceboy on my phone. On my phone’s gmail app, it’s far easier to read than reply to messages, but I could, at least, send him a quick reply via Twitter’s direct messaging function.)

So yeah, all that adds up to a lot of goddamned messages.

Which got me to thinking about something scary: Word count.

Only two days ago, I’d added this “tweet” of Merlin Mann‘s to my favorites:

Because I read tons more nonfiction and poetry than fiction, I’ve not read much of King’s outside of his memoir On Writing. But holy crap do I ever respect the man’s work ethic. (And for that matter, Mann’s; he’s a goddamned machine of lucid, socially and technologically relevant creativity.)

So between the insane number of text messages sent and received on my phone, and the Mann/King anecdote about writing productivity, I was not-very-gently reminded of the fact that outside of Twitter (and only the occasional, generally lackluster blog post), I haven’t been producing shit in terms of actual word count.

Yes, I have literally thousands of pages of work towards several books, and there was a point when I was actually sending out work to, and actually publishing in, some worthwhile print- and online publications².

But my output in recent months, outside of Twitter, has been negligible.

Of course, there’s a reason for that: The inherently fragmented (140-characters-or-less) medium of Twitter is well suited to the fragmentation of my own stories. There are things which, outside of the generally inane jokes that occasionally land me on Favrd, I’ve been able to articulate within that medium which I’m not sure I’d have had the strength to do outside those paradoxically liberating confines.

For example, I’m absolutely not ready to write the whole story behind this anecdote:

But I am glad I could get that particular fragment out of my consciousness, where it had been (as it were) poisonously lodged. Its articulation is one step in a greater process of assembling a much more sustained narrative. It is a piece of my puzzle, the dimensions of which would be overwhelming but for the ability to realize its individual elements, one by one, even if it has been at an excruciatingly slow pace.

So last night was a wake-up call: I really need to start making the transition from fragmentation to sustained narrative, even if (no, especially since) that terrifies me.

Thus I made what will be my last post³ to Twitter for at least the next few days:

Not because that particular work-in-progress is especially relevant to the more obviously dramatic meta-narrative of my past which includes crap like bullets. (Although it does involve one armed private investigator/former City of Richmond cop, now that I think about it… hmmm.) It’s mostly a fun story, a means for me to re-enter the serious, sustained creative process without scaring myself to death (and thus, retreating back into the fragmentation of Twitter). And it has enough relevance to matters of cultural and political concern to me (for instance 9/11, the Iraq War, and Islamophobia) that I won’t feel (despite its sillier details, concerning my variously sordid experiences working in Richmond restaurants) that I’m wasting my time on something frivolous.

Those who follow me will likely doubt my capacity to restrain myself both from posting to, and reading others’ assemblages of characters (where the meaning of “character” is both literary, referring to those whose actions are described in our creative works, and computational, referring to a “grapheme-like unit or symbol,” of which Twitter limits one to 140 in any given message), on Twitter.

And for good reason, since, almost immediately after sending in that last tweet, I compulsively checked my feed to see if my message had successfully posted. It had, and already there was one response from my pal Abby:

In response to which I allowed myself one final direct message for the night:

And now, I have a story to write.
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¹ I’m always suspicious he drives faster when I’m not there to fuss at him. Which, because I am petrified of motorcycles, I never am when he’s on the bike.

² My best writing concerns things of which I’m least proud. This, perhaps, explains why I stopped sending out work, right as I’d started to publish well.

³ I’ve totally stolen “see if I don’t” from my pal Jane at Hillbilly, Please.