I Livetweeted Trying To Think Of Something To Livetweet
By Blake Butler
I opened the MS Word browser about thirty minutes ago and have been staring at it since.
It feels like my head over the past few years has been filling up with the white light from computer screens.
I am estimating that in 20 years they will find out one in every two people have brain cancer from their screen’s light.
The light from outside from the window doesn’t actually seem that much different from the machine stuff.
I’m not sure what livetweet means.
It seems like kings would make their servants go tweet things for them if kings were on twitter, and that would not be a live tweet from the perspective of the king.
Sat here disgusted with myself for five minutes for spending time thinking about the term livetweet.
Everyone on twitter either seems depressed or like they are reading a newspaper aloud.
Mental image of William Burroughs shooting a computer screen with a shotgun from close range and turning around to smile.
I feel like going running soon because I feel disgusting from having eaten so much recently and just spending all day sitting still here.
I would like to livetweet my running experience but that would be hard, like I would have to stop a lot, or try to run at a speed I can mostly type during.
I would like to do a marathon where everybody had to be typing on their phones while running or they are disqualified.
Huge mental reel of people running into mall doors and phone poles while looking at their phone instead of the street.
What percentage of every day do most people spend sitting trying to figure out what to do?
Tried to estimate the amount of time I spend like that per week and ended up just typing “I estimate I spend” and then stopped and erased that and wrote this instead.
I keep going back and forth between believing everything is real and nothing is real, like some oversized twelve-year old.
Tried to go back to Twitter to look at actual tweets that happened between starting this and now and the OS X color spinny ball thing came up while I was waiting to click back over so I gave up and came back here.
Every computer seems to be getting slower, like they are getting cancer too, from people touching them so much, from putting the light out.
Will you be able to 3-D print a 3-D printer?
Will you be able to 3-D print a 3-D printer that is currently in the midst of printing out a 3-D printer?
It’s hot in here.
Mental image of Barack Obama, having opened a secret Twitter account, turning around at a meeting to tweet something depressing, laughing about it.
I keep thinking “I want to go shopping at the mall” even though I don’t want to do that and there’s nothing I could even think of wanting to buy besides food.
I do get a feeling of calmness just from walking around the mall for some reason, like the glass and the floors all make me feel like time doesn’t exist.
I don’t know why time not existing keeps seeming like a comforting feeling, when it would actually probably be worse for everyone if time didn’t exist.
I remember being eight years old or something and my mom telling me it would be 30 more minutes before we went to my friend’s birthday party, and how that seemed like an impossible amount of time, like we’d never actually go to the party because that was so long, like it was longer than a year somehow, and now 30 minutes seems to go by before I even have time to notice that I should look at what time it is, even when I’m doing something that usually feels a lot longer than it actually is, like lifting weights.
Mental image of if you could write more than 140 characters on twitter, but the font would just keep getting smaller so that it fits inside the box of what 140 normal characters would fit, so you could spend a year writing a tweet and no one would be able to read it.
Just yelled aloud at my phone for ringing while I am busy trying to communicate, even though I don’t know what I am communicating.
Deleted something I was trying to say about John Updike knowing what he’s trying to communicate before he begins communicating and writing down like, “Time is brief,” then writing another novel about a white guy who doesn’t love his wife.
I could livetweet my recent uncontrollable strings of thoughts about wanting to strange Kelly Ripa with my hands.
I wonder if tweets are admissible as evidence in court for intent.
Imagined federal prosecutor standing before the court to admit my tweet drafts folder on my phone into evidence while the judge is busy tweeting a funny rap lyric rewritten to comment on death.
Keep thinking “Kanye West…” but then nothing else comes after it.
While staring at the clock on my computer trying to think of what to write I saw the clock move from 4:13 PM to 4:15 PM.
Imagined a service that combines 3-D printing with twitter, where people could tweet code prompts to create objects in the physical inboxes of everyone who follows them.
3-D livetweeting a banana so big it fills the room the 3-D printer is sitting in.
3-D livetweeting an axe to Kelly Ripa over and over.