First Step Toward Failure

Finally got to my first Twitter post ever.

“Well, shit” indeed.

I’ve been on a campaign to delete as many tweets as I can. Knocking off the low-performers, the dumb posts, written in haste, zero-engagement, etc.

I could only go so far back in the timeline before the infinite scroll stops scrolling. Twitter stops showing older posts at a certain point, no matter how many times I refresh. So my only choice has been to give it a week of rest before the algorithm reloaded older posts from the archives just to fill out the scroll cache.

Tonight, I finally got the last stretch of posts to the beginning, and boy howdy, I was on some shit.

Instead of deleting my account, and risking it being revived by spambots, I’m just culling bullshit tweets, unfollowing weak associations, and removing messages, retweets, and likes. Anything to make my account less usable to a solipsistic capitalist warlord and his galley of H1B visa captives.

This twitter meltdown really has be bummed.

Today’s total outage highlighted how far the platform has fallen. Now I wish it greater gravity and a steeper trajectory to burn up on reentry.

Click Here To Pay Tax Now

Well, dammit.

I didn’t withhold enough federal tax throughout 2022; now I have to pay the shortfall. It’s really not much, considering how much was withheld and how much I owe according to my tax bracket. But still, no refund this year.

Haven’t had to pay when filing since 2000-ish when I made a clerical error on my W-4.

Now I gotta get smarter about adjustments and deductions — or just withhold more tax out of each paycheck, which is what I did tonight shortly after filing. Logged into my company payroll and filed a new W-4, same settings as before, but added extra deduction per check.

Good thing I don’t have to figure for kids, wife, property, or cryptocoin.

In a perfect world, The Man would have exactly what I owe him, and not a penny more. Refunds are nothing but a little reward he gives if you let him have more of your money to buy bombs with. If you play it right, the refund is exactly $0.00.

But who’s got a crystal ball?

Anyway, Damn The Man. Unless he’s doing something righteous with them gains. I’m no anti-tax blowhard; I just want them spent on the common good.

Ellipses

Dreams are telling me about the same voices with the same ticks having the same conversations with the same jokes about the same topics in the same places. I don’t need dreams to point that out. I see it in my waking life. But I appreciate the soothsaying nonetheless.

Dreams are nerves experiencing randomness, jumping and jarring, finding some narrative through the noise. This narrative is that these nerves are getting poked and touched with the same stimuli, day in, day out, until pleasure is gone. It is only discomfort and pain that remains, muscles twitching under weight to feel something different.

Dreams tell me to wander. To seek randomness and weave my own serendipitous narrative through the noise. This is where the Beats would’ve packed up a rucksack and thrown a thumb out into the highway. Eastbound and down.

Eros: Miss, I’m Sore

I was bemoaning to a friend earlier tonight, what with the major icy weather event we’re having here in Austin, that I seldom get holed up in my house long enough that I connect with my creative drive to produce something artistic. The weather here is just so nice year round (until it is definitely fucking not nice at all) that I never ever want to be cooped up long enough to create. I want to be out elsewhere, possibly near other people, wasting my life.

Gone are the days when I lived where the weather was so shitty for months on end that, to save myself from the gray and cold, I’d burn all the lights and grab an art pad or flip the switches on some music gear or open an editor and write something. Hell, I barely paper-journal anymore.

My Eros is just completely switched off.

What do I do to save it? It’s still there, waiting in hunger. How do I turn it on again?