I was sitting at home over the weekend, enjoying a warm summer breeze with my eyes closed and little on my mind apart from the sound of the wind and the leaves, the birds calling one another, and the patches of light that managed to pierce through the imperfect canopy of a tree.
The following statement popped in.
“C+C Music Factory’s Things that make you go Hmmm… is just the pumped up, less wholesome 90s version of Huey Lewis and the News’s Bad is Bad.”
If you can figure out how my brain ended up with that from a moment that should’ve actually gotten me closer to what people commonly refer to as “enlightenment”, please drop me a note explaining it to me and commit yourself to your nearest mental health facility at once. But now the thought was there, and it was the perfect size to tweet about it. And lo, I wanted to tweet about it. There was only a problem. I wasn’t anywhere near my computer.
A bit of a secret on this one. The reason I have such moments of peace in my life is because I have extricated all social media from my phone and most of it from my life. The only exceptions I make are particularly stupid headlines I tweet about once every honest politician and the alerts for these articles, which are written on an actual computer and then scheduled and tweeted through Medium. But this thought about some made-up equivalency of two songs that honestly have about as much in common as a cheap digital thermometer has with the SR-71 Blackbird was so insidious that I had to tweet about it. So there was nothing going for it. I would have to stand up and reject paradise to share this observation with 30 people, at most.
The computer was off, and I did want to return to backyard meditations, so the phone would have to do. But not the browser, lest I end up surrounded by interesting stuff to read. In fact, let’s not even use the main phone, but the backup one, hidden in a cupboard and coming out only to be occasionally charged in preparation for the day my actual phone finally goes to meet Steve.
The backup phone runs Android, so already I am on unfamiliar ground. And I really don’t want to use the first-party Twitter client. So a very careful browser excursion was still required for me to discover Plume. The download was easy. The setup was unsurprisingly complex as I realized I needed a password manager and a way to get the social media accounts Yubikey to play. By the time I had everything set up, the account open and the window to compose a new tweet open I realized that, in all honesty, my Zen observation was actually not Zen at all. Nor was it useful, relevant, or likely to provide anyone with anything of interest. So, without uninstalling anything, I placed the phone back on its hibernation slumber, closed the cupboard and went back to where I was at the beginning of this journey. It took a little longer than expected, but as soon as I stopped worrying about the length of the journey, I reached the destination.
How to use Twitter: Mostly don’t.
