A post about posts

Photo by Michiel Annaert on Unsplash

We’re not supposed to talk about this. I’m supposed to do it in a way that looks comfortable, natural, and most importantly, invisible. Like scrolling through instagram and there’s an ad but you just keep scrolling until there’s another ad and you accidentally watch a little and think, I do need to work on my posture. Keep scrolling and wonder—do I have a neck hump? Scroll some more. Wonder how you got into farrier videos but goddamn it’s satisfying. Oh that horse definitely has laminitis. You’re an expert now. Oof careful cutting into that. He’s gonna need a gel pack. Oh fuck yeah. Peel that gel pack off. That’s the good shit right… Huh. Maybe that weird traction device will help actually. It says it was invented by a chiropractor.

I think this was supposed to be the point of twitter. It’s why publishers were stoked about my follower count. Then they wanted me on tiktok and I was still mad that I was required to have a face at all. The fuck was I gonna do on tiktok? Dance? Maybe I should’ve been a farrier. I could slide my book under the hoof I was scraping. But not everyone’s addicted to farrier videos.

Everything we see is curated, designed to lock us into that screen. Watch one farrier video. And that’s all you’ll see. Don’t interact with the people you follow and you’ll never see them again. Your friends fade into the background. You don’t even know your cousin’s dog died last week because you didn’t like their vacation photos last year.

Social media is designed to keep you on social media. The longer you scroll, the more you’ll start thinking about your neck hump and buy that thing to fix it. I suppose we could also look up from our phones. There’s another screen that won’t even ask if you wanted to watch the Dahmer thing. It’s already playing the third episode.

Twitter can’t hook you with farrier videos. So it hooks you with outrage. Happy people don’t hang out on twitter. Or people who are on twitter aren’t happy. Chicken/ egg sort of thing. But the longer you scroll, the more pissed off you get. Why wouldn’t you be pissed. Everything and everyone is fucking terrible. You know this is true because that’s all you see—terrible people saying and doing terrible things. And this is all twitter will show you. It doesn’t matter who you follow. If they post something kind or happy, it won’t get engagement. So you won’t see it.

You want engagement, you dunk on what everyone else is dunking on. You get angry. Twitter shows you more anger. More hatred. More bad news. Now you’re really pissed. You’ve developed a deep hatred for Joyce Carol Oates. You’ve not really sure who Joyce is but you know she’s crazy because everyone says so. So you say so too. She’s good for engagement.

Publishers want us to have twitter accounts. It’s funniest goddamn thing about publishing. They want writers, who are definitively insane, to post on social media. Writers. People who chose to spend their lives hunched over computer screens pouring out the darkest, saddest shit in our misfiring brains because it’s the only thing that makes us feel alive. We see and feel everything. We’re thin-skinned and everything hurts and we let it and we write it down. And publishers want us to scroll through a rage pit of doom, where hating writers is a bloodsport, and remind people to buy our books.

That’s not entirely true. Male authors get a pass. They can post insane takes, tell people to eat shit and fuck off, threaten to fight someone who makes fun of their tweet, and they’re, you know, just being a writer. Standing up for themselves, for their work. A real fighter. Holy crap did you see David Simon call that guy a fuckstumble. That was some funny shit.

A woman tells someone to fuck off and she’s in for a week of fat jokes. She’s probably insane. I know we support mental health and care a lot about mental health but that stupid bitch showed a symptom. Women need to be cuddly and friendly and warm. The fuck was she even thinking. She’s probably a TERF anyway. You know who’s not a TERF, any male writer. Only women can be TERFS. A TERF is someone twitter decided they don’t like, any woman will do but a woman with an opinion who isn’t cuddly and warm to people fucking with her—TERF.

When I was a cable guy, part of our monthly goal was sales. I could usually hit the low end of the target just because the sales department would screw up orders enough that switching someone who never watched a sport from the soccer package to HBO. One HBO sale here, one Korean package sale there and I’d be close enough. But it always came up in my reviews—why wasn’t I selling? Because if I wanted to go into sales, I’d have applied for a job in sales, Dave.

I thought it should be obvious that “hey do you want to add HBO” isn’t something that’ll endear you to someone whose cable keeps going out. It wasn’t obvious to someone in corporate. In their defense, it’s not actually hard to sell someone HBO if their cable’s been out for a week. You just tell them you’re going to give them a free month, and forget to mention they need to call and cancel it or they’ll be charged the next month. This is the advice the guys on my team gave me. In their defense, they were dealing with the same “goals” I was missing. After a while, you don’t even look at customers as fully human anymore. Who gives a shit if they get fucked on their bill. But as someone who can’t remember to call and cancel even if I’ve been warned, it felt shitty. So I wouldn’t do it.

I used to think my aversion to selling anything came from a childhood of standing on a pedestrian bridge by the Glinko sign in Osaka, harassing tourists and waiters who were late for their shift to please buy a poster to support our missionary work. The only missionary work we ever did was sell those shitty posters, or tapes or videos.

I never put a whole lot of thought into the selling part of writing. I knew I’d have to tweet about the book. And occasionally I’d suck it up, remind myself that I wanted to be a goddamn writer. I’d written a fucking book. The least I could do was sell the goddamn thing. So I’d swallow my pride, light a bowl—not necessarily in that order—and post something like hey buy my book, or did you know I wrote a book, I wrote a book, you can buy it anywhere. Disgusting.

But you can’t just tweet about the book. You want people to see your tweet about the book, you have to tweet about other shit too. If people haven’t engaged with your tweets, they’ll never see the book tweets. And what the fuck is the point of being on twitter.

It’s easier when someone else tweets something about it. Then I just have to retweet that. Promotion done for the day. Have a drink. Someone will post an article that mentions my book, easy. I can make a joke about being in the New Yorker. Someone will comment that they saw it months ago. I won’t reply because, no shit. So did I. But occasionally I have to mention there’s a book and I wrote it and this is easier than “Please buy my book. My dog, he’s very sick.” (My dog is fine. He’s not sick. I’m making a point. I don’t even get paid if you buy the thing because I got an advance I’ll never earn out.)

I’m supposed to tweet about substack too. You can’t just throw up the link, though I do on occasion because I hate everything about self-promotion. But if you just throw up the link, twitter buries it. Twitter wants you to stay on twitter not some link to somewhere else. How are they going to sell you anything if you’re on another site.

The way to do it is you post an image, say something funny or incisive (though I’m not generally either), and a few tweets down the thread, you post the link. Then you have to retweet that several times a day. This annoys the shit out of people who live on twitter who think you’re desperate for engagement on your dumb joke. What you are is doing the gross part of this job. You have to retweet or repost for the same reason you have to post about your book until you hate the damn thing and yourself. That is because normal people do not live on twitter.

Substack will helpfully add little links in your post. They look like this:

I usually remember to go back through and change the wording, delete the “support my work” part. Because it feels an awful lot like I should be throwing in a line about missionaries or Jesus and as gross as sales feel, telling you that you’re “supporting” me makes me want to walk onto I-35 and let traffic do what it will.

But you can’t just post about substack. No engagement means no one sees your shit anymore. But engagement, if you’re a woman with more than a few followers means you’re a crazy bitch TERF. Also you’re fat. And probably murder dogs. Or fuck them.

I don’t know. I’m supposed to post on twitter. Publishers want me there. Substack is more valuable, probably. So I’d like anyone who’s been following me on twitter to just follow me here. Then I don’t have to go there. I don’t have to hear from people who’ve made hating me a personality trait. But if I want people to follow me here, to even know that I have a substack, I have to post it on twitter. God help us all.