The road goes on forever and the party never ends
8 years on Twitter
I remember January 2014 as a particularly cold and brutal winter in western PA, although I think my perception was probably colored by the mile walk to and from my job in black dress pants, a white button up and non-slip black dress shoes. I worked at a nominally “upscale casual” restaurant that was already 10 years past its prime when I arrived as a busboy, and whose business model seemed to depend on an impending cure for cancer that would save their aging clientele from the grave. I had an enormous, wholly-unrequited crush on the hostess, as all 16-year-old busboys should, and a surplus of time to spend hanging around her lectern, especially after the restaurant pipes froze up and burst two weeks into the new year. She had a twitter, to follow our much funnier coworker, so naturally I had to have a twitter too.
I spent the next two years making some of the worst puns I have ever seen and offering trenchant commentary on current events from the vital perspective of a suburban teenager. On January 23, 2016, a few hours before boarding a Greyhound to New York, I tweeted a popular picture of Bernie Sanders running to catch a train alongside a rehashed dialogue joke. Halfway through the 9 hour ride I had to turn my phone off to stop the continuous buzzing. By the time I arrived in New York amidst a crippling blizzard the tweet had beaten me by several hours, landing on the socials of my friends and roommates. It was my first viral tweet. Feeling uncomfortable with this much attention from strangers, I deleted my full name from my handle and changed my profile picture to the funniest thing I could find on my phone, an illustration of Jesus Christ DJing in heaven.
By February of 2018 I was working a soul-crushing office job at PNC Bank in a basement cubicle farm. Think Office Space if they didn’t have natural light. I spent most of my time on Twitter, contributing thousands of messages to a number of group chats, desperately trying to get the attention of larger accounts and generally substituting likes for vitamin D. I got a retweet on a meme making fun of cops from a now-disgraced podcaster, and became an active member of a group chat of young adults that is still chugging along with the same core group more than 5 years later. We called the chat Cube, and I think it genuinely saved my life that year. Some notable episodes from Cube Chat included:
Paying the chat admin to take a bite out of a bar of soap and mail it to me for a joke
Paying the chat admin to eat cigs on camera
Paying the chat admin to do a bunch of other stupid shit typical of 20 year olds
A robust art exchange between members via mail, pieces from which I still treasure today
Repeatedly adding Mike Kinsella from American Football and harassing him because he didn’t know how to turn off DM invites
Coaching each other through breakups, catfishing schemes and arrests
Bailing the chat admin out of a Mississippi jai
Can a group chat be art?
I also got into politics during this period. After my first viral Bernie tweet, I felt an obligation to put my money where my mouth was and volunteered in PA for the 2016 primary, just weeks before he got creamed and the campaign closed up shop. After dropping out of college and losing access to my social circle I started volunteering for local campaigns and activist groups like the Democratic Socialists of America. I started tweeting about socialism, like so many during the Trump presidency, and more importantly, local politics. My twitter following grew during this time and I learned how to make people very mad at you on the internet, and when to apologize when those people are your friends that you respect.
When the pandemic started I was still working the awful PNC job, my soul now thoroughly ground to dust. But away from my boss’s watchful eye, and locked inside like everyone else, I found a new niche tweeting about the city I loved. I built a following writing threads about funny Pittsburgh stories and legends; the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern, the Oakland Spiderman, the South Side Burger King. I took a silly sense of pride in the whole endeavor. It felt good to collect these oral histories of the city and share them with newcomers locked inside, who couldn’t experience them told drunkenly by a friend over a pint at Nico’s. After months of publicly joking about it, I caved to peer pressure and expanded this project into a podcast with two of my friends called I Hate This Town.
I don’t know if Twitter is going to shut down in the next week, or the next month. There’s a part of me that still thinks this place is too important to too many powerful people for them not to step in. There’s another part of me that knows believing that runs counter to my cynical view that the institutions of the current moment are too decayed to act in the common good. If I’m right, we’ll all get to look back on these dramatic posts as a little embarrassing and funny. But if I’m going to be histrionic about anything, I’m glad it’s this. I don’t think I’ll ever reach 10k followers before the heat death of the Twitterverse and I don’t think I’ll ever have some kind of successful media career off the back of my podcast and Substack. I’m ok with that. I never did put in the kind of hustle for that sort of thing, and the days when you could turn a few viral tweets into a TV writing gig were gone by the time my hostess crush inspired me to type my first 140 character joke.
The only thing I’m proud of on Twitter is the effort I put into building relationships with all my friends. For Luke, Charlie, Lew, Josh, Drew, Dak, Meg, Shyan, Dan, Morgan, Quinn and everyone else in Cube Chat I’m forgetting, I will treasure our stupid messages and zoom calls forever. For Nick, MJ, Shocks and anyone who ever guested on the podcast, thanks for helping me create something to be proud of. To my real life friends who follow me, thanks for taking me seriously even after seeing all my awful thoughts. To anyone else I talked to on here, it’s been an honor riffing with you, please forgive my ignorance on so many topics I felt the need to speak on anyway. To anyone that approached me in public and asked “are you Chief Justice Keef?” that was weird of you but I’m glad you did it anyway. I feel so incredibly loved, knowing that there is a couch for me to crash on in every state in the country, offered up by someone who took the time to get to know a stranger off a couple joke tweets. I don’t know where I’ll go if the site really does shut down. I don’t think it matters much. Wherever I end up there will be people there to joke and laugh with, to trade phone numbers and plan road trips to visit, and maybe even follow through on those plans. The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.