@Twitter Kicked Me Out. I Should Thank Them.
It never occurred to me to consider the time I was wasting on @Twitter.
I suppose the medium is like eating peanuts. You think it's just a handful but soon realize you’ve consumed an 18 oz. can. That’s not the problem. That you are still hungry for more is.
One day a message popped up on my feed: “your account is locked due to suspicious activity.” I thought, what the hell is so suspicious? I thought those nerdy Twitterati took offense at my libertarian messages, somewhat convincingly, of the totalitarian state that Michigan had become under its commissar, Gretchen Whitmer:
But I thought who in San Franciso gives a hoot about Michigan?
I wrote Twitter to say there must be some mistake, but I was only talking to an echo chamber of an algorithm’s algorithm. Eventually, I slinked off and started a new account, and after several weeks counted four followers down from four thousand. It was a message.
Lacking any other reason to waste time on social media, I began reading voraciously from early Greek civilization to the War of Algerian Independence (whose atrocities make the World Wars seem rather tame). I discovered a new admiration for Abdel Nasser, who gamed the superpowers like drunken poker players, and Anthony Eden, Prime Minister of Great Britain, who said, “if you’ve broken eggs, you might as well make omelets.”
I also spent more time with my lovely wife talking about this, that, and everything, finding that we share in common than I had realized because the sharing I was doing now was the real thing.
A message appeared this morning that Twitter welcomes me back, it was all a misunderstanding, and the fault was Twitter’s. They said I was caught in a spam filter. Damn! And although I wasn’t spamming, it must be hard to tell sometimes. They were truly sorry. Really.
