jimbessman.com

I made the mistake of immediately checking my Twitter page upon returning from a night of trying out a vaporizer for the first time.

First I sent out the following Tweet: “Just back from BB King’s for Asleep at the Wheel. Paul Shaffer sat in on the encores. AATW never better.”

For you non-Twitterers, as soon as you click the Twitter “Update” button, your Tweet is added to the top of the list of your sent and received Tweets. Ultra-stoned state that I was in, my gaze naturally dropped down to the next Tweet on the list: “Graham Norton, on Brendon Fraser: ‘His cock is like a Ferrero Rocher.’”

I frantically felt a terrible twitch in my gut. “My God! Did I just write that? How could I? What on earth was I talking about? How fucking embarrassing!”

Then I quickly realized that this was a Tweet sent from “dceiver”–the Twitter name for Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post. I love Jason’s intensely scornful political posts on HuffPost, but I really need to cancel his Tweets since I’m so prone to this type of scare–maybe because his Tweets don’t have his picture: So I see my Tweet with my picture (taken, by the way, at June’s Songwriters Hall of Fame induction dinner, which is why I’m in a tux) and my impaired mind can’t distinguish that the next Tweet is from someone else because it doesn’t have an identifiable picture.

Luckily the Tweet after Linkins’ was Sandra Bernhard’s: “Elegy with penelope cruz ben kingsley based on philip roth’s dying animal excellent a grown up film with great performances, watched at home.” So reassuring, especially since it had her picture!

If you follow me on Twitter you know that I’ve been way more involved there than here, and that a goodly portion of my Tweets announce new posts at examiner.com. Which brings me to a shameful plug: Every time someone clicks on one of my examiner.com pieces, I stand to make between half and a full penny! So I urge all jimbessman.com readers to help me pay the rent by clicking, clicking, clicking on my examiner.com stories–even to subscribe to my page! It doesn’t cost you anything, and you don’t even have to read anything. Just click, click and click again–or is it scream, scream and scream again?

Last word–for now–on Twitter: I’d been making steady progress in the eight months or so since signing up–and especially in the four months or so that I became Twitter-active–in gaining followers at a clip, sometimes, of two or three a day. Then I hit 117 in June and pretty much died. I even lost a few, dropping all the way down to 110 before inching back up, two steps forward and one step back, until I’m now up to 133–my highest mark ever!

Now as I’m sure you know, I don’t promote this site other than Tweet up new posts–like I do with examiner.com. And I don’t make the best use of Twitter–I really don’t know how to. But I was so blasted when I got home last night that I was inspired to use Twitter to comment more creatively on the AATW show, and then hail a TV commercial I watched for the first time (T-mobile’s spot using a Cat Stevens song).

So I also implore all readers who haven’t already done so to sign up for my Twitter updates! There’s no money in it (not even half to a full cent!), just the warm feeling I get inside when someone actually twitter-cares!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.