Sectional Healing: But Like, Do We NEED Puppets on Twitter?
this newsletter has a beach house it can sell you in Idaho...
 |
WRITE SECTION
Did you know Sesame Street characters are on Twitter? I did not. Recently I was made aware of this because evidently Elmo went viral last week due to some prehistoric beef he has with Zoe?
GMA devoted an entire segment to it where there is a LOT to unpack.
Elmo’s “friend” Zoe has a pet rock, named “Rocco” (which, naming your pet rock “Rocco” is a straight DIESEL move and I love it.)
However, having a pet rock is insane. This is why imaginary friends are more optimal because you can aggrandize their presence. With a rock, it’s just a carbon turd that does nothing. And this particular rock isn’t even an igneous rock, which, of all the rocks, the igneous rock is like the former rock star who is now burned out (lol nailed it) but at least can regale us of stories about how one time Nancy Reagan sexually harassed him outside of a Shoney’s. Igneous rocks used to be volcano juice, bro. That’s pretty sick.
Have we ever considered that maybe Elmo should chill the big one about fake pets when he built his whole brand around manipulating people into tickling him. I mean, fetish much?
To me, devoting a morning show segment to two puppets feuding over the sentiency of a rock is the apotheosis of society and culture just giving up and walking into the ocean like a protagonist in a Sylvia Plath story.
Speaking of which, what in the name of God is going on at GMA? Didn’t they also just have Jamie Lynn Spears on? Is their executive producer the same guy who planned Fyre Fest? Tomorrow will they do a retrospective called “A Year After Bean Dad with Bean Dad?”
Why does Chris Connelly look like he is cosplaying as the grumpy adult that Scooby and friends just busted for doing something unethical?
Anyways, the logical conclusion of this was checking out Elmo on Twitter because that’s where beefs go to get squashed or super-sized and this is what Elmo clarified:
…and to be honest I don’t know if this just got squashed or if that last cryptic sentence made things thermonuclear! Stay tuned etc etc!
I didn’t care anymore though because I wanted to see who Elmo followed because I was worried it might be white supremacists and/or Woody Allen.1
In turn, this opened up a completely different can of worms because evidently ALL of the Sesame Squad is on Twitter and they all just do their whole Sesame Street thing on Twitter.
Here’s Cookie Monster.
Here’s Oscar the Grouch2
Also, here’s the Count, whose whole thing on Twitter is actually kind of unnerving. What is he counting towards? And why did he stop?
I suppose this makes sense because I would have been a little confused if Cookie Monster was sexualizing celebrity chefs or if Oscar the Grouch was vocalizing his belief in determinism and how we’re actually in a simulation because any civilization that can simulate a creature who lives in a trash can probably derives that imagination from some innate awareness that they too are just creatures living within filth for the entertainment purposes of some larger and more advanced civilization.
BUT I was just a little confused because I didn’t understand who this was for? Just because it can exist, that doesn’t mean it always SHOULD exist, right?
But these puppets and their twitter accounts do exist BECAUSE they can and because they can, it occupies this space in a sort of haphazard existence; not really sure how to adapt to the medium, but present enough to require effort and attention. Which to me is the real takeaway here; that the ubiquity of things / spaces / people requiring our effort and attention is expanding rapidly. And to me, this is the case for compartmentalization.
The internet and social media have evolved so quickly that we haven’t been able to counter-evolve in a healthy way yet. It’s a ride on a bus of chaos with no built in stops for disembarking. In fact, all of it is incentivized to keep us as hostage/passengers so that our dependence on it is imprinted on us like a biological addiction.
HOWEVER this doesn’t make the internet and social media inherently bad. By rule, I try to reject absolutes, but I do think that the internet and social media tend more easily towards negative feelings, habits, and actions than we realize. And yes, I do understand the irony of saying this while leveraging the internet and potentially having had leveraged social media to get you here to read these words.
But again, that’s the beauty of the sharpness of those things; unlike the twitter feeds of Sesame Street characters, there is nuance available. When it comes to how we reject or rely upon social media and the internet, the best choice is always the thoughtful one where we train ourselves to take it or leave it, lest we end up down a rabbit hole of why two puppets are feuding over the consciousness of a rock.
HOUSECLEANING SECTION
(PLEASE READ, VERY IMPORTANT ETC ETC
Whether you are new or old to these here newsletter parts, I would like to alert you to a recent development that gives you more control over what you, the subscriber, does and does not see.
This newsletter is split into two parts: writing stuff and sports stuff.
When you become a subscriber to the newsletter, you are automatically added to the writing stuff component MEANING that you will get all newsletters like this one and anything else I do under the banner of writing.
HOWEVER, you are not automatically added to the Sports list, which is where I post about gambling, sports hot takes, threads etc.
If you would like to be added to the Sports list, you need to go to your profile and check a box to do so.
After you do that, look for this section…
Once you check that box, you’ll receive all future Sports posts delivered in the newsletter form.
The point of splitting it up like this is so that I’m not inundating non-sports people with sports content. OR vice versa.
Yaboi all about personal preference and thankfully, Substack is allowing for that now.
PICTURE SECTION
WHAT DO SUPPORTERS GET NEXT WEEK SECTION
The Introduction of my next non-fiction book, Secretly Sacred.
Supporters can read it OR listen to it OR do neither OR do both. It’s called optionality, sweetie, look it up.
READS SECTION
For Georgia Football Fans, 41 Years In the Making and Worth Every Minute. As a Red Sox fan, I always love reading stories about cathartic relief.
The Triumph and Tragedy of Yellowstone. An excellent look at why Yellowstone seemingly is available no where but also in weird places? It’s complicated.
A Super Gross But Interesting History of How the Romans Went To The Bathroom. I’m glad that modern gas stations recreate this dynamic throughout the South.
The Forgotten Medieval Habit of Two Sleeps: Found this fascinating as it reveals how strange sleep used to be and how little personal space everyone had.
Did a Viking Woman Named Gudrid Really Travel to North America in 1000 A.D.?: This one has the golden sombrero for including archaeology, Norse mythology, and historical consistencies.
GOOD DOG SECTION
TWEETS SECTION
MY UNREAD NOTIFICATIONS SECTION
MUSIC SECTION
can confirm he does NOT.
And to be honest, if we were doing a snake draft of which Sesame Street character was most likely to follow white supremacists on Twitter, Oscar the Grouch would be the most obvious, no brainer #1 draft pick of all time.
I found the unread notifications portion of the newsletter very painful and completely unnecessary. Literally, my eyes are burning and my Apple Watch is alerting me that my heart rate is too high. Get yourself together or don’t but do not inflict such horror on your Type A, control freak, borderline OCD readers, we are fragile.
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should” also me to me debating the fourth glazed donut for breakfast. Spoiler alert, I ate it.
My future nightmares thank you for the Count content because wondering what he’s counting toward or away from is hanging my every thought.