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This blog is a table of contents for my Twitter threads, starting in 2012, and working through toward the present. I include links to the threads, as well as quick descriptions of the threads.
From time to time, I like to do a blog post reflecting on the time frame of the threads I've most recently posted to this blog.
Below are the Twitter threads I wrote from January through May of 2017. As you can see, my posting on Twitter was pretty spotty during the first five months of 2017. I only did about 30 Twitter threads, versus about 100 for June through December of 2017.
There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, I wasn't going to as many places in the first few months of the year. This was partly because my car had broken down and I was too depressed (really) to buy a new one.
We also had Car2Go, the distributed car-rental system/app, in Denver for a few years (service in Denver stopped in October of 2019). And when my car broke down, I started using Car2Go instead of buying a new car. This limited my range of action. But I actually still went places. But for the first few months of 2017, I still didn't go anywhere, even using car to go. It wasn't my car as much as it was my sense of depression and exhaustion.
I'd probably simply burnt myself out in 2016. But I was also suffering from a lot of bad sentiment in my community -- especially in Denver's art community where, for a number of reasons, I basically had enough people turn against me to make it impossible for me to continue interacting in that space.
But I think I spent a lot of early 2017 trying to make one last attempt to find a more acceptable foothold in Denver's art community. I made the attempt via Instagram -- which really is how folks in the visual arts community speak with each other. So I shifted to Instagram and off Twitter one last time. But by the end of May of 2017, when I realized I would never be accepted by Denver's art community, I essentially shifted off of Instagram and back onto Twitter once and for all.
At the end of May of 2017, I also ended my relationship with the art gallery I'd been helping in Denver. I'd helped them do a lot of good stuff and make a really important transition. But, at the end of the day, they'd ended up taking a lot of people on board who didn't want me around. The gallery didn't defend me. The people who didn't want me around won. And I just simply had to end my relationship with the gallery.
Just touching on social media for one last moment, though -- I should note that in April of 2017, I hit my high point of followers on Twitter. I reached over 1,000 followers on Twitter.
But it's kind of crazy -- that moment really marks what I mean when I say I had people in the community who were following me and trying to shut me down.
When I sent out a tweet thanking everybody for getting me over 1,000 followers, I got backlash -- and I got backlash from exactly the people I'd thought I would get it from. Suddenly, I got maybe a dozen or so random subtweets retweeted onto my timeline saying things like, "Only arrogant people talk about how many followers they have," or, "Oh, look at me, I have 1,000 followers! Like that even means anything," and all this stuff.
But not long after those subtweets, my follower count suddenly dropped -- by something along the lines of 150 followers. Just like that. And I basically stayed at around 850 followers until mid-2019, when I completely cleared out my profile of followed and following accounts.
But this hopefully just goes to show what I mean when I talk about having a group of folks -- somewhere, somehow -- following me and aiming to shut me down. This was a pretty concrete (online, lol) occurrence.
In April of 2017 I moved out of a place I'd been living in in Denver. For years I'd been living in apartment or shared-living-space situations. And I'd been tortured in all of them. But the final months I spent in the place I left in 2017 were sheer torture, almost an indescribable level of torture from the person who lived above me. I kind of took my level of activity down to a minimum just so I could survive (I'm not kidding) the torture I was experiencing from the person who lived above me (who was also, at that time, my landlord).
In April of 2017, my step-grandmother also passed away. I ended up a few days here and there in April and May helping my family take care of my grandma's final business.
I think I must have been depressed after my grandma passed away. But I was also sort of energized, as well. I realized that I needed to focus on my life. Who knows when any of us could pass away? I also knew my grandma would be disappointed in me if I let myself become inactive, now that I'd found ways in my life to be active. So I got focused on my life and activity again.
I also inherited about one-third of my grandparents' book collection. This in itself inspired me, as suddenly I had a lot of my grandpa's and grandma's intellectual lives in my house. They had tons of great books! And some kind of silly and narrow-minded ones. So I was inspired by the prospect of reading the books. And that energized me throughout the second half of 2017.
I also think that my life was stabilized by mid-2017 with my job situation. I had a steady, okay-paying consultant gig throughout 2017. That was supplemented at times by other consultancy gigs throughout the year. So I felt like I was doing okay economically. Getting financially stabilized by mid-2017 helped me out a lot in terms of feeling comfortable coming back to Twitter more consistently.
But this isn't to say that I didn't do anything in the first five months of 2017. In fact, another reason I wasn't doing threads consistently on Twitter was that I was spending almost every single day in February on March doing posts in a blog where I transcribed by old paper dream journals online. I kept a dedicated paper dream journal from 2004 to 2010. I logged thousands of dreams during that time. A bulk of my transcribing efforts -- getting those dreams online -- took place in early 2017.
I also did quite a bit of research for some amateur novels I'd been thinking of writing. While I ended up not writing or completing some of those novels, I did complete one, Summer Azure, in December of 2017. I actually did hundreds of pages of note-taking for that amateur novel -- which is one reason I'm so proud of it.
So I wasn't very active on Twitter in the first five months of 2017. Nevertheless, I hope you find the 30 or so threads I wrote during that time to be interesting or entertaining.
Thank you again for visiting my blog!
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