Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

I can’t really get behind Follow Friday. I like it when people mention me, perhaps because I enjoy the confidence boost of someone saying what I think is interesting. But honestly, I don’t think anyone new has ever followed me from being mentioned, and I don’t think I’ve ever followed someone who was mentioned. In spite of the fact that I feel guilty for not giving those people props back, I feel like it would be a disservice to all 20 people and 140 spam bots following me to simply spam a bunch of names of people who have mentioned me.

It wasn’t always that I felt so negative about this particular aspect of Friday, but these days it seems like follow lists are just that: lists of names. If you throw my name in there with about 10 other people in one of 3 tweets that is nothing but names and “#FF”, it doesn’t really show much of an effort. The first times I saw anything about Follow Friday, it had “#FollowFriday” and a single name with a reason to follow them. That’s something worth doing. It shows you’ve put some thought into it. Of course, these days if I actually spent that much time it’d practically seem like a love letter to spend that much time thinking about a single person on my list.

Twitter’s always been a pretty ephemeral medium, so it makes sense that over time processes that occur on it will be condensed. But the law of diminishing utility comes into effect nonetheless. If you give me more and more names and do that at the expense of the “why,” because it’s “more efficient” that way, then you’ve lost any sort of meaning with it. Few people will click through the list and figure out if they want to follow those people as well.

I doubt this will impact anyone and prevent them from doing their own list come Friday, and that’s fine, really. I don’t intend to convince people, but merely explain why I won’t just “hit you back,” as it were. I prefer a high signal-to-noise ratio in my personal Twitter feed, despite what it may seem like sometimes. That’s why I skip the “Good Morning!” tweets and the (to me) meaningless “#FF” list.

Now, #WhiskeyFriday is all well and good, and #FridayReads, in spite of not being alliterative, is just fine by me. Like #MusicMonday (which I haven’t seen in quite some time), I am always ready for some new media (but not New Media) recommendations. I’ve also been told about #FridayRide, though I’ve never actually seen that one before. Hey, biking to work is always good (although for me, it might take about three or four hours each way).

If life were like a yarn twisted about, what kind of clothing would your existence make? It seems like one of those stupid questions that stupid people ask to get stupid responses that people think are deep. There’s nothing really to it. Your life isn’t cloth, it’s flesh and blood and bone and pain and misery. That’s what I’ve always thought, what I’ll always think. Sometimes people get fooled by the shadow of their fathers and mothers, and think there’s someone watching over their shoulder, but it’s just a tree scraping against the window, nothing more.

We’re all just empty little hobgoblins pressing up against the roof of our world, with most ignorant of the quiet vacuum lying just beyond. It’s big, and it’s cold, and it’s empty. Our lives, they’re just a fraction of a blink to a universe that’s only now waking up. Even the people who “matter” are just insects crawling next to us. They found a tiny little crumb to make them seem important, but they all died too, when the ever-impending flood rose up and washed them away. Maybe the stupid and the lazy have it right; you’re going to die, you’re going to end up not mattering in the slightest, and you’re going to be alone; why bother making anything bigger out of it than it is?

I want to matter, I want to be important. But a flash in the pan is nothing to write home about, and the soup will still be cold. Even if I could turn this world into a burning star with my passion, the stars themselves die long before the space that birthed them could be considered young. Why am I fighting, then?

I don’t know.

I should get that printed on a shirt.

I wrote this about a week ago, in response to a then-current news item. Fearing a tide of Charles Village people (or anyone, really) who would read into this that I just didn’t give a shit about someone dying, and come and harass me, I didn’t post it. However, I guess at this point I’m either going to have to post it or delete it, and I’m getting tired of deleting the thoughts I have. So, while no longer timely (and thoroughly unedited), here’s my thoughts:

If you’re one of the people who follows me from Baltimore, you’re probably aware of the homicide that happened in Charles Village this weekend. I definitely am; it was at the end of my street. I wasn’t made aware of it until the next morning, somehow I missed the commotion that must have been made. However, I haven’t missed, for the past three days, repeated news crews, and a press conference the Commissioner of Police himself attended. Huzzah, you might be expecting me to say, the city is responding to a violent crime in my neighborhood with a swift hand and recognizing that there’s a problem.

Except I’m not saying that.

The thing is, and I know I’ll sound callous and unfeeling for saying it, is that Stephen Pitcairn is a small number in a large statistic. Baltimore is not a safe city. There have been one hundred and twenty homicides in the city limits this year so far. And while Mr. Pitcairn was doing valuable research, every single one of those other people were flesh and blood just the same, and so few have received the attention he has. It’s partially due to who he is, and partially to do with where he was when it happened.

And that’s really the problem. I don’t want people to marginalize his death, but I don’t want people to marginalize the 119 other people who’ve died this year, either. But they are marginalized, because so many of them occurred in poor, black neighborhoods where that’s just part of the deal. We just finally caught some of the spillover in our little hamlet between multiple sections of town people colloquially call “ghetto.”

I’ve seen a number of extra police in the days since it happened, typically buzzing around the exact location, as though there’s a mystical significance to that specific spot and any future murders would only take place there. I do not feel safer for the over-the-top show. I don’t feel any less safe than I did last week, as a matter of fact.

Because this is Baltimore, this is one of the murder capitals of the world, and if you felt invincible cause your house had some cute paint and you can walk to a farmer’s market in a parking lot, even though you can hear the semi-automatic fire that periodically rings out from Waverly, then you’re a fool. You’re not any less safe than you were before, your eyes have just been opened to the reality of where you live and you’re hysterical. And it’s disrespectful to the people who, when murders happen around the corner from them, are ignored.

It’s a major tragedy that Stephen Pitcairn died. It’s an outrage that the people who did it were released repeatedly into the world after apparently committing other robberies. But it shouldn’t be so much more than when someone else dies senselessly. The city is dying all around us, and we can’t just draw a line in the sand and say “Not HERE. You can kill them THERE but we will HAVE our painted ladies, damn it!” Cause the problem with a line in the sand is that when the wave comes crashing down it gets washed away.