What, am I supposed to just not check Twitter every five minutes?
The Giants have a Carlos Correa to not sign, people!
Look, I get that Elon Musk, after having unwisely spent an awful lot of money to purchase Twitter, now has to boost engagement numbers on the site. I understand that when he tweets things like “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he is doing it both to court the young right-wing incel-adjacent audience that has become his primary support base, and also to anger the left-wing bloc on Twitter that will quote tweet dunks on him, making numbers go up and making the site more attractive to advertisers. I get it that my presence at all on Twitter is helping, in its own infinitesimal way, a man whose blasé attitudes towards facts and morality have earned him the approval of famous Twitter users like Baked Alaska and Catturd.
But, like, what if Carlos Correa signs with the Giants and I miss it?
I mean, he won’t. I know he won’t. I have said multiple times that the Giants will giants it up and he’ll go to, like, the Cubs or whatever. Then we’ll all be horribly disappointed, briefly fantasize that Dansby Swanson will come to San Francisco as the heir to Brandon Crawford’s title of King Dreamy Shortstop, and watch Swanson too go somewhere else. This is all obviously going to happen, what with time being a flat circle and whatnot.
But what if it doesn’t?
At some point, the Giants will win on a big-time free agent. Maybe it won’t be this year. Maybe it won’t be next year. Maybe it won’t be until Larry Baer goes away forever and is replaced as President and CEO by someone who is at least 80% less Larry Baer-y. I don’t know. But…maybe it will be this year. There will be a year when it’s this year, after all. Why can’t it be 2022? Why the fuck can’t it be 2022?
Again, I know it won’t be, even though it seems like the field is pretty well cleared out for the Giants. I know how these things go, despite ample reason to hope. I am well aware that Correa will not sign here, although if there’s ever been a free agent who could be swayed solely by money and a team with the money and the need to sway him, it’s Correa and the Giants. I think that Carlos Correa will not sign in San Francisco, just like every other free agent (with apologies to Mitch Haniger and Sean Manaea) does not sign in San Francisco.
But if I’m wrong this time — the one time — and I miss the reactions? I’ll never forgive myself. Because as awful as Twitter is in a lot of ways, like for example how its owner weaponizes pedophilia accusations to attack people against whom he has some personal vendetta, when a group you’re part of celebrates a thing you’re also happy about, it’s fantastic.
There’s a burst of jubilant energy you get, and a seemingly endless stream of people saying funny and clever things about this thing you’re happy about, and then someone tries to be a downer about it and all of those people tell him to shut up and somehow that just makes it better. You get into a group DM where you all just write “OMG” at each other, and 30 people post GIFs you’ve seen before, but then one person posts a GIF you haven’t seen before, and it’s exactly the right one for the moment, and plenty of things in the world aren’t perfect but this, right now, this is.
But then someone fucking retweets Elon Musk again and it ruins everything.
There is, in its own way, a scene on Twitter, and if you’ve been part of it for a while, then you don’t want to miss it. But Musk makes you want to miss it, makes you realize that the party is dying. It’s not that there was a noise complaint and someone called the cops, but a guy told this other guy about it, and he told his buddy, and his buddy told this weird asshole who never gets invited to parties, and now he’s rolling up with his entourage full of white supremacists.
Maybe it’s a big crowd and you can avoid him for a while. If you work really hard at it, you almost certainly can. But people are still going to be talking about him, and he still might show up at any minute, state his opinion, and then close his eyes and loudly decry woke culture when you start to tell him he’s wrong.
The place is worse with him there, in other words. It is necessarily worse. If we’re being honest, it had a lot of problems before that you ignored for the sake of the party — the house has a bad roof, the neighbors are kinda shitty, the perfectly nice trans people are constantly getting berated by JK Rowling — but it’s hit a point where the decline is undeniable.
Did I ever say where the party even is? I guess it’s in a house? Sure, let’s go with that. Anyway, the metaphor is over, so it doesn’t matter.
It is an ironclad rule of human nature that a sufficiently rich person with enough determination can make anything shitty. Not only is Elon Musk doing this on Twitter, he’s also making it more morally unjustifiable to even use the site. When you use the site, you’re supporting him and his harmful conspiracy theories and his theory that he, Elon Musk, should be the enter of everything. Using Twitter is basically telling him, “Yeah, that’s all fine as long as I can still tweet out the GIF of Michael Scott yelling out “No!” when Toby comes back/”
It’s not a good thing to do. It’s not a helpful thing to do. The sooner we can all wean ourselves off of that site, the better we’ll be. If we ever should have been on it, we certainly shouldn’t anymore.
But on the other hand, the Giants still might sign Correa…
“… when a group you’re part of celebrates a thing you’re also happy about, it’s fantastic. There’s a burst of jubilant energy you get, and a seemingly endless stream of people saying funny and clever things about this thing you’re happy about, … and 30 people post GIFs you’ve seen before, but then one person posts a GIF you haven’t seen before, and it’s exactly the right one for the moment, and plenty of things in the world aren’t perfect but this, right now, this is.”
This is all true. It would be nice if there were some community webpage in which the community members do exactly this. And, it is … I mean … would be awesome! I might even lurk around that webpage for almost 2 decades and enjoy every minute of it, even after it transitions from a longtime brilliant writer, who would get hired by the Athletic or something, to another likable entertaining writer. And, the webpage could create a podcast, which I would listen to Monday mornings on my walk to work, which would feature a commenter that would lead me to his own humorous web page that I would enjoy every week as well. That would be awesome!! Also, there would be capybaras.
Also, I deleted my Twitter account as soon as I saw someone show up with a sink. Anyone who claims to be a “free speech absolutist” while supporting Ron Don’t Say Gay DeSantis lacks too much self-awareness for me.