Mexican Superman: Undocumented Nephilim
Metadata
Highlights
- I hated Twitter because of course I hated Twitter; if you didn’t hate Twitter, you weren’t there. Hating it was the only way to live in it; that was word for love in its language. I hated Twitter, and I still hate Twitter, and an alarming percentage of everything I love or am proud of derives from the time I wasted on that stupid website, complaining about how the website is garbage.
- In a naive decade, in a city full of construction sites, in glittery, restrictive unflattering dresses that bunch up at the waist and droop at the neckline, in a hotel where the rooms are cheap and the drinks are expensive and the ballroom is full of twee taxidermy and enormous green indoor palms, where obliterated young people throw themselves into the maelstrom of one another, at two in the morning, at the far shore of the future, drunk girls in a bathroom have the key to all mythologies. If twitter was a garbage website, and it was, it was also this, too, the bathroom, and the drunk girls, the lingering smell of coke and vomit, and the purest form of unconditional love.
- The only punctuation that exists is the exclamation point; it has just now become illegal to use other punctuation. There are too many people in every single frame and every single one of them is famous. Nobody’s face is correctly visible and no one’s relationship to anyone else makes any sense.
- Twitter was the city and we all knew each other from the city. All of us on here lived for a while in the city of Babel, miraculously speaking one another’s language, the previous barriers that had kept us from connection removed, building marketplaces and town squares, and dark underground bars and fancy restaurants, building palaces and gardens and amphitheaters and houses and bedrooms and lecture halls and printing presses and offices. We all lived here in the city together, running into old friends and making friends with strangers on the walk to the grocery store and the train to work, eavesdropping on heartbreaks, and getting into arguments, and dodging the wild-eyed preachers screaming about the end of the world.
- But Twitter allowed me to enter the world, because it rendered the world into text, and in that form I had an all-at-once fluency in things that had been previously out of reach. It was a city and I made a home in it, and now that city is gone.
- If Twitter was ever utopian or even good or pleasant for any of its users, it certainly isn’t now, and likely wasn’t ever any of those things. I don’t mean to imply that it is, or even that it once was. I mean that I once thought it was, which is the difference between love and reality. Once I lived in a city, and in that city everyone could miraculously talk to one another, and then we couldn’t, or maybe had to admit that we never had been able to, and then one day the city was gone.
title: “Mexican Superman: Undocumented Nephilim”
author: “substack.com”
url: ”https://substack.com/inbox”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
Mexican Superman: Undocumented Nephilim
Metadata
Highlights
- I hated Twitter because of course I hated Twitter; if you didn’t hate Twitter, you weren’t there. Hating it was the only way to live in it; that was word for love in its language. I hated Twitter, and I still hate Twitter, and an alarming percentage of everything I love or am proud of derives from the time I wasted on that stupid website, complaining about how the website is garbage.
- In a naive decade, in a city full of construction sites, in glittery, restrictive unflattering dresses that bunch up at the waist and droop at the neckline, in a hotel where the rooms are cheap and the drinks are expensive and the ballroom is full of twee taxidermy and enormous green indoor palms, where obliterated young people throw themselves into the maelstrom of one another, at two in the morning, at the far shore of the future, drunk girls in a bathroom have the key to all mythologies. If twitter was a garbage website, and it was, it was also this, too, the bathroom, and the drunk girls, the lingering smell of coke and vomit, and the purest form of unconditional love.
- Twitter was the city and we all knew each other from the city. All of us on here lived for a while in the city of Babel, miraculously speaking one another’s language, the previous barriers that had kept us from connection removed, building marketplaces and town squares, and dark underground bars and fancy restaurants, building palaces and gardens and amphitheaters and houses and bedrooms and lecture halls and printing presses and offices. We all lived here in the city together, running into old friends and making friends with strangers on the walk to the grocery store and the train to work, eavesdropping on heartbreaks, and getting into arguments, and dodging the wild-eyed preachers screaming about the end of the world.
- But Twitter allowed me to enter the world, because it rendered the world into text, and in that form I had an all-at-once fluency in things that had been previously out of reach. It was a city and I made a home in it, and now that city is gone.
- If Twitter was ever utopian or even good or pleasant for any of its users, it certainly isn’t now, and likely wasn’t ever any of those things. I don’t mean to imply that it is, or even that it once was. I mean that I once thought it was, which is the difference between love and reality. Once I lived in a city, and in that city everyone could miraculously talk to one another, and then we couldn’t, or maybe had to admit that we never had been able to, and then one day the city was gone.