#howl

It’s not often someone summarises the flimflammery and tomfoolery of your life through the medium of beat poetry pastiche, but that’s just happened to me, thanks to Renai LeMay.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present #howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Twitter, starving hysterical tweeting,
dragging themselves through the #media140 conference at midday
looking for a Wi-Fi access point,
sticker-covered laptops burning for the sparkling invisible
connection to overloaded WordPress servers in the machinery of MediaTemple,
who Fail Whale t-shirts and MacBooks and empty-batteried iPhones sat
up decoding Telstra QR codes in the supernatural darkness of
Bar Broadway, champagne supernova floating across the crowd
contemplating WebJam,
who bared their brains to @mumbrella as one at SHTBOX and
saw @stilgherrian posting rants on odious government filters under the radiant
supervision of @greenj, now @sophieblack,
who passed through #barcamp with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Google-esque startups and new media apostasies
among the @annabelcrabb soliloquies,
who were expelled from the ranks of social media experts for crazy &
publishing obscene polls on whether @silkcharm is a sandwich,
who endlessly debated the merits of #openinternet versus #nocleanfeed,
pledging their @markpesce tweets to the #newinventors
to the #spill behind the curtain,
who got busted in their no-pants Friday blasting #heyhey
to make the trending topics, even bigger than #sydneyduststorm,
who were mystified by the various nefarious, hidden bathroom-tweeting identities of
@stephenconroy, @leslienassar or @deptofinternets,
who purgatoried their souls by debating obscure ancient Christian symbolism
with @cameronreilly
night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
with @scottrhodie at #digicitz,
incomparably hungover; litanies of satirising ecstasies directed
at slowly harmonising @bigpondteam,
#qt chatter in the House leaping toward insights of @turnbullmalcolm #rip,
illuminating all the ghost-written doings of @kevinruddpm, of time between,
inspiring anonymous re-tweets of @iconic88, parables of Churchill,
of Gandhi, of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
of @jjprojects,
most of it because @helenrazer is a homosexual,
quiet boroughs of Rainbow Dreams cafe autumn Canberran trees
hiding vivid vibrating #publicsphere and @katelundy,
@renailemay #selfcheckout rantings and endless hot cross buns out of season,
who chained themselves to @latikambourke for the endless
ride from Senate courtyard and #peopleskills
until the noise of @abcthedrum and @newmatilda brought
@barrysaunders down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the dreary light of new journalism,
who sank all night in submarine light of illuminated Twitpic self-portraits of a haloed blissful @neerav,
floated out and sat through the stale beer #adtech
noon in desolate lack of Wi-Fi, listening to the impending onset
of #STUB on the hydrogen Fridays,
who @ replied continuously seventy hours from Sydney to
Melbourne and back again for the jumpy Dawkins-esque #atheistcon hipsters,
lost battalion of misunderstood Twitlongers falling
down the stream out of the hashtag underneath tinyurls,
off the edge of too many TweetDeck columns out of the bottom of
misbegotten #mediawatch sarcasms,
hilariously @jonaholmesmw side-jabbing at @maxmarkson’s
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks of
Naomi Robson Wikipedia re-edits,
@jdub and @piawaugh Linux-Wordpress-gamer-Politico-happy-crazy-kung-fu-coziness,
and rudely satisfying shocks of Grecian choir @cacotopos, @dobes and @bernietb,
echoing through the stolid halls of two girls, one cup,
whole intellects disgorged in total #qanda recall for seven months,
and years with brilliant eyes, meat for the
#isnack20 casts on the glowing brand haloes of
sleeping 1920’s yeast extracts
calmly pondering @nickhodge @scobleizer @frankarr comparisons
who vanished into nowhere Zen aide-memoire leaving a
trail of ambiguous lolcatz picture postcards of @kcarruthers,
suffering TechCrunch sweats and inquisitive group bloggings that led to
protected indigestions of @duncanriley,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
ABC Ultimo quadrangle wondering where to go, and went,
leaving broken hearts and adolescent obsessions over @leighsales,
who concocted excuses to introduce themselves as @franksting or @gavincostello or both,
who studied new age dynamite rocketing social media theory
in single riveting one image powerpoint @trib keynotes,
who loned it through the streets of New York seeking visionary
Jobs-esque iPads who would revolutionise slowly sweating publishing monopolies,
who thought they were only happy when
@wolfcat ruminated in early morning editorialistic enthusiasm,
who jumped in powerboards with the laptop connections of @ssharwood on the impulse of
temporary netbook exhaustion,
@abcmarkscott dynamism,
and late-night @peterhau philosophising
who lounged hungry and lonesome through late-night #ignite presentations
no powerpoint option,
seeking jazz or sex or #startupcamp, and followed the gentle pencil-touchings of
@firstdogonmoon,
re-touched batarang batman cultural investigation detective agency hat warlach,
while @hortovanyi ruminated on traditional cupcake ladies.
@Twitter! Solitude! Filth! Beauty! Disused hastags and unobtainable URL redirections!
Twitter! Twitter! Nightmare of Twitter! Twitter the
loveless! Mental Twitter! Twitter the heavy
judger of men!
Twitter the incomprehensible prison! Twitter the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Twitter whose buildings are judgement!
Twitter the vast stone of war! Twitter the stunned governments!
Twitter whose mind is pure machinery! Twitter whose
blood is running money! Twitter whose fingers
are ten armies! Twitter whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Twitter whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Twitter whose eyes are a thousand seductive Tweetie-ringed windows!
Twitter whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Twitter whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Twitter whose
smokestacks and tiny insect antennae crown the cities!
Twitter! In my dreams you coalesce dripping with cynicism,
hope, courage, despair, late night wonder and unbridled wishfulness,
crossing my mind’s highway across Australia in smiling tears
to the opened hinge of my MacBook in the sedated night.
Amen.

With apologies to Allen Ginsberg.