Suggested Audio Jukebox ♬

 

[1] M.I.A. “Bird Song”

[2] Iggy Pop “Vulture”

 

Look at that blue bird acting like he’s some sort of swinging dick with his shiny beak and brand new Ray-Bans. Well I’m here to tell you not to be fooled by his cool persona for one nanosecond as appearances can be mighty deceptive and our “feathered friend” is actually something of a jumped-up prick. I can almost hear the Twitter police sirens getting closer as I pull the can on my freshest can of whoop but they can lock me up and throw away the key for all the hoots I give as I’m not leaving here until one of two conclusions is reached. Either they shoot me from my perch in cold blood, in which case, there’s about a dozen or so witnesses. Or they let me say my piece and nobody can say that they haven’t had it coming for long enough. You see, something particularly unsavory is going down in the Twitterverse and they’re in stark peril of getting crossed off my Christmas list. The gloves are off this time Grueheads and I plan to pluck this arrogant blue fuck before my rant is through or damn well die trying.

Before we get to the nuts and bolts of things, please allow me to make it abundantly clear to you all that my crusade is not against birds in general. By and large I find them rather an agreeable breed and will even forgive them defecating on my epaulets as I hear it brings good fortune. I could be feeling like death pan-fried when I wake up but, as I open my bedroom window to breathe in the morning napalm, their sweet chirped verse can part the rain clouds instantaneously. Granted, I may not be quite such a keen enthusiast as Norman Bates, but taxidermy freaks me out a little if I’m honest and I believe there are better ways to approach ornithology. I mean, that’s why binoculars were invented right? Or the least sinister reason anyhoots. I’d much rather appreciate them from a distant vantage as the two species have hardly got a lot to small talk about have we? Even Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t dissuade me from considering myself something of an entry-level bird lover and, with Big Bird as my witness, I’ve never given them a lick of trouble since the very first moment I hatched.

Okay so there have been a few felled baby birds who may have found their way beneath my sneakers from time to time but it’s not like I go out of my way to crush their tiny skulls. I blame the parents as they should be keeping close vigil of their infants, not sitting around idly while their nestlings plummet to the very pavement that happens to be under my temporary jurisdiction. Hell, I’ve even endured both Birdemic movies and they were hardly what you’d call cutting edge entertainment. Did I bitch and gripe about them being potentially the lousiest excuses for motion pictures ever excreted onto the marketplace? No I damn well celebrated them for the very same reason. Acting isn’t an easy profession to excel in and I fully understand how hard it is to coax a believable performance from anything possessing a beak. Thus I cut them some slack as that’s the kind of guy I am. Well guess what? I’m all outta slack Jack and reckon it’s high time we take the power back.

Okay so here’s the lowdown. I’ve been utilizing Twitter as my social platform of choice for well over three years now and, over that time, have been given precious little reason to climb atop my soapbox and lay the smackdown. Having been burned by Facebook recently, I barely ever show my face there anymore, as I find the walls come closing in a lot faster and struggle with ongoing depression as it is so avoid it out of self-preservation as much as anything else. However, there’s something about Twitter that suits me far better, and I’ve made plenty of lifelong friends there who I know will take me as I am, flaws and all. Recently I have been on something of a resurgence and releasing new content on the site pretty much daily in an attempt to remain connected with those who inspire me to keep on, regardless of cloud bursts. This is all well and good but this revival has coincided with something that I’m not altogether comfortable with and my job becomes a thousand times harder as a result of this meddling.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, the blue bird has decided that I’m not worthy of flying free with all the other chickadees. My thing has always been to mail my posts personally to anyone who has expressed an interest and I’m assuming that the powers that be consider that spamming. I’m caviar motherfuckers, an honest and hard-working individual not looking to downgrade anyone’s meal ticket, and certainly not the human equivalent of luncheon meat. Yet something has their feathers all a ruffle and I’m buggered with a budgie beak if I know what that is. It may have escaped their attention that I am but one man with only a solitary pot to piss in right now and could do with not being victimized when there are literally legions of manky-assed trolls dropping blazing bags of squirrel shit on our front porches, ringing the bell, and scuttling away totally unpunished. Do I badger Sandra Bullock just because I find myself strangely indifferent to her? Never once and, should she pop up on my feed unannounced, then I’d say something cordial about her marvellous turn in Gravity and wish her all the well in the world. I may have given Justin Bieber and Donald Trump a dash of stick on occasion but I don’t tag them in my posts as I don’t wish to get into a full-blown slanging match. Indeed, you could say I’m a model citizen.

It’s simple, I don’t put anything out there that is intended to needle or demoralize, and there are far more heinous creatures mincing about the Twitterverse than I. So why then do they incessantly castigate me and do so without supplying anything resembling rhyme or reason? When I hit that tweet tab, where does my communication go as it sure as shit doesn’t end up where it’s intended over half the time. I seem to have figured it out that my tweets only become visible if I’m fortunate enough for someone to spot them as they’re posted and hit like or retweet. Should that fail, then they become lost in a vortex and leave me feeling all pariah like. Meanwhile, if I’m engaging in conversation with someone during live feed, I end up having said conflab with myself while they’re left suspecting me to be an ignorant bastard. It’s borderline cruelty Twitter. I feel like I’m twelve again and out way past my curfew when it’s over thirty years since I perfected the art of wiping front to back. Not saying I always do but I can if need be and that makes me a big boy dagnabbit.

In an attempt to tow whatever invisible line they’re requesting me to, I have started to use hashtags more often and play the game by the rules that they created. I’m also mindful not to send out en masse in one fell swoop and attempt to stagger my output through the day so as not to overload the servers. Even more pathetically, I actually retweet my own correspondences now in a vain attempt to keep them circulating in the Twitterverse so that someone, anyone can notice how much graft I’m putting in here. Mercifully there are a few diehards who actively seek out my posts and know that my Twitter photo feed is effectively a catalogue of every single movement on my site. Just one comment can make my day and it hasn’t reached the point where the blue bird denies me these few simple pleasures. But it’s bloody well heading that way. I’d actually rather be tossed into Twitter Jail for being naughty than the slow torture they seem to have planned for me. Something has to give or else their platform becomes redundant and it’s my only available tool to remain connected.

Of course, I put in the legwork to get to the bottom of this ongoing problem, reluctantly it has to be said, and tapped up the great Google gods for some long overdue answers. However, that turned out to be utterly fruitless as, either nobody else in the world is experiencing this particular problem, or no other fucker has the faintest clue how to solve it either. This is where frustration begins to overspill as their technical support is nigh-on non-existent and entails leaping through numerous burning hoops only to be presented with…more burning hoops. Whatever happened to off-shore call centres? I may not be a fan per se, but at least you get to hear someone breathing at the other end. Instead it remains a sodding mystery while, all the while, my blood pressure continues to rise and I get ever closer to achieving cardiac arrest.

Talk about stuck between a rock and a hard place. Moaning like a fishwife may not be my personal bag, but I feel justified in stomping my shit-kickers some here as this cruelty simply cannot be allowed to continue. That said, with bankable logic at such a woeful premium, it appears as though the only course of action available is to suck it up like phlegm in a flute until which time as the powers that be have their fill of hassling me and pick on some other luckless wazzock instead for a change. Perhaps I should try pleading and hope I sicken them enough to lose interest. I know one thing, they may have the best of me, but they’d better keep their filthy flappers away from the rest as I’m not giving that up without a good old-fashioned bar brawl. Twittered I may well be and for how long I cannot say at this point but I don’t need 140 characters to flick ’em the bird, I just need to create a middle finger emoji. You’d think that someone would have come up with that by now wouldn’t you? They probably did and tweeted it out but no bugger ever saw it. Cruel, cruel irony. I’ll tell you this for free, if Birdemic 3 ever gets made, they can damn well poke it. Whatcha got to say about that blue bird? Caw? How dreadfully predictable. Now where’s my hunting rifle?

Click here to read Attack of The Drones