Monday 1/9/23
I'm not going to be putting anything up on Twitter anymore. There's no point right now for me to do that. I'm just giving things away for free for the entertainment, enlightenment, and enjoyment of the people on my side--who are mostly assholes who take from me, and are usually up to something passive aggressive, because it's me, with their plotting in their little brains--and this isn't any way to move the pile forward with anything else at the moment.
That you could just buy the blue checkmark changed things. Everyone hates, fears, and envies me because of greatness. I mentioned the people on my side. They see a way to get me. They can profit by my genius, be entertained by it, and then cut me by not so much as hitting the like button. "I'll get him. Ha." Or by hitting it for only a certain kind of thing, because they might know that something else means more to me. Or by commenting without hitting the like button. See how that's a hit? A ding? A cut? "I didn't give you that like. Take that, Fleming."
I play it very close to the vest. I'll let someone like that think we're friends or whatever, if there's a single reason for me to do so, but they are in for the rudest of awakenings--and a very public one--when things do turn for me, which they will. That will take place in these pages, and it will be a case of, "Holy shit, why did he do that to me?"
But it will be spelled out why I did. And it will be justified. It will be very thorough. Excruciatingly so for the other party. As for the world: they want to go sideways or down. They want to look left, right, and move in either direction--a parallel direction--or else reach down. To look or reach up makes a person feel bad about themselves. I am as up as anyone can be. I am the only person who has anything consistently worthwhile to say. Anything original. And it's both every time.
No one else has anything like that on something such as Twitter. No knowledge, no wit, no insight, no command of language. People want this from me, when they see it or know to see it. But the like and the follow is a form of giving credit within the social media world, just as to not like and to not follow is a way to ding and cut, to pathetically try to even the score with someone that someone else knows is better than they are.
Now when you go into the comments beneath someone else's post, you see all of these people with blue checkmarks commenting, whereas before you didn't see this; the thinking behind the set-up was that the blue checkmark people were too important to comment, that that was what the folk, the dirty unwashed masses did.
All of those blue checkmarks in the comments that you see now, were bought, for whatever Twitter charges. You have to be so pathetic to do that. But people are. People are so mentally ill that if you could buy the Hart trophy in the NHL, they would, and tell other people they won the MVP. I'm not saying a checkmark ever meant anything. None of this shit does. I'm saying the shift in perception has hurt me further, made it so that even fewer people will see anything I post.
The way the checkmark worked before was that Twitter had to give me one because of where my work ran. Despite having an industry against me. Thus I became the person with the fewest amount of followers--by far--to have a blue checkmark in the history of the website. That's an actual fact. I have 200 followers. Do you see the effect of greatness? People want to hurt you and stop you when they see greatness. We see greatness in no one, pretty much. Everyone sees it here, and they recognize it instantly and they behave as antagonistically as possible. As is possible for them.
What do I mean by that last qualification? They are cowards who are terrified of me and what I can do and how I could embarrass them if they tried to step forward and be a direct antagonist, so the technique is to show no support, to do passive aggressive games, to try to fuck with me if they know me and hit the like button for something like the blog but not the masterpiece of fiction.
(As I've said before, I've done experiments where I take something from a story and pass it off as the blog, and that same kind of person will hit the like button. Why? Because if one reads these pages, or knows the fiction, it's obvious that fiction is what I most do. It's the ocean. It's what I'm here for. Everything else is the river. Because of it being what I most do, most am, and because it, more than anything, is what would allow me to change the world to the good more than anything ever has, and because I know this, and because it's also obvious, and because it's clear as a result of these things that it is what matters most to me, that person will make a point of not hitting the like button for the fiction-related post, and will try to insult me by doing it for the blog and some bit of whatever I put up in five minutes. It's meant to cut. In the passive aggressive style. Because they have that knowledge of everything I just said. If I take the exact same words and frame them as something else, they're more likely to behave differently, because they think it means less to me. And if they can make it about them--like they "co-sign" on some brilliant thing I've said--which is a form of stolen valor, on the intellectual side of things--then all the better.)
No one is going to do anything without me knowing the full motivation of why they're doing it. It's not possible. If you look at my Twitter, it's one brilliant, outstandingly well-written, fascinating post after another. You could make a book of them. If you read my Twitter and nothing else over the course of your life, it could change your life. This throwaway thing I have been doing. Which is nothing compared to my actual work.
Some of the people on my side--again, nominally--are also so awestruck that they don't know what to do, even at the most basic of levels, and nothing is more basic than the like button. They have no idea what to say, what could be "good enough." They also don't want to seem like they're kissing my ass, because that would cost them the respect that they also figure I wouldn't ever have for them, because of what I am in their mind. Thus, they sit everything out entirely, and in a way, as I've said, that kind of person behaves the same way towards me as the publishing person who wants me to die. Silence becomes the weapon of suppression. An absence of voiced support is vital to suppression. So, my people--again, I can't stress how loosely I use that term--like "friends" and "family" and "admirers" are contributing in a real way, in their way, to my hell. They are not trying to act in cahoots with publishing people, but that's tantamount to what most of them are always doing with me.
And people are so weak and cowardly, that if they see a case where many other people aren't giving expressed support, they can't do it on their own. Even at the lowest, simplest of levels, the most token. They can't be that lone person, or that person among a very few. So it becomes a case of that iceberg of a zero always staring you back in the face, and staring me back in the face, and I think, "Fuck these people, man." They're the same people who would say they had an association with me later, or we were friends, or I used to write them, or we joked about this, or they were one of the first people in the world who read "Fitty" or "Best Present Ever" or whatever because I sent it to them privately, or they did a book of mine at their tiny press, leaving out that they made me beg and scrape and ignored me and essentially worked to sabotage the book after. Wouldn't even put a tweet up about it or the amazing things the author was regularly doing. Why play to this gallery right now?
There's a new wrinkle, though, and that's part of why I'm shutting this down. What's happening now is even fewer people than ever are looking at anything I might post, because of everyone else buying the blue checkmark, and the algorithms that have always worked against me are doing so to a greater degree currently. People think I bought that blue checkmark. They have no clue who I am, these people who might see something of mine for the first time, because everyone makes a point to say nothing favorable about my work or me as part of the suppression. (You know what else happens a lot? If someone sees me write an op-ed, they think I'm an op-ed writer, but on that particular op-ed subject. If someone reads Brackets, they think I write books like Brackets, not that there has ever been a book like Brackets. If someone reads a Beatles piece, they think I devote my life to the Beatles. If someone reads a jazz piece, they think I only write about jazz. What an editor sees first from me--doesn't matter what it is--will often prejudice them against everything else I do, because it's human nature to think I couldn't do anything else at the level of what they just happened to read. The piece doesn't matter--the order does. Whatever it is that's first. But what happens is someone out in the world reads something by me. Let's say it's on sports. Then they read something else. Let's say it's on music. More often than not, they think that's from two different Colin Flemings. So on Twitter, they don't even think I'm the same guy. Because it's not possible. And this is at the start--when they've seen only two or three things. That's another problem--what I am is beyond the scope of what most people can begin to allow might be true or could exist. Especially when they are just thinking on their own. If they were in a crowd, where others were saying what there is and what needs to be said, then it's easier to think what is undeniably true, what is proven as true. But on their own? In that mere moment? They won't begin to allow for the possibility of even the smallest corner of what is the biggest of pictures.) Because no one who has ever published anything once in most of the places my work has been in wouldn't have 20,000 followers just off of that. Again, I have 200. So they think I'm some guy who just bought one. They don't look at the bio. If they did, they would think it's an error or there was something they weren't understanding. When people think there is something they don't understand, they back away from it, lest they embarrass themselves by revealing their ignorance. They can't get out of the room fast enough. On the internet, that takes the form of clicking on something else.
Put simply, it's impossible to believe that someone that fascinating, who knows everything about every subject, who knows how life itself functions at this point, the meanings behind the veil, with that background, could have 200 followers. If you look at the posts, it's impossible to believe that there could be no likes. Everyone behaves a form of the same way towards me though, on account of greatness. Unsurpassed greatness is, and always has been, and deepens as, the problem to be solved. That's a hell of a problem. That should be what makes everything happen, and I have to try to retain faith that it will be. When? I don't know. But hopefully. But at some point either way.
But that's how the world is right now. And really how it has always been, but it's more so now. Remember the lines of Thoreau? The public demands an average person, he said. The worst one could be--in his estimation--wasn't just a person of greatness, but what he called a person--the person--of absolute greatness. I'm ringing the bell for that right now, as clearly as anyone ever has, and that's not me being a dick or hubristic or anything. It's in evidence in every single thing I do, say, write. It is proven. And the proof stands before us all, accessible to all. Undeniable for all.
I saw some guy yesterday with fifty-six followers who had the blue checkmark. I clicked on his profile. He claimed to be a songwriter and he said he was influenced by everyone from Paul Simon to Neil Young and "others." That was his bio. This fifty-something pudge-ball with a little beard. And cats. Who was probably an accountant. He had a link to what is no doubt a terrible song he wrote about peace for the Ukraine on YouTube. He bought the checkmark because he thinks it made him legitimate as this thing he's pretending to be. That's how delusional and broken most people are. Most don't buy the checkmark--but most people are that broken and mentally ill.
People who don't know me and see a tweet of mine pop up on, say, the Patriots or the Beatles, think I'm that guy like the person I mentioned above, but the jock version, on account of my photo. And if they did click on my profile, and saw my bio, their brain would overheat from confusion, and they'd just move on.
I'll leave it up. My profile, that is. But Twitter only makes sense for me--I tried for years to get it going on its own, with what I posted, but that's not going to work--as something I use when I already have the reach and the numbers. To treat it as a pulpit in a place filled with people waiting for my words in another forum.
Right now, there is no one in that venue, and the doors are locked. I can get in and go up to the pulpit, but there's no one there to receive my words, save a few people--these would be "my people"--who have worked their way in through a busted window in the back, but they're also there--with maybe two exceptions--to fuck with me. I give them the little terms, the "brother man" and what not, if I have to, but I know exactly what they're doing. And why extend any more time and effort to entertain and enthrall them? They have millions--it's millions--of other things they can read by me in many other places, and to preach to a very small choir that is also in some very real way against you has no point that I can justify as part of my days right now, during this stretch of the war. And I give so much away for free as it is, when in reality, I shouldn't be giving a single word away for free, and I won't later on.
There is no one else within that hall, and there's nothing I can post that will bring them in. There's nothing I can post that will bring three people in, let alone three million. Let alone thirty million, which is when we'll begin to be talking about the kind of numbers that make sense here. This isn't the way to achieve anything. It's an "after" thing, not a "via" thing. I may just put up links to my work, or links from here, without much in the way of prefatory words or explanation. But go and look if you like at what I had been doing, it's fascinating, right? And all of those subjects. See all of the zeros? This is no hard and fast rule, no decree; but rather what I'm pretty much going to do right now because it makes better sense presently. Anything I might have posted that was a thought, an observation, I'll just put up in here.
