Twitter as an open mic poetry reading

I took my friend Bruce down to Beerandblog. It's a great slice of Portland with creative geeks drinking high proof beer at the Green Dragon Brewpub. This week it was in the outdoor patio by the quanza hut (which causes a slowdown in the drinking as you can't just wander up to the bar and order -- taking it out, onto the sidewalk and into the garden violates some sort of OLCC rule).

It's an interesting mix of creative extroverts and not-so-creative extroverts with a number of folks who would really like to be extroverts but just haven't had enough beer yet. Tech jokes go over well, word play is normal communication, and the mismatched socks aren't by accident.

Tonight's main event was the #whattheshit readings of favorite tweets. Think open mic poetry reading with the found poems of the 140 character postings one finds on twitter. When asked if I would read favorite tweets in a theatrical, poetic style I said, "Sure!" not realizing that most of the dozen or so participants had been researching for weeks to find a perfect blend of tweets to recite.

I quickly got on my phone's web browser and started searching for crowd pleasing tidbits. I started with "Michael Jackson" thinking that being topical might be good, but, really, I have to think in retrospect, that was dumb… So I moved on to "fuck twitter" which got some interesting tweets, but I decided I didn't want EVERY thing I said to have a FUCK in the middle of it. I finally searched on "twitter sucks" which definitely gave me some tweets perfect for the cynical, beer quaffing, blogging crowd.

Here's what I came up with:

Looooooooooooooooool @kladkins: twitter sucks twitter sucks twitter sucks twitter sucks! @thomas_x: playing on twitter, checking out my sister's twitter page, wondering why scifi became syfy, I know why, but god it sucks @amuldoon: Nevermind; Twitter sucks. I really don't get why people use this, haha. Facebook ftwwwwwwwwww. @frankshyong: excellent twitter account activity. I like that you only follow me and shaq. ILL sucks pretty hard @Ian_Graves @ryansentz: Life sucks and so does twitter @mollydotcom: I will never understand / s/he who follows in twitter land / that which offends and makes one shout / haven't you heard? / OPT THE FUCK OUT.

The poem I placed at the end was golden. Who would have thought that 5-10 minutes on a cell phone would garner such a perfect #whattheshit tweet.