I’d like to buy the world a Coke

I’d like to buy the world a Coke. Just one Coke. And everybody would have to share it. How do you split twelve ounces into seven billion? I’m sure it has to be possible, right, I mean, soda is made out of molecules, and all of those molecules have to be able to be broken down, even the tiniest atom is composed of smaller parts.

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So here it is, a can of Coke, from Rob, to the world. But who’s going to accept it? Who can I entrust with making sure that everybody on the planet gets his or her tiniest drop of Coke? This is getting pretty stupid already, I thought I’d maybe get like two or three paragraphs out of this, and then I’d be able to stretch it out to five or six, and then add a ridiculous intro.

But I’m already out of everything to say about making the world share one Coke. Actually, the first three lines, that would have made a great tweet. I get Twitter, I do, I just don’t get how I can really do anything on Twitter. Because every time I have anything even close to something that would do well on Twitter, I’ll post it, and then that’s it, it’s gone, maybe one or two people will “favorite” it.

And I don’t get it, some of these Twitter people that I follow, they’re like really good at just constantly churning out bite-sized packets of information, little jokes, beginnings, middles, and ends. Me, I can write eight hundred words and not feel like I’ve really said anything.

But Twitter, even though I get it, sometimes I wish that I’d never gotten it. For example, a while back I started getting a ton of new followers. Wow, I thought to myself, it’s really happening, my work is getting out there, I’m attracting a following. But none of these people ever clicked on anything that I wrote, my stuff never got retweeted.

I thought, maybe these people are just mad that I didn’t follow them back. So I started following people back, everybody that followed me. So now I had these two columns of rapidly ascending numbers next to my username. It was “followers” and “following.”

But then right after I did that, my Twitter feed turned into something that looked like my spam email folder from when I had AOL back in the late nineties. And that’s when I figured it out, all of those accounts that were following me, they were all spambots, all of them sending out identical weight loss formula tweets and magic penis enlargement ads. So I had to go through my followers list, which, by this point, was quite large, and I had to individually block and report each one for being spam.

So yeah, that stopped the new followers. And then I got sad. Because it hit me, great, I didn’t have spam anymore, but it also meant that I wasn’t really popular. I couldn’t even pretend that I was popular. Ignorance really was bliss. Now I just regular, it turned out that I had been regular all along. I felt more regular than ever.

Every once in a while someone will follow me who has like fifty thousand followers. Wow, I’d think to myself, this person must be famous, or at least really well known. Even though I’d never have heard of any of these people. And then I noticed also that they had an almost equal number of people that they were following.

That didn’t make sense, because all of the famous people that I do follow on Twitter, for every hundred thousand people that follow them, they in turn follow zero to one people back. So I figured out that these people were just following me purely to get a follow back. I stopped following back and, sure enough, within twenty-four hours, they’d unfollow me.

Now I’m sad again. I wish the world would buy me a Coke. Actually, I don’t wish that. I have tons of soda in my house. If the world knocked on my door and gave me a can of Coke, I’d be like, yeah, I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t need it at all, and I’d feel bad that the world went out of its way for me, for nothing.