Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (27 page)

At least, as far as I could remember.

But I acknowledged my mistake. I moved past it, I made direct if truncated eye contact
with everyone there, and I pushed through the pain. And that is all that can be asked
after one has humiliated oneself in an enclosed space with a group of near strangers.

The person who passes out at a party is a living emblem of poor life choices. The
person who passes out at a party is tragedy personified, and to be avoided lest one
becomes like them. The person who passes out at a party is the most unfortunate person
in the world,
⁴
and their impulse is to slink into the shadows, never to be heard from again.

But the person who boots, passes, owns it, apologizes profusely, and then rallies
is a phoenix risen from the ashes to rage again. That person is a champion. And also
delightfully polite.

Maturity. Now
that
feels like winning.

( 32 )

The Time I Vowed to Stop Drunk Tweeting

“A wound will perhaps become tolerable with length of time; but wounds which are raw
shudder at the touch.”
—
O
VID
¹

“People are never, ever going to forget this. Crap.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

The
night we killed Osama bin Laden, I tweeted some pretty irresponsible stuff.

I admit we were all caught up in the excitement of it all, the heady “look what we
done” drama of the night, and we had killed this terrible mass murderer who was responsible
for the loss of so many lives, after looking for so long, and after all those whiffed
chances and missed opportunities we got the monster. By we, I mean the president,
his close advisers, and some very brave and badass highly trained operatives doing
dangerous shit very far away from home. Much in the way that “we” have won the Superbowl
when the ’Niners were in the midst of their dynasty, “we” killed Osama bin Laden.

Yes. By “we,” I definitely do
not
mean me.

But I was excited. That guy sucked. And it was late and I had some wine, and I did
some really ill-advised online jubilating that in the light of day, which was like
a few hours after I did it, I really wished I hadn’t.

I mean, he was a bad guy. He had signed his own death warrant a thousand times over.
But do you really want your definitive statement about the killing of another person
to be the tweet

²

Good lord. Have some composure, lady.

When I woke up the next day, I was filled with regret. I should have shown more restraint.
I wished I had thought about the tweet before I tweeted it. Stepped back. Realized
a whole lot of people would see this thing, and I might want to consider how I would
feel if my grandchildren read it, and how I would explain it to them if they did.
³
And I realized I wouldn’t be able to. It was improper. It was undignified. And it
was way too late to take back now.

Luckily, the Internet is full of stupid, like to the gills, so it’s not like in the
grand scheme of things I was going to stand out. The Internet is where stupid goes
to find stupider so it doesn’t have to feel so stupid. My tweet would pale in comparison
to the idiots who think the Apollo mission was staged on a Hollywood movie set or
that aliens embed secret messages in cell phone waves or President Obama was born
in Kenya and is part of a terrorist sleeper cell bent on overthrowing the American
government and establishing Sharia law. Me and my momentary lapse of judgment pale
next to the guy with the potted meat and the tinfoil hat.

But here is the thing about Twitter. Like its home, the Internet, Twitter is forever.
You can never, ever, ever take it back. You can delete a tweet from your stream, strike
it from your memory, end your Twitter account, and never visit the Internet again,
and years from now, decades, centuries even, when whatever life-form is still alive
and sentient on this earth strikes up their computing device, your infernal and incendiary
tweet will be waiting for them in some forgotten, dusty corner of the interwebs, proclaiming
for all the world that you are still, and have always been, a complete idiot.

It does not matter that it is easy to tweet, or convenient, fast, or even brief. Brevity
is the soul of wit only if you have wit to begin with. Anything that seems ribald
and cutting at four in the morning when you have been nursing a bottle of Bailey’s
Irish Cream will, by the light of day seem a) sexist, b) racist, c) stupid, or d)
all of the above. You cannot beat Twitter. Its sole purpose is to capture the things
you have said and amplify them across the Internet in a terrible game of Telephone.
Only when your tweet comes back to you, it isn’t a distortion of what you said, but
exactly
what you said, and just as terrible as everyone thought, and there is a picture of
your penis attached along with a very poor joke about cats and fire hoses, only both
are metaphors, and you didn’t use the words “cat” or “fire hose.”

You didn’t mean it. You shouldn’t have written it. You regretted it the moment you
clicked that little blue button. None of this matters to the Internet. The Internet
feels no sympathy. This thing you have said is out in the world, and what’s worse,
it is being passed around actively by dozens, even hundreds of people, who do not
know you and do not care to know you, and so cannot apply any kind of “I know him
and he’s really a nice guy” temperance to their interpretation of what you said, instead
flying to the exact opposite “Oh my god, this person is pure evil and must eat kittens
for breakfast and should be bound and thrown into a river” kind of place, from which
there is no return.

Here’s the truth. As helpful as it may be, and as important as it may seem, the Internet
hates you, the people that live inside the Internet hate you, the troll that lives
under the bridge hates you, and they are all just waiting, just
dying
for you to make a mistake.

So what should you do? You know the answer to this. It is simple, pure, and utterly
impossible.

Don’t tweet.

I realize this is completely unrealistic. How can you
not
tweet? How else will people know what you ate for breakfast or what you are listening
to on Spotify or what your gamerscore is? Ridiculous. Not tweeting is not an option.
I am a dolt for even suggesting it.

So the second option is to never, ever tweet when you are drunk. Not even a little
intoxicated. Not even after you have used alcohol-based mouthwash.

I have written tweets I thought were lazy, not funny, boring, dry. I have tweeted
silly things, maudlin things, and things that upon retrospect were pretty self-involved.
⁴
I have tweeted stuff I thought should have been reworded or retracted. But it is
only when I am drunk that I tweet stuff that I know will be a source of deep and abiding
regret when I am old and my brain is hooked up directly to the Internet via nanochips
and a web of fine copper wires. It is then that I will be haunted, day and night,
with the images of my vintage tweets, floating back at me like traffic signs on a
lonely highway, reminding me just how easy it was in the olden days to write something
in 140 characters that you would never say in real life, and then set the hellhound
of your own destruction loose upon the world.

Nothing particularly terrible resulted from this regrettable run of tweets. I was
not reprimanded huffily by a follower, received no calls from my family or emails
from colleagues. Instead, I was just struck by my own regret, and the sense of agony
I would feel if what I had said had ended up in print, or was analyzed elsewhere on
the Web. These weren’t meant to be official statements or repeatable quotes; they
were the midnight ravings of a lunatic. But no matter, because we as a nation now
take every tweet, every offhanded Facebook comment, or shotgun aside as the gospel
truth of a person’s sense of the world, when in reality most are typed late at night
when people are intoxicated or sleep-deprived or just got in a terrible fight with
their spouse.
Most
of what is posted online, especially on Twitter, which by its very nature is brief,
temporal, ephemeral—is disposable. But nowadays, when something posted at noon in
Buffalo can be duplicated a thousand times across websites by one p.m., nothing is
disposable. Like that awful see-through dress that refuses to die, nothing will ever
disappear into the ether again.

So let us all say it now, together once more, so that it sinks into your head and
sears itself brand-like into mine: the Internet is forever. Forever like sequoias,
like fossils, like mountains, like Old Tjikko,
⁵
like atoms, like interstellar dust, like the ever-expanding universe.
⁶
You can delete it, you can disavow it, you can strike it from the record, you can
beg, borrow, plead, and disable your account, but that tweet is out there, shot through
the Internet like a virus, and you can never, ever, take it back.

We are so cavalier nowadays with what we say, tossing out offhanded jokes and saucy
commentary via smartphone, typing madly with the thumb of one hand while drinking
vitamin-enhanced water with the other. We do not even take the time to type the thing
that will be our undoing with both hands anymore, which is probably why we are so
quick and so very eager to hit the “post” or “tweet” or, more accurately, “detonate”
button, because how can something that was so easy to type, so facile to concept and
execute, be a danger to anyone, including ourselves? Easy things are soft, they are
gentle, and they present no danger.

At least that’s what you tell yourself as you take a cell phone picture of your naked
torso in the mirror of your filthy, laundry-strewn bathroom, and then upload it to
Facebook accompanied by a tinkling cloud of LOLs.
⁷
Whom could it possibly hurt?

You, and only you, and you repeatedly, and you will have none to blame but your wayward,
thoughtless, and downright reckless right thumb.

So think before you tweet (or post, or text, or email, or upload video, or anything
that gives others any information of any kind about you or your life), and end up
tortured in a hell entirely of your own making, at once delightful and ghoulish, spending
eternity drowning, much like Homer Simpson under an avalanche of donuts in his personalized
Hades, under a torrential and endless deluge of your own 140-character idiocy.

Man, I should tweet something about that.

( 33 )

The Apologia; or, Shut Up Aisha—a Far From Comprehensive List of My Verbal Gaffes

“All the hours wound you, the last one kills.”
—
L
ATIN
P
ROVERB

“I’m screwed now, may as well keep going.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

I always
say the wrong thing. Luckily, I have made a career of it, or I would have no friends
at all.

It actually comes in quite handy for a comedian. A big part of our mental energy is
spent breaking down the brain-mouth barrier, the mechanism in normal people that keeps
you from blurting out the first thing that comes to mind, the on-off switch that says
to normal people, “Hey there, why don’t you examine this statement before you just
fling it out into the world like a word grenade?” Most people have this mechanism
in their head, and it keeps them from putting their foot directly into their mouths
most of the time, unless they have been drinking or are overly emotional or a character
in a meet-cute rom-com blockbuster.

Comedians do not have this mechanism, and those that do spend a lot of time trying
to override it. The only way to be spontaneously funny, to be verbally sharp, to be
quick on the draw, is to
never
think about what one is about to say, to not ever hesitate, but say that thing, as
loudly and theatrically as possible, and
pray
. You open your mouth, turn on the faucet, protect your eyes, and stand back. Most
of the time this works, and you are quick, irreverent, off-the-cuff, and hilarious.
Occasionally, it backfires terribly and you say something you really wish you could
take back, or worse, something that others are going to force you to take back through
angry correspondence and the Internet version of a pitchfork mob. You hope for the
little mistakes—ones remedied by a simple apology, rather than something you have
to call a press conference for, issue multiple statements, and then donate money to
an anti-defamation league or animal welfare charity. You pray for the tiny trespasses.
After a while, they are your only friend.