When I first set up my Facebook and website for my book, Spanish Cedar, I felt I knew the purpose of each. As I saw Twitter's social media growth, I was unsure on how to incorporate this brief moment of text into what I saw as a more thoughtful and reflective process. After all, how reflective can we be constantly checking for Twitter feed or continually typing our thumbprint into the world?
I decided my Twitter would be run as a form
of diary or journal, a posting of significant events in a continuum. As such,
it became unimportant to me that I tweet every hour or day; as noted in my book,
when I am with a cigar, typically I am reading, writing, talking, or reflecting
on that cigar. I am in the moment with the company who sit in the lounge with
me or the landscaping of the area around my veranda. Tweeting interrupts that
calming time of day.
Tonight, for example, I will be at Murdocks, a restaurant in
Cocoa, Florida, for the monthly Montecristo Cigar Club meeting. I will have a merlot and
a stick (brand of each to be decided later). I will not feel impelled to Tweet
any of the details in the meeting. Instead, later, or much later, I will look
back and carefully choose the words to properly represent the evening and the
mood, and then I will Tweet.
A poem may follow, but that will come from a different part
of the mind for a different purpose that the reader will decide has value or
not as they read it without Twitter and Tweets. The decision will involve thoughts and feelings not compressed into 140
characters.
And that’s my call.