By Mark Sadler
Life can be tough in the United States
Fire Service. When the time comes to let off some steam, I like
nothing more than to abseil to the bottom of my live feed on the
social media website, Twitter, and gaze down upon the adorable
upturned faces of the feral cats who live there.
Sometimes I dangle a few feet off the
ground and let myself swing back and forth, as if I am in an amateur
theatrical production of Peter Pan. I attach trailing balls of yarn
to my ankles to give the cats something to swat at. Recently I got
written-up by my supervisor for failing to remove this unauthorised
yarn from my work pants. The woollen thread that I offer to the feral
cats on Twitter is much softer than the regulation, flame-retardant
yarn balls, used by the fire service to keep domestic cats from
clawing at our legs while we are extinguishing blazes.
How did so many cats end up living wild
and free on Twitter? People purchase these animals without
considering the amount of personal time they will have to invest
reading Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost to their new pets, as
part of the Nancy Reagan Feline Evolution Advancement Program. After
the novelty wears off, some owners attempt to store their cats
digitally. When they discover that even a basic model feline requires
50tb of storage space, and you can't legally upload them into the
cloud because they hunt the indigenous wildlife, many resort to
turning their animals loose on social media platforms. I guess they
gravitate towards Twitter on account of all the tweeting.
During these past months, this feline
community has become a sounding board for my problems; an inscrutable
and judgmental audience, who express their disapproval at my life
choices through excessive scratching and biting. Below is a short
list of the personal details that I shared with these cats, without
knowledge of how this information might be used, or the third parties
who might be allowed access to it.
(1) Clare will come back. She just
needs some space
If it wasn't for Clare, I would have
never even known there were feral cats living at the bottom of
Twitter. After our break-up, when I noticed that she wasn't posting
on social media, I rappelled to the base of her Twitter feed to make
sure that she hadn't fallen and injured herself while using the site.
At first the cats regarded me with suspicion. I felt that an
explanation for my intrusion was warranted so I told them about
Clare. Ever since then, I have kept them updated with the latest
developments in our separation.
(2) Taylor Swift has optioned the
movie and TV rights to your story
This isn't true and I regret saying it.
I don't think Taylor Swift even knows that there are feral cats
living at the bottom of Twitter, or, if she does, I have never heard
her express an opinion on it. Come to think of it, I recall, when
Clare's older sister got a kitten, she had to throw out all her
Taylor Swift music because her vocals are like war cries to cats.
It's why you typically get cat households or Taylor Swift households,
but seldom both.
(3) Millennials don't know the
proper way to serve wine
Last weekend, I went to a sit-down
pizza restaurant. It was the first time that I had really been out
since Clare left me. The waitress kept on pouring the half-bottle of
wine, that I ordered to go with my meal, until it was level with the
rim of my glass. The look on her face when I corrected her makes me
think that it was a genuine mistake. I guess nobody is teaching young
people how to serve wine any more.
I don't know why I told the cats this;
I think I was probably just venting. Cats don't drink wine. Even in
cartoons, a cat drinking wine is something that you just don't see. I
suppose, if you work as a professional illustrator, you get to know
how far you can push the boundaries of reality. A picture of a cat
drinking prosecco is too much for the average human-being to mentally
process.
(4) With every passing day, the
distance between you and I increases
Every twenty-four hours, a few hundred
tweets are added to my Twitter feed, increasing the distance that I
have to travel in order to reach the cats. A couple of hundred might
not seem like a lot until you take into account that, up close, each
Tweet is, on average, five feet tall. That's only four inches shorter
than the actor Seth Green. If Taylor Swift suddenly puts out a new
album, the number of daily tweets could skyrocket a thousand-fold.
A day is fast approaching when I will
only have time to visit the cats for short periods, on holidays or at
weekends.
(5) I am burning the rope that I
used to get down here
Since things aren't working too well
for me offline, I thought that I might try my luck living among the
cats on Twitter for a while. Maybe Clare will notice that I am not
posting any more and will come looking for me.
As I was watching the flame working its
way up the rope, it occurred to me that if it encounters any
flammable tweets - anything containing images of dry wood, cotton
wool, or petrol - then it is likely that the whole column will go up
in smoke. Then I remembered that every tenth tweet on the site
incorporates a sprinkler system designed to prevent exactly that kind
of thing from happening. Plus a lot of people tweet fire extinguisher
emojis, so I guess that everyone would be okay if there was a fire.
Even if I did set the website ablaze
and they called-out the fire department, the first responder would be
me! The man holding the burnt-out match, who lives at the bottom of
Twitter, in a one-person tent, surrounded by thousands of feral cats.
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