on meeting places

when i was in high school i lived near a pizza shop

it was a local chain

maybe a half-dozen stores across the region

and the closest was by the train station

it was a twelve minute walk

less on the right afternoon

when dusk would caramelise the valley

and you could skate downhill on the breeze

and the pizza was not the best

though they did an amazing garlic pizza

creamy and pungent

i later learnt from a friend who worked there

the dough for this pizza was dipped in garlic butter

before rolled out

and slathered with cheese

and more garlic

but every monday they had an all-you-can-eat-offer

for ten bucks you are given a plate

and all night pizzas are carried between tables, served by the slice

i went every other week for about three years

including for one of my birthdays

the staff brought out a 'dessert pizza'

covered in nutella and icing sugar

adorned with sparklers

it was delicious

mostly with friends

one hosted a youth radio show the same night

in a studio two blocks away that looked like someone's house from the outside

and for a time i co-hosted with him

all-you-can-eat forming a steady pre-show ritual for us both

but also sometimes alone

i would come to know the staff, who were mostly my age

i would make conversation with them between serves

and eventually went to parties with them on the weekend

always dropping by the shop on our way

scabbing a free pizza from whoever was on shift that night

in exchange for a UDL or can of Canadian Club

passed through the takeaway window

or i would people-watch

the all-you-can-eat special, cheap as it was, brought all folks

large families (kids under six ate free)

older tradies and train-workers (leathery, quiet, stacked from the bottle shop two doors up)

groups of raucous teenagers (see: me)

or simply be

this was the central pleasure of the all-you-can-eat

not just the place or the people

but what happened between the two

a meeting place

a decompression chamber

a hot and greasy sanctuary

i have been thinking about this feeling lately

with what is happening on/to/around Twitter

a website i have used every other week for about ten years

actually, as at the time of writing this i have been using it for ten years and one week

i know this because on the ten year anniversary

Twitter prompted me to tweet about it with a pre-prepared graphic

and it felt like a bad omen

and which i use for lots of reasons

making friends

like the first writer i knew around my age

who moved to Sydney at the same time i did

and who showed me what a young writer could do:

backyard readings

zine fairs

Voiceworks

and everything that would come after

sharing my work

and in turn getting work:

many of the opportunities i've had started as a Twitter DM

when i found someone on my frequency

or they found me

and while i think my work is visible now without Twitter

i wonder about those stepping into their art

like me, five years ago

how will they be found? how will they find, now?

people watching

like at the pizza shop

it's hard to avoid being sucked into the spectacle

when someone kicks up a fuss

not always but often over very little

but I think Twitter might not be around much longer

or at least not in the same way

it is falling apart socially

my timeline is filled with people packing up their Twitter homestead

opposed to elon musk's ownership

sharing their handles for other social media sites

retweeting their favourite shitposts

saying goodbye

and infrastructurally

since i started writing this there have been mass employee lay-offs

followed by mass employee resignations

followed by increasing bugs and outages

there may be no one left to fix what has broken

i'm unsure how i feel about this

i have tried to go elsewhere

i set up a cohost account

and a mastodon account

right now both feel like blurry knock-offs

with the rough ux you usually get on smaller, noncommercial platforms

though i am trying to be forgiving

but it's not the same

and how could it be?

twitter is not a piece of software

or an online community i felt kin with

it's something messier

a meeting place

and like the pizza shop

its presence in my life is finite

after school finished my friends moved to the city

and eventually i followed them

and while the shop is still there

i can't go back there any more

i can't dwell on the past

though i am still learning this

i recently got a roll of film developed

shot while i was in high school

photos of local haunts

parties i'd forgotten

friends i haven't seen in years

these pangs are intoxicating to me

a phantom place untethered from the present

i am thinking about what's next

it's like moving cities

the places i reside on the internet shape my life

and i am weighing up the shape i want for it

a place where i am queer and safe

a place where i can find and share weird internet art

a place to simply be