If you’re not already on Twitter, and are thinking about joining, don’t. If you, poor bastard, are on Twitter, why aren’t you following me?

Oh yes, I’m there, one of millions and millions of people thinking that there are people out there who’d like to hear what I have to say. All those funny observations that usually only Wife gets to hear – as well as links to my stories that I usually make Wife read – I can now broadcast to the world! To the world, I say!

When people forward, or re-tweet, my tweets to their followers, I feel like a superstar with real followers. If they tweet a link to a story of mine unprompted by my tweets, even better. Every retweet takes my “message” further out there, so every retweet by my followers may bring me a new follower, and every new follower makes me just that much more important.

Of course I care about the number of followers. Most of us do. (Only true superstars don’t). Every day, I see people commenting on their number. “Oops, just lost two more, was it something I said”.

(No, two of the spam bots just died.)

Twitter seems innocent enough at first but then it pulls you deeper and deeper, until you walk around thinking about only things to tweet, until your first reaction to whatever happens to you is to tweet about it – and then rush back to see if anybody retweets them.

Two days ago, I got an email from Twitter. I had got a new follower. Nice. A friend of mine had joined Twitter and had started to follow me. To return the favor, I started to follow him. The favor turned out to be huge, because I noticed that I was his first follower.

Yesterday, while going through my Twitter timeline, I noticed my name – not my Twitter handle – in the stream. Somebody had tweeted a link to my story! The elation I felt was almost beyond words, but only almost because, in my mind, I immediately started to construct a carefully worded, funny but not over the top, witty yet not obnoxious, tweet.

Before I got that far, though, and before I retweeted the link, I noticed that the sender was the friend I had started to follow the day before and that it was a link to a story I wrote about a chapter I wrote for the Hall of Fame’s book. In the short entry, I wrote about the book, and mentioned the photographer on whose art the book is built.

My tweeting friend is that photographer.

I also noticed that he only had one follower.

To recap:
He tweeted a link to a) my story which mentions b) himself to c) his one and only follower, an audience of one:

d) me.

A nice loop. Of course, now I have retweeted his original tweet, and have blogged about it, too, so that I can tweet a link to this story, and hope that he retweets it, too.

I’ll be waiting.