Everybody's Having Those Same Old Dreams (Or, My Day was Just Wonderful, Thank You Very Much)

The other day, I was walking around Hyde Park. I often do this: it's a very good park for walking. There's plenty of interesting people there: gynaecologists, gourmet butter importers, lords whose kingdoms have dissolved into sand and the like. Just a month ago I was there and a man with small glasses and a green jacket came up to me- his name was Ozymandias, he said to me. I said hello to Ozymandias. It turns out that this fellow is in fact an Egyptian, used to be an accountant in Egypt. A sort of king, I suppose. He and I ended up discussing J.G Ballard, who you will know died the other day. We ended up going down to Hades to visit Mr. Ballard- we also visited my soul, who rests upon a pillow of silk and tweed. I've always rather enjoyed the river that one must go down to get to Hades- Anna's done some fantastic fishing in it. It's black and shiny, much like the remaining the umbrella I designed in 1947.

Anyway, I was walking around Hyde Park and everybody's looking at the sky. Even the doormen, in their Austrian jackets were looking up to the sky. Every single living thing in Hyde Park- plants included- was looking up toward the sky.
"What are you doing there?" I called out to a man in a tweed suit, with tweed shoes and a tweed pencil. He did not reply, his eyes mimicking the relationship between a child and a television.
"Hello?" I called again, stunned by the collective necks straining upwards.
"Twitter." was the lone response from a man with no face, but a bowler hat.
"Hmm?" I hmm?-ed.
"Twitter," he repeated, as if a wind-up toy.

The crowd in Hyde Park moved their arms up toward the sky, as if they were worshiping one of those religions, and started to say "Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter."
"Is twitter not an internet service?" I asked the man who had no face.
"Twitter is the sky. Twitter is the sun, moon, sky, and Earth. Twitter is you, Karl."
"Hippie." I retorted.
The crowd began to sing "Aquarius"- that awful wishy-washy-my-mother-didn't-breastfeed-me song, you know the one? I won't even link to it here, for fear half of you form a commune and never bathe again, but you know what I mean.

I walked away from Hyde Park scared a little, to be frank with you. As I walked a way, the crowd grew louder; now singing "give peace a chance". I wondered if I had stumbled into the 60's by mistake.
I talked to my watch, which by the way, there is only two of in the world. I muttered generally, as old men do. "Nein nein nein" accelerated at the speed of a Franco-Prussian bullet train. As I went further away they had stopped singing "give peace a chance." They were simply singing "Twitter's what we need, 140 characters' all we need, can't read no books, but hell, we can read twitter."

As I was on the outskirts of the park, the song had devolved once more, into something that wasn't even English, French, German, Swedish, or Russian. I could smell the smoke of fires, as people threw each other into the air, hoping to catch a glimpse of what-? -Ultimate Twitter Nirvana? A world created from 140 characters? Ultimate knowing of what somebody had for lunch? Mm, obviously that. I walked into the empty streets, and had diet Coke with a deaf, dumb, and dead old lady from 1840, who did not know what twitter was. I saw Shakespeare in the alley, writing a new play. One hundred and forty characters long.