Welcome to the New Hell

It is official.  Really official. It doesn't get any more official.

Your Tweets will remain available forever.  Eventually, everyone with an independent study in Smiley Faces or Texting in Dyslexia (actually Dyslexia in Texting) will be able to read everything you ever Tweeted and will judge the whole of your existence accordingly.  They may Tweet about it, although Tweets will probably seem awfully long to those future scholars.

Tweets?  No way.  They're, well, dumb.  Compared to erudite, well-comma'ed blogs.  No one wants to archive a passing impulse, more like gas than thought, reduced to short bursts of grammar mangling.  Right?

The Library of Congress of Congress does.

And you thought those guys still wore powdered wigs twenty-four-seven and simply kept only the quill-pen-on-parchment-or-worse-vellum stuff from getting too dusty to read.  Like something Jefferson wrote praising the Parisians' efficient, and repeated, use of the guillotine to enforce term limits.  At most, otherwise, the LoC archived maybe a Lincoln speech written on an envelope.  Or Myspace pages. 

Nope.  The LoC plans to store everything on Twitter, including... well, "everything" means everything.  It inked a deal with Twitter to gobble up everything you impulsively put in a Tweet, like your enthusiastic endorsement of something Sarah Palin said to Katy Couric; your voting for George III, twice; your agreeing with Scaley, also twice; or your quasi-linguistic slavering over of Megan Fox's... eyes, way more than twice.

All that stuff you assumed would be washed away by the daily tsunami of Tweets, it isn't going under.  It won't even be damp or smeared.  Go ahead, delete it or set fire to your laptop.  That electronic bit of drivel will still be there, even if there is only one (not bloody likely), for all who just don't get your sense of humor to read.  To coldly evaluate.  For all eternity.

It is a harrowing, but undeniable truth.  Sartre was wrong:  Hell isn't other people.

Hell, my tweeting friend, is you.