The Writings of Geoff Micks

Hello again everyone,

I shall begin this post ⁠—as annual tradition demands⁠— with an expression of regret for not doing more with this blog over the last year. The first fourteen months of married life has kept me busy. I will not linger over the details other than to say I am very happy, and also I unexpectedly became a homeowner much sooner than I ever thought possible, which has thrown off a lot of timetables I set for myself and my writing. If I had suddenly become prolific on this comatose site, it would have been as an exercise in procrastination while avoiding more important matters, so this year my usual apology comes with some unusual and unapologetic pride too.

Anyway, let’s just move on to the only thing I have always gotten around to posting here over the last thirteen years, my annual and slowly growing list of favourite tweets. Here are the Top 10 of 2010, Top 11 of 2011, Top 12 of 2012, Top 13 of 2013 & Top 14 of 2014, Top 15 of 2015 & Top 16 of 2016, Top 17 of 2017, Top 18 of 2018, Top 19 of 2019, Top 20 0f 2020 (With some COVID-19 Honourable Mentions), Top 21 of 2021, and Top 22 of 2022 for anyone interested in the back catalogue.

To start off, I have an honourable mention that is going to serve double duty as a public announcement:

December 21, 2023

More and more I get less and less out of Twitter.

After 13+ years, I’ve decided Dec 31, 2023 will be my last day as an active user. I’ll keep my account online —maybe I even tweet a couple of times a year— but I’ll be deleting the app off my phone and bookmark off my browser.

Yes, today’s post will be the final entry in this series. In fact, I only stayed on Twitter as long as I did because I enjoy having these lists enough to want one last addition to the collection. Last year I said,

Here we are twelve months later, and while Twitter does still exist, it is a shadow of its former self. The people I want to hear from and speak with are mostly gone or falling silent, and those who remain are filling the emptying room with angry words that echo back to them in a way I do not want to spend my time absorbing.

I’m done.

Meanwhile, no one I know on Mastodon or Blue Sky or Threads seems happy there. Twitter’s secret sauce was it was first, and so everyone was there. We will likely never get everyone on the same microblogging service ever again. Without going into a rant you no doubt have heard before and better elsewhere, Elon Musk has broken the spell and driven off most of the people who made Twitter worthwhile for someone like me. I will continue on with Facebook —something of a social media ghost town in its own right, but at least one whose lingering spirits are not increasingly hostile and insulting to me yet— and I am also going to experiment with generating content for TikTok. If I gain any traction doing that, I will probably end up writing about it here.

Anyway, let’s get into this year’s list. It is a little uneven in places, both because some months I was too busy to make the time to Tweet regularly for a dwindling audience, and because when a ‘Top’ list starts going into the mid-20s your vetting process starts hunting for best examples of certain things you do often rather than trying to build criteria that can be applied evenly to every entry. As has become my custom, I will explain myself where necessary in italics.

Okay, then. With the final preamble to the final entry in the series now done, here are my favourite tweets from my last year as an active user on Twitter:

My Favourite 23 Tweets of 2023

January 2, 2023

For Christmas I got a lovely warm plaid shirt with elbow patches. When I wear it, I speak of myself in the third person using the nickname “Patch” and prompt my wife to call me that. She is horrified but also slightly amused, and that’s the line I like to walk with her sometimes.

(As I was winnowing down this list, I had quite a number of back-and-forths with my wife that I wanted to highlight. Most did not make the final cut, but I enjoy having this one up at the top setting the tone.)

January 3, 2023

Eleven days out of the office. Did I think to get a haircut in any of that time? Absolutely not. I feel like one of those sheep who wanders up into the hills at shearing time and is discovered years later, more wool than beast.

January 19, 2023

Today’s Twitter Confession:

Part of me thinks pens belong to the universe.

Another bigger part of me thinks if I have ever used a pen, that’s my pen. Even if it used to be your pen at one point, if I’ve used it, it is forevermore my pen, and I resent you for wanting it back.

(I only did the ‘Today’s Twitter Confession’ bit maybe 20 times in 13 years, but I always enjoyed them. This one was inspired by my admittedly bad habit of having sticky fingers when we go to pub trivia nights. If the host or one of my teammates does not collect their pens in a timely fashion at the end of the evening, then those pens joined the collection of my pens in my backpack, quickly becoming ’my’ pens. How dare anyone ask for them back in the future?)

April 15, 2023

A plaque I saw on a street in Fort Worth prompted me to look up Wyatt Earp on Wikipedia. A lot more ‘owned a brothel’ and ‘worked as a pimp’ in his bio than I expected. Like a lot more. Too much, really. I feel like he’s famous for a very specific 5% of his life’s work…

(I encourage everyone to look him up. It’s quite an eye-opening read!)

April 29, 2023

The Leafs advance to the Second Round! The Leafs advance to the Second Round! It’s been 19 years. I was a 21-year-old university student the last time this happened!

I don’t know what to do with this energy. I did as a kid, but I don’t now. Do I… Do I make loud noises?

(The sports fan side of myself is something I mostly keep quiet about, and why not? I am a Torontonian who watches hockey and baseball. Justifiable opportunities to express pride have been few and far between in my adult lifetime. The Leafs made the second-round of the post-season for the first time in almost two decades on April 29^th. For me, that was like them winning the Stanley Cup.)

May 11, 2023

A few years ago I got my father a ticket to the Hockey Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Bobby Orr was there. My father was too nervous to ask to shake his hand.

“Dad, the guy was literally there to shake people’s hands!”

“He’s Bobby Orr. I didn’t want to bother him.”

(I mentioned this story in a quoted retweet of this post by up-and-coming Canadian historian Craig Baird. Craig has been one of the few remaining highlights of my last year or two on Twitter. I will continue to follow his podcast, his Facebook content, and I believe he is now also on TikTok. I have no doubt someday he will be in the front ranks of our generation of Canadian historians, and I will be able to look back fondly on when he and I used to engage with one another on Twitter.)

May 23, 2023

My grandmother turns 98 this August. My aunt got her an Amazon Echo Dot. My grandmother thinks she’s living in the future now. There’s a ‘thing’ in her house that tells her the weather whenever she asks and plays Charley Pride on demand. She’s basically in heaven.

May 23, 2023

Godzilla is a burned-out workaholic with no social life, but when his car breaks down in a charming small town —trapping him there for Easter weekend while he waits for a spare part— he finds love and gets his groove back.

Then he destroys the small town. He’s still Godzilla.

(This was in response to a social media account promoting an upcoming Godzilla movie. It asked people in one tweet to pitch the plot of their perfect kaiju —a Japanese giant monster— movie. I immediately wondered if I could fit a ‘Godzilla in a Hallmark Movie’ plot into 280 characters and was delighted when I managed to do so. Unfortunately, the tweet I was replying to was taken down. I am confident enough people said enough negative things to spoil it for everyone else. A social media account trying to have some fun and promote a film found itself a lightning rod presumably for some pretty hateful stuff that is becoming the norm on Twitter, and so the tweet was deleted. Ah, well. I’m still happy with my little Hallmark movie tweet.)

May 31, 2023

I’ve just learned the king cobra is not considered a cobra. My first feeling was one of consternation, followed by unshakeable certainty that it’s the other cobras that need to be renamed. The king cobra owns that brand. It’s like Ray Kroc pushing out the McDonald brothers.

June 13, 2023

My wife is having some dental work done. I have been driving the ‘You should schedule the appointment for Tooth Hurty (2:30)’ joke into the ground, and I have no regrets. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a load-bearing pun that I will lean on with all my weight with confidence.

June 17, 2023

“Will you miss me?” My wife asks.

“Of course,” I say.

“Will you think of me while drinking sangria in the Spanish sun?” She asks.

“No,” I say.

“NO!?” She protests.

“I’ll find some shade,” I explain.

(I went to Barcelona for a work trip, and I persuaded my very understanding wife to allow me to stay for two extra days to explore a city I’d never been to before after the project was done. She wished she could have gone herself, but we had just bought our first home, money was tight, and we wouldn’t have been able to make it a proper vacation even if she was able to join me. Anyway, this was how we said goodbye before I left, and it is something I would like to remember in the future. It’s not quite banter at the August 3, 2021 ‘Should we get a llama?’ level, but I was still pleased to come up with something so teasingly affectionate in the moment.)

June 24, 2023

You wouldn’t think at 40 I’d still be getting new mispronunciations of my name –how many ways can you even try Geoff?– but this Uber driver just asked if I was, “Goy-ffffft?” He was so far off, I didn’t immediately understand his question.

(This was the Uber Driver giving me a ride home from the airport after returning from Barcelona. I remain baffled how he got Goy-ffffft from Geoff, but bless him if that doesn’t earn him a spot on this list. I’ll remember him now until the day I die.)

July 13, 2023

Back in my university days I knew a guy whose beer of choice was Labatt 50. He once tucked a bottle in each side of his mouth and walked around saying, “I’m a walrus!”

He’s a bank manager now.

(Strictly speaking I believe he holds a senior position responsible for loaning people millions of dollars without actually being a bank manager, but sometimes you need to shorten things to fit in a tweet. Meanwhile, it is a true story with an amusing twist that I am rather fond of and reflects my penchant for fun anecdotes nicely.)

July 30, 2023

My eldest nephew is four and a half. He greets me from the door as I am exiting my car. “Hello Uncle Geoff! Have you brought me any presents that are toys?”

First, nice to have a reputation as a gift-giver. Second? Someone gave this kid a non-toy gift, and he never forgave them.

(My sister is embarrassed by this incident. I look forward to my nephew one day being old enough to also have some sense of shame about it. I, meanwhile, think it’s pretty funny.)

August 8, 2023

Early morning office banter mentioned the resale value of Taylor Swift concert tickets. An older coworker chimes in, “Young people will pay that much for shitty music? Something wrong with the young generation. The meteor can’t come soon enough…”

A new turn of phrase to me!

(For the record, my wife is a fan, and I have now listened to enough of Swift’s music to agree she is clearly a very talented singer-songwriter worthy of being celebrated for a lot of great qualities. Meanwhile, ‘The meteor can’t come soon enough…’ is working its way into my frequently used turns of phrase, so let’s also appreciate my older coworker’s talent for curmudgeonly bon mots.)

August 24, 2023

My grandmother is 98 today.

If I live to be 98, my 4-year-old nephew will be 62 when he wishes me a happy birthday. What an incredible thought.

Happy birthday to her, and many more!

October 4, 2023

I cut my toe yesterday. While waiting for my wife (aka ‘The Breaker of Wine Glasses’) to help me get the bleeding under control I said aloud, “Direct pressure. Elevate. Rest. RED Backwards.”

I took First Aid courses as a kid. Funny the things you remember by rote decades later.

October 5, 2023

I’ve been a TD Bank customer since I was five. My first account book was blue with a puppy on it. From then to now, with all its products for customer convenience, has TD ever used the slogan, “Ta Da!”?

I’ll take my Clio Award & advertising retainer cheque at their convenience.

(Strangely enough, it is occurring to me I’ve mentioned the Clio Awards on my Twitter several times, including one that made my Top 20 of 2020 from December 9^th, although I think this one is better. I wonder what it is about the Clio Awards that gets me to name-drop it so frequently? I’ve never seen the show, nor could I name you a single winner without some educated guesswork…)

October 19, 2023

There’s a podcast I want to hear about where Crypto goes from here, but I want to listen to it from a place of schadenfreude, and I worry algorithms will mistake me for and market to me as a Crypto Bro if I download it. I feel like there should be an ‘explain yourself’ option…

(I almost didn’t tweet this for fear of online backlash. If you were making a Venn Diagram of the kinds of people who are making Twitter a less enjoyable place for me, the Crypto Bro circle would have a big catchment area. That said —do I dare say fortunately?— I would never consider paying to use Twitter, so by and large my Tweets are now only visible to my followers, many of whom abandoned the social media channel before me. I don’t believe this tweet came to the attention of the kinds of people who would spend too much of their free time explaining why crypto-currency is great and I’m just not smart enough to follow their example and put my perfectly good money into their unregulated multi-level marketing scheme, or similar twaddle.)

November 5, 2023

Me: “I fully support cloning mammoths, but one day –like 20 years from now– I want to eat one.”

My wife: “That is like the darkest thing you’ve ever said.”

Me: “What? Haven’t you ever wondered why they went extinct? I bet they taste delicious! We should farm them like bison.”

(I didn’t have room to include this in the tweet, but I went on to explain the ‘Black Hole’ theory to my wife. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, some witty paleontologist or anthropologist has suggested the world’s Ice Age megafauna disappeared into a black hole… The one between people’s noses and chins. Anyway, I am a fan of the theory, and am happy to share it around.)

November 30, 2023

How much has my social media landscape changed in the last year? I first heard Henry Kissinger was dead on TikTok…

…TikTok?!

(My wife got me into TikTok. The more I look at it, the more I think this is where social media has to go. It’s a perfect combination of amateur-generated content for all sorts of audiences and mysterious algorithms driving the right eyeballs to the right products with the right advertising. With a billion pairs of eyeballs already on it, my only quibble is its connection to the Chinese government, but is that so much more concerning than Zuckerberg controlling Facebook or Musk controlling Twitter? Other than Wikipedia, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an online staple that doesn’t have someone behind the scenes who I wish wasn’t benefiting from my engagement with it on some level…)

December 26, 2023

I just saw a YouTube ad for a Mitsubishi SUV that ended with the tagline, “Mitsubishi Motors: Change Your Mind.”

Not since the days of, “Have You Driven a Ford Lately?” Have I so clearly heard a desperate PR team fighting tooth and nail against a brand’s negative reputation.

(I spent about 30 minutes after seeing the ad Googling around looking for the tagline elsewhere. It may be just for that model of SUV, or it may be just for YouTube ads? Whatever the case, I do enjoy thinking about why advertising works the way it does, and sometimes you can just feel the writers room’s frustration breathing out of the end result. Should this be included in my final list ever? Will it age better than some of the stuff from six months ago that I decided shouldn’t make the cut? I can’t say. This always comes up with December posts. Today, I’m enjoying it, and I guess I’m going to remember it for a long time now.)

December 27, 2023

One of the first things I did on Twitter 13+ years ago was bemoan that Bernard Cornwell didn’t have an account (he now does); one of the last things I’ll do is tweet at Lawrence Block and get a response. I’ve bookended my time here wanting to connect to the writers on my shelves.

(Since deciding to leave Twitter, I’ve been struggling with what my last tweet at the end of this list might look like. For a while, I thought it was going to be the honourable mention up at the top, so I’m rather happy when the final list came together it included two entries since that Tweet. I am especially happy to end on this note. I really did wish that Bernard Cornwell was on Twitter as one of my very first tweets. It even made my Top 10 of 2010, a list that I have always thought about putting an asterisk to because I joined Twitter with only three months left on the calendar year. Anyway, I spent most of Boxing Day reading Lawrence Block’s A Writer Prepares. He had mentioned it on Twitter, and I told him I’d put it on my Christmas list. I figured, “Why not telling him I’m enjoying it and wish him a Happy New Year?” as one of my final tweets. I did so, and that 80-something lifelong writer responded. That’s the magic of Twitter that you don’t see very often at all anymore. I’m very happy to be wrapping up my time on that social media platform in that way.)

—

And there we go! The last of 13 lists. I won’t say it’s the best of them, but it’s certainly not the worst. I know I enjoy going back and looking at these things from time to time as snapshots from my life and a reflection of what I cared to talk about to a public audience. I suppose I will miss this annual exercise now that it’s gone, but nothing lasts forever.

To anyone who has read all the way down here, from me and mine to you and yours, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! The future is always full of possibilities, and I hope all of us find good things out in front of us to pursue, to experience, and to enjoy. All my best!