While in the library the other day, the man next to me was looking at A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. His laptop buzzed and he quickly abandoned his reading continuum for a short blast of finger pulses transmitting data to followers everywhere across the cyber universe. He was tweeting at the speed of light. I took out my lined notebook...
A Brief History of Follow Me
A couple of thousand years ago, a visionary with a beard and long hair and a few tricks up his sleeve said - Follow me. Started out with a dozen friends, soon had a large crowd following him around with their faces stuck in his Book.
Millenniums ago, dogs never followed their tails. Then suddenly, around the Sixth Century, for no apparent reason, canis major went round and round and round like a mad spinning dog planet. Experts think it was some sort of Canine Renaissance period. Meanwhile, in the Arabian Desert, insightful astronomers postulated that following the Stars was a key to understanding our world, setting up the philosophical foundation for the E! Channel, fifteen hundred years later.
By the 1980's, after people had followed trends like headbands, mass slaughter, disco dancing and devils, the Irish King Bono and his wee band wrote a song called, "I Will Follow." This lead people to places where the streets have no names but soon it no longer mattered. It was Amazing Grace, and the lost were found, thanks to following their GPS system.
By the end of the world, a prophet called Anderson Cooper from the distant land called CNN, went around saying "Follow me" on something called Twitter, a system emboldened by a messianic Follow Me tag line. Soon, people were following Mister Cooper's sparkling gray haircut and making serious faces in this last earth age of mega-messiahs.
Some words disappeared from use in the English language - shun, abandon, elude, renounce, evade and turn off were forgotten. In the end, God was mad that he did not haveth a Twitter account, so he sent an asteroid to finish off the World. The last Twitter entry read - Going to store for ice cream. They say an asteroid is com...
I stuck "A Brief History of Follow Me" in the back pages of A Brief History of Time. A message for someone else to find in the cooked up future.