The Dark Absurdity of Aaron Hernandez's Zombified Twitter Account

At 8:04 a.m. on June 18, 2013, Massachusetts state police entered Aaron Hernandez's home in North Attleboro with a search warrant supporting their investigation into the murder of Odin Lloyd. Three hours later, Aaron Hernandez wanly wished his Twitter followers "good morning," an innocuous banality that, with the hindsight of nearly two years—as well as an indictment for the murder of Lloyd and the specter of three other firearm-related incidents—reads rather spookily comical today.

The entirety of Hernandez's Twitter presence, in and of itself, is a bleak and hilarious bit of social media archaeology, and it's a beautiful wonder that the account still exists at all. One would think that, in addition to their mentors on the sideline, professional athletes enjoy an armature of social media cleaners who can swing into action when the shit hits the fan—for instance, if the athlete in question had been handcuffed while half-dressed and perp-walked out of his opulent suburban home.

But not so for Aaron Hernandez, whose verified Twitter bio—that 160-character blurb in which one captures the very essence of one's snarky, pun-filled stupidity—still, today, touts him as "TE for the New England Patriots" in "Foxboro, MA." Oh, word?

I asked NFL social media and Internet culture insider PFTCommenter for his TAKE on this most glaring of errors:

You know I hate to compare things to Hitler Jim, but historys greatest monsters have allways secured there thoughts and manifestos that can be saved for posterity. Did Hitler delete his account before he snuck away to Argentina just because alot of the chapters in Mein Kampf were embarassingly feminine in retrosepect? Did Jimmy Carter burn his diary before he gave the Panema Canal away to the CIA? No. Evil doers want their ideals to live on for eternity and besides I guarentee you that Hernandez isnt the kind of guy who can remember a 6 character password, so when he smashed his cellphone to pieces in his lawyers car, he ensured that his twitter account would be getting locked up along with him.

Without any reason to believe otherwise, this explanation will have to serve as the most plausible currently.

With a corpus of just 279 tweets, Hernandez's Twitter presence is arguably the most perfect Twitter presence of them all. He adheres, these days, to the first and most important rule of Twitter, don't tweet. Like the ancient city of Pompeii, Hernandez's timeline is frozen in place, public, unlocked, a happy store of mundanity and athlete-speak and "tgif" and requests for music recommendations and happy-this-or-that-holiday. He retweets people like famous serial domestic violence perpetrator Floyd Mayweather, who apparently signs his own tweets. Hernandez can also be by turns introspective, or philosophical, or inspirational. To be sure, if one were to judge Hernandez's personality solely based on his tweets, he comes off rather boorish. "Goin to bed and I'll be back whenever my eyes open!!!" Okay, man, okay. And his retrospectively chilling second-to-last tweet—sent mere hours before he allegedly shot Odin Lloyd in the groin, arm, side, chest, and back—could have been, and probably was, tweeted out by every chirpy middle-schooler on the planet: "happy father's day to all the great dads out there."

A more scrutinizing psychoanalysis of Hernandez's timeline betrays a possibly unhealthy obsession with what his followers are up to on any given weekend, insofar as Hernandez's weekends in the early summer of 2013 undoubtedly entailed some raucous and non-traditional goings-on. It's within that tantalizing disconnect—the sheer benignity of Hernandez's short stint with social media over and against the excitement of a not-so-bright-millionaire-20-something's day-to-day movements—that a certain mystical dark humor can be found.

"Life is great!!!" Hernandez squawked on December 22, 2011, just three days after "Day 1 on Twitter." Then, with Christmas 2011 rapidly bearing down, he seems to have fallen on financial hardship: "I'm done Christmas shoppin and I'm officially broke!! Lol." Still, a thin wallet didn't keep him from engaging in outreach to the women of #PatsNation, who got a shout-out the very same day. How utterly ridiculous, how awkwardly stupid all of this is scans in the context of a very-visible murder trial that's finally winding down, and after the innocuousness of his feed has been laid so thoroughly to waste by that trial's revelations.

A month before his arrest, Hernandez implored his followers to lighten his day: "y'all got any good jokes for me?" Here, today, in 2015, the goofy existence of Hernandez's Twitter account is the joke. Feeling that weekend coming on during a Friday afternoon? Go ahead and retweet one of Aaron's many "what y'all got this weekend?" interrogatives into your followers' timelines.

To the extent that Twitter's raison d'être is ludic in nature—a multibillion-player, international word game—Hernandez is amusingly both left out and yet still plugged-in. His being barred (presumably) from Internet use leaves his social media presence in a curious limbo, and leaves us free to recontextualize any of and all of Hernandez's timeline to devastating effect. Some brave soul will retweet, after the jury hands down their decision, "one more day before I'm released from my cage." Or this:

Life isn't measured by the amount of breathes we take…it's the moments that take our breathe away!!
— Aaron Hernandez (@AaronHernandez) December 23, 2011

Or this:

Nothing better than a bye week!!!
— Aaron Hernandez (@AaronHernandez) January 8, 2012

Every dumb tweet ready for any occasion, straight from the dangerous fingertips of #81, TE for the New England Patriots.

So bless you, Aaron Hernandez's Twitter account. You are the past-come-to-life, an obnoxious and glaring anachronism, a rude and interjecting reminder of June 2013, a perfect—if rather macabre—trek back to a more innocent time. If that's the word for it.