The last few days I’ve been sharing little bits and pieces of memories. I sort of like the memoir genre, so I’m going to toss up another little something-something here.
I mentioned in my last post that I met some interesting people in the time between graduating high school and finishing at IU here in Richmond. I thought I’d take a second to go back to my once prolific habit of doing Nick Hornby style Top 5 lists and type up the top 5 people I met on the internet from 1996-2001 inclusive.
So it’s a top five, it has to go in order, right?
5. The Producer: I’m not going to list his actual name, but I used to ply in the trade of TMBG bootleg cassettes. I met a producer who wasn’t THEIR producer but had worked with them on a few projects. We talked nerd music, mostly, but he introduced me to a who’s-who of bands no one but me and other nerds cared about. From Brian Dewan to the Young Fresh Fellows, from the Magnetic Fields to Shirk Circus, I met a ton of people and heard a ton of music that wasn’t ready for audiences through this guy. He also accidentally introduced me to my second favorite comic of all time, Scud, and he put me in a chat room with Rob Schrab (who I interviewed for my fanzine). He also got me onto so many guest lists it wasn’t even funny. Thanks to him, I got to shoot John Flansburgh with a dart gun (pre-9/11 you could do that in a club; now I’d get tackled) and I got to talk to him about it.
4. The Drummer: Oddly this was a famous (well, nerd famous) musician that I met not because of my friend the Producer but because he got me into a show that I left (due to rain) but wanted to go back into (because of the Ramones being on the main stage). To get back in, I had to stand on the back of a flatbed truck and sing “I Touch Myself” by the Devinyls on live radio. Doing that got the attention of the drummer from one of my favorite bands, who insisted to people in the Ramones crowd that I was a member of his band. We emailed and exchanged wacky answering machine messages until his band finally hit it legit-big, and I guess he quit having time for a nerd in Indiana. Cool dude, though.
3. The weird goth married-too-young chick who wanted to teach me to be less uptight: I think everyone who grows up a sheltered nerd has someone like this in their life, a hyper-extroverted, hyper-sexual person who somehow befriends them in spite of the oddness and slowly forces them out of their shell. I met this girl on a MUD that she was just using as a chat room. We talked a lot because “bored” and we came from radically different sensibilities. She was a raver, and a happy hardcore DJ. We shared mix tapes. She came to visit me once, which was weird because I was super moral and she was super not. Funny adventures running all over Indianapolis, though. That could be a great episode of the Big Bang Theory, if Leonard ever met a really, really gothed out version of Penny and spent a weekend in a midwestern town trying to stay out of the trouble she was getting into. Because I was young and stupid– or so I tell people because as I mentioned, I was a good boy– I never went in for “coffee” at her friend’s place because her friend had a cat. I bet that would have been really awkward, regrettable coffee.
Happy ending for her: she finally resolved that her marriage wasn’t a bad idea even though she got married super young (at 18). She and her husband run a pet shop now.
2. The dude with the painted face: My friend Mark had a little brother who loved pro wrestling. I had, around 1994, stopped watching because my friends thought it was lame and really, it’s hard to enjoy wrestling with no one to talk to about it. The little brother was in a thing called an Ewrestling federation. It was basically a big wrestling RPG. The people who wrote it SUUUUUUCKED. So I started a new one, to amuse him at first, then to amuse a whole slew of people I met in the process. One of the people I met applied as a well known WWF competitor. I emailed and told him that his details and description were awesome but he couldn’t just use someone’s existing gimmick. Turns out it WAS him. And we struck up a digital media friendship that lasted for a while. I miss that dude. RIP.
1. The Enigma: I made one friend in this bunch that became my longest-term friendship ever. We met in 1996, and he decided to stop speaking to me in 2010 (over his discomfort after I told him that if we were going to play WoW together he had to not always take the side of the PuGs in the group over me because it undercut our guild’s sense of unity, so I will never know what was REALLY his problem). That was 14 years of friendship based on a few phone calls, daily hours of chatting and gaming and working on projects together, and never once meeting face-to-face. I helped his partner get into medical school. I tutored his friend’s brother. We talked each other through bad holidays, through breakups, through career implosions, through the 2000 election, through Buffy dying and Angel getting cancelled. I thought we had a strong friendship, but it fell apart over how I tanked a boss in WoW, so I guess you never know anyone, really.
Started with ICQ now we here. Started in UNIX talk now the whole crew fucking here. Started with Pine email, now we here. Started with AOL before there was an instant messenger now the whole team here.