Recently, I got a curious email. The subject line read: You have received a virtual gift for your 18 anniversary on LiveJournal. The body read: "Thank you for being with us for 18 years! With love, LJ Team."
Could it really be….LiveJournal? I was sure I had deleted that ages ago. Against better internet security practices, I clicked on the link and was sent back 18 years back in time. I’ve recently moved back to my college town so I’ve been thinking quite a bit about 18 years or so ago. I was sucked in. I read every terrible entry. Some of them were good. Some were really detailed. Some were a real outpouring of emotion. This is not like me to be so open about my emotions online. Didn’t younger me know to hide those emotions behind a carefully crafted cynicism? Apparently not.
There was one question that was hanging over me the entire time I read through those old posts: Was I a better writer back then? I had a schtick then too, although it was different. I think I was more openly aping Hunter Thompson then, which made sense given college me and being in the UF journalism program. I was way more descriptive though. Here, I write takes and what I think should happen. But I’m not nearly as descriptive and observant as I once was. I wrote about my morning commute in near granular detail:
Occasionally, my driver will take a different path than I mentioned before. It starts the same way, drive up on Smith to Atlantic and make a left; then hang a quick right at Boerum Place/Brooklyn Bridge and cross the Brooklyn Bridge. From here I can turn to my left and look at Lady Liberty standing alone in the dark bay of New York or turn right and see the Manhattan, Williamsburg, and, in the distance, Queensboro Bridges. In front of me stands the decades old buildings that make up the skyline of the Financial District and City Hall area. I can almost see where Chinatown's creep on the rest of the city ends. (Note from present day Jason: this sentence makes me cringe. There was a hugely mistaken and definitely racist view that was pervasive in the 2000s and earlier that Chinatown was somehow separate from Manhattan and was consuming Little Italy and other nearby neighborhoods. Cities are ever evolving and a NYC without Chinatown isn’t much of an NYC. I regret some things I’ve written, but few more than this sentence.)
Crossing the bridge into Manhattan presents my driver with the familiar options: FDR South or North or West Side Highway. Instead, he chooses Chambers St. to Avenue of the Americas and takes that up the entire drive. Here I see parts of the Financial District, Tribeca, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Midtown and finally Columbus Circle and the southwest entrance to Central Park. The Financial District is akin to someone turning a light bulb on and off, only people turn up instead of light. During the day, the streets are crammed and a two block drive can take 25 minutes. At night, even the homeless make themselves scarce, leaving only windswept newspapers, overstuffed squirrels and the occasional taxi cab. Even in the most crowded city in America, you can find an entire part of the city that is dead. The Financial District most definitely sleeps at night and wakes up around 6:30.
Tribeca is a little livelier, but the city doesn't come alive until I reach the Village. Here the streets zig zag without logic and make a mockery of Manhattan's famous grid system.
Up we zoom, passing green light after green light. It's entirely possible to go from West 3rd Street to 57th without hitting a single red light at that time of morning. To my left, the Kool Bloo diner shines it's gaudy bloo lights advertising burgers, fries and milkshakes. At 3:46am, that sounds pretty damn good actually. Across the street, the 6th Avenue Car Wash looks like it's still going strong into the night. Question: When do taxi cabs get car washes? Answer: Now.
Look, there's the Town Tavern, where for $20 on Saturdays, I can get completely sloshed on Blue Moon and Stella while sobering up at the same time with unlimited buffalo wings and waffle fries, all the while watching the gators score touchdowns (and thus getting a free shot) on many giant plasma screen TVs. Evan said it felt like being in ancient Rome. I think more just like Medieval Times, except I'm not getting ripped off and the show and food are much better.
I pass about six McDonald's, four Bank of Americas, 25,000 Bodegas, one GIGANTIC Macy's, the Fox News building, Radio City Music Hall and a statue of Simon Bolivar, El Libertador, the man on the big white horse who came to save South America.
Buildings like Radio City Music Hall can't be built anymore without succumbing to the new corporate tackiness of architecture, and I use that word loosely. Its marquee would be garish and gaudy and the building itself would be plastered with ads for anything from the Gap's new sweatshop clothing to Lindsey Lohan promoting a new album or film or appearance on the Surreal Life. But thankfully, Radio City is from another era, and it continues to age gracefully and bring a touch of class and elegance to Midtown Manhattan.
The car turns left on Central Park South and before is the statue of Columbus, the anti-Bolivar, El Conquistador, the Oppressor. He stands alone atop his perch in the middle of the road, causing countless yellow cabs to circle around him. He gazes out at Midtown with his back turned to the most beautiful part of the city, Central Park. There's symbolism there, but I'll leave it for now. Towering behind Columbus are two towers made of glass and joined by a mall in the middle. I work in the South Tower, across the street from a Duane Reade, Subway, Starbucks and high class bar called the Coliseum. Down the street, on the corner of 58th and 8th is an escalator and two sets of stairs that lead down into the A, C, B, D, and 1 trains. So yes, there is a Subway across the street from the subway. In front of the Duane Reade, a Middle Eastern man sells impossibly greasy and good gyros for three bucks a sandwich. He's out there until at least 2:00am. I think some days I might be his last customer and other days I might be his first.
I read that post and felt like I was back in my CNN American Morning days, a young sleep-deprived perpetually nervous version of me who wasn’t comfortable in his own skin, who felt adrift in a new city, who wasn’t sure of the choices he’d made, who somehow made it into work on time despite having a start time that varied every couple of weeks but was almost always well before sunrise. See now I wonder if I would have written that sentence right there better 14 years ago. I want to be more observant and descriptive. Maybe I’ll write more about what I see and less about what I think. Or perhaps I’ll combine both more often.
One thing I did a lot back then was apologize for not writing more consistently. I’d write in bursts, 3 posts in 2 days or maybe even 3 in one day, and then I’d go a week or two or even three without posting anything. When I posted again, I’d start with an apology for not posting more consistently. Did anyone care that I didn’t post for those days? I don’t think so. I think maybe I was apologizing to myself. I always saw myself as a writer, and by not writing, I was in some way failing this idealized version of me. Sorry, me. I still don’t write consistently. Somewhere along the way, my career path took a turn and I left writing behind. I had a couple of brief moments where I looked like I might turn back toward it (CNNMoney let me write a few articles and then I once got a semi-serious offer to write for them for my main job), but largely my writing has been blogging and my day job has been making online videos. I’m at peace with this now, although clearly I’d like to be writing more on the side or I wouldn’t be doing this. Sorry, me, but there’s more money to be made this way that I’ve chosen.
Even before reading my old posts, I’d been thinking a lot about the path I’ve taken to the end result I have now. Oftentimes I wonder if the path could have been better. The end result is fucking great. That’s not in question. But the path… Could I have done something different or more exciting or taken a risk here or there that paid off and still have this same great end result? And the answer I always arrive at after batting this question around in the back of my head for a day or so is probably not. The path determines the result. Reading those old posts, reading angsty me, mad at George Bush, mad at racists, mad at capitalism, mad at injustice in the world, mad at myself, made realize well, first damn, I’m still mad at a lot of the same things, but also that was the journey. I was figuring myself out. I still can’t believe how open I was back then with the small group of people who followed me. And yet, I can also read in those posts how I was guarding myself from saying too much, at least when I was writing sober. I was clearly drunk on some of those more vulnerable posts.
I had a lot of anxiety back then. I have a bit still now too, but I think it’s more existential, world collapsing sort of anxiety now. We’re living through a pandemic and climate change and it sure feels like as a collective, we’re not fixing things fast enough. Is that how everyone always feels about change though? We seem to have a fixed timetable though and being slow just won’t do these days. My anxiety back then was much more personal. I wrote a lot about being broke, especially when I was up in Atlanta interning for free at CNN. I was broke most of that time. I was alone most of that time. I was nervous most of that time. I played cards with work friends when I could afford to join the weekly poker tournament that was held at some restaurant down at the CNN Center that probably doesn’t exist anymore. I remember getting paid once, in the form of a nice steak dinner, for logging tape (transcribing everything that was recorded on a betamax tape) on Burt Rutan’s historic suborbital space flight for the X prize back in 2004.
Yes, CNN used betamax. It was better than VHS. Lasted longer, was more reliable, which is why VHS won. You can’t have a product that lasts be out in the marketplace or people wouldn’t need to rebuy the same stuff over and over again. I’m still mad about some parts of capitalism!
I read all those old posts. It wasn’t easy at times. Some of it is cringe. But it also gave me a better understanding of who I was. I’m glad I’m a bit more confident now, wiser for sure, still prone to make silly mistakes of course, but more satisfied overall and much less broke too. Much more comfortable in my skin.
As it turns out, the virtual gift I’d been promised in that email was nothing really. Some silly badge they gave me that I could only view on one website and couldn’t share anywhere because it’s still LiveJournal after all and LiveJournal still seems frozen in place from a pre-social media dominated internet. God bless it, a much better time for the internet, much less cynical.
I suppose the gift was rediscovering my old blog. After reading all those posts, I downloaded all of my data, and I deleted my LiveJournal account. There’s just no fucking way I was going to leave that up. 18 years is enough. Thanks for the memories. Sorry I didn’t post on there for 14 years.