secret blooooooooooog

I've never had a secret blog before. I'm gonna go ahead and make the inaugural secret blog post. With secrets!

Eight years ago or so. Actually, nine? As an obsessive Smashing Pumpkins fan who has scoured the internet during many lunch breaks spent in the high school's library, when I wasn't cutting articles out of the immaculate magazine archive, I had identified which Pumpkins websites were worth a damn via a combination of Yahoo! indexing and personal investigation. There was one called The Smashing Pumpkins Collection (at smashingpumpkins.net... hasn't been active for god knows how long...) which was obviously heads and tails above all other. It seemed to have the most primary-sourced information, a huge RealAudio(!) bootleg archive... it was amazing! And I would go over it day after day. Everything except the chat. I wasn't supposed to go in the chat because that is the one thing the library forbid. No chatting! This was 1998, that shit was scary.

So my brother died and yadda yadda we got a fairly sizable insurance check. Before that I had talked my elderly uncle into purchasing a computer (to help with our homework! no joke!) solely so I could use it. My mom was now in a position to purchase a computer of her own. Which I greatly supported. Now what was the one thing I couldn't do on the library computers? Chat, yes. I had done this before and it was a bizarre novelty. I had only had unrestricted internet access for about two months before this, and it was still a new thing. And living in Vermont, for whatever reason, The Smashing Pumpkins weren't liked by anyone in a radius of a few miles. Not just a passive resistance either... people fucking hated the Smashing Pumpkins. And I was nearly completely mute absurdly pale young fellow with horrible posture and gigantic t-shirts. So I would go in that chat room and just sort sit around. I wasn't that invested, and it wasn't all about the pumpkins, but it was something. For whatever reason, I would hang out in this chatroom for hours not really saying much. I was absorbing. Over the course of a month or a few I got the familiarity with the regulars and I was just sorta there.

So there was this girl Alexis that I started noticing there around March of 1999. She could really have been anyone at that point, I wasn't really that involved in this chatroom, it was just something I'd open up and forget about while I was reading about Nirvana b-sides. I can't remember when it happened, but the chatroom at some point became less about the Smashing Pumpkins and more about absurdist comedy. I started to really get into it around then. Maybe too much. To the point our little clique had a fail-safe in the event the website's official chatroom was dead... through ICQ we all were directed to a pre-designated mIRC chatroom. So one night the official chat was dead, and we all went to IRC. There were a bunch of people initially, then around 2 or 3 am it dwindled to a few, then it was me and this Alexis girl in there and we were talking, like, for fucking ever. To the point where it was sunny outside and my mom and my sisters were starting to wake up and I had to pretend I just woke up and hadn't been up all night. I remember there was a Scooby-Doo marathon on Cartoon Network that day. We didn't stop talking until around noon. I still have this chat saved. She does too. Which is nice to know.

So through the rest of that school year, and through that summer where I had this data entry job in an office building... I would talk to her whenever possible. Sometimes on the phone, whenever my mom would go to sleep... I had to answer on the first ring so as not to wake anybody up. Now, I was jaded as fuck way before this point, so I wasn't buying into of that internet relationship bullshit. People who did that were weak and probably cat enthusiasts for all I knew. Still, I was absolutely crazy about this girl. To the point where I was sending messages to her idle ICQ account at 3am saying goodnight, solely so I could fall asleep myself. My high school was depressing to the point where I had completely ignored it at this point... there were girls who I knew were into me, and I thought they were attractive, sure... but everybody was just "too stupid" for me and on the whole, Brattleboro, VT was far too slim pickins for me. I spent most of my schooldays asleep, attempting to escape as many classes as possible. Eventually, I'd just end up leaving at lunch, or earlier.

So yeah, I had this crazy intense friendship with this girl in San Diego, to the point where I'd be getting mail from her and my mom thought I had fallen in with some internet cult or something and was whoring myself out across the country. I dunno, my mom's fucking weird.... But when you get Posh Spice dolls in the mail for your birthday from people you've never mentioned across the country... you have to explain these things away somehow... and those weird phone bill charges... I was 15 at the time, that's completely insane to think about.

For whatever reason, the idea to push this relationship legitimately into the sinful (or whatever they call it) never occurred to me. I legitimately loved this girl so much I didn't care what sort of relationship I had with her, just as long as we were talking everything was great. Also, with my embarassment about the whole concept of internet relationships (I was in high school for fuck's sake. My pants were an issue!) I didn't want anything like that on my plate. So I never pushed for anything, were were just floating along having a fine ole' time. I just assumed everything would work out OK.

So a few months into this, her friend Sara that she's mentioned a bunch (Think about Ghost World here, and that's seriously a legit close visual to have here. Alexis is Scarlett Johanssen and Sara was the Thora Birch) starts to pop online. She has a website with fucking zany HTML so I figure "damn, Sara's pretty fucking awesome" and there's not that unspoken friendship line like with Alexis, so I was essentially handed a diluted Alexis with no pre-conditions. Whatever built up shit I had probably came out on Sara instead of the intended target... Alexis had just started to actually have an outside life and shit, so our communications got a tad bit less frequent. Somebody had to suck up all that free time, and wouldn't you know it, Sara was around all fucking day. Had no idea why, but it worked out OK for me. They would both three-way-call me randomly some nights and I was the happiest boy in the whole of New England. At least 10 times superior to anybody I had around in real life, yes.

So Sara was around way more, mostly because she was way more of a shut-in than Alexis. And was home-schooled. (Wait, nevermind, I just realized they both were. Look, can you imagine a 15 year old boy from Vermont stumbling upon two hot home-schooled chicks in California and they were really enthusiastic about him and took the time to call him from time to time?) And with the three-hour time difference I started to run into her a lot more. At this point, by the end of the summer, this internet thing had gone from an enthusiastic occupation to a complete 24/7 absorption. Whatever phantom feelings I still had for Alexis got sucked up more and more by Sara and I just let it happen, despite knowing early on Sara was baaaad (crazy)news and considerably dumber and less fun than Alexis. I couldn't remember though, or maybe I just wanted to forget.

So that fall or so, I had a video-editing class in high-school and by contrast it made every other class I had completely worthless to me. On top of this, these events made me completely disconnected from everything that was happening in real life and this ghost existence with my san diego people seemed far more promising... I'll finish this later.