October 25, 2008

• A decade ago—no, more than that—I was much younger than I am now, a kid trying to find his place in the world. I remember in quiet whispers the pain of feeling lonely, of wanting to belong, and even now there are some days that I feel the old (and young) feelings and emotions—There was a great bright world out there, beautiful people, glistening glamour and the thousand red carpets in a Hollywood dedicated to its own red-carpeted parties.

  I remember wishing that that was me, trying to figure out how to become someone, someone great and something classic. I never did, but that story was told later.

  At the time, I didn't have to shave, I never seemed to sleep (not at night, anyway), and I was still wearing short pants. The internet was in only one-in-three homes, the Web was a booming thing, wild, untamed, uncertain. It was before the dot-com boom, or just at the same time, perhaps. Google wasn't a household word.

  I remember learning to write web pages (on Geocities.com) from scratch with my best friend Justin, who always had a better eye for the beautiful design that was waiting to be discovered in raw code,

  And in raw words, the beauty found within. I remember e-mailing bits and words of letters to a group of friends that started out as just Justin, but quickly grew to include much of the home school group that was capable fo abstract thought at the time—I remember long (sometimes embarrassing) questionnaires written by Krystal and Brittany—when the one was still a Koen, and the other a Sawyer.

  I remember Clint's parody of Cake, and Al and Ju's parody of James Russel Lowell.

  I remember trying my best to relate to a culture that I had never really been privy to—a culture that was at once pop-culture but also had a thick layer of something else, an older culture, the writings of the poets and epic battles from a thousand years ago. It would no more have surprised The Poetry Wars (which name we gave it while it was still warm on the ground) to find a rhythm and a meter from Shakespeare or the Preacher than to find political commentary pulled from suck.com or WIRED news.

  Between the juvenile jabs and compassions that we shared, we discovered friends that we never could have imagined. And though we no longer e-mail twenty times in a day, I still keep quiet tabs on the other warriors.

  I'll ask a question of a mutual friend about someone, getting answers back that seem completely irrelevant, but which answers are truly the breath upon a spark long-shielded, in hope that someday it will once more burst into a booming bonfire of bad rhymes and true friendship. Something red carpets can never inspire.

  And so, in memory of the thing that once was, and as an echo of the brilliance that we once shared, I raise my glass and bow my head in honor of the poetry wars. We were young, we were classy.

  Good night, my young friends. Good night.

  • 1:29 am
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