An Epic Journey of Amazing Self-Discovery, or Finding Old Shit

I logged onto my Tripod account for the first time in years today. If you're unaware, Tripod is a free web hosting service. If you remember Angelfire and/or Geocities from back in the day, that's much like what Tripod was. I was doing this because I felt like re-teaching myself some HTML and CSS, skills that I've long since forgot. Kind of a disappointment, because gotDAMN there are a lot of coding/development/etc. jobs out there at the moment.

Anywho. I logged into my old Tripod account and found two things, one was the website I created on Adobe Dreamweaver for my old band Downtown Owl. Very basic, but looked pretty cool. Whatever.

But I also stumbled upon an old site I had created called Infinity Over Infinity. It wasn't particularly well designed or anything. Instead, it was very much like Racecar Brown: a place where I had decided to write down every thought that came into my head, regardless of topic.

More after the jump.



The first thing that I noticed was that I had organized the different topics, so that if a person wasn't interested in one topic, they could simply bookmark a topic they were interested in and sort out the superfluous information. This was before blogs came with built-in search features, see, and I don't know if I thought the move was genius so much as I thought it was a cool excuse to have a lot more pages.

I wanted pages, I think, because I liked the idea of starting at me and then burrowing into the minutiae more and more, and it would tunnel seemingly into infinity before looping back to the beginning. I designed the pages of the site so each topic would be broken down several times and once it had been broken down completely, the next link would be to the main page. Infinity, get it?

The second thing I noticed was that a lot of the writing was incredibly-- incredibly-- emo. There were a lot of posts where I didn't even bother really making sense, shooting and falling short of a ee cummings-style surrealism and impressionism. It was also pretentious in its stylings, with posts dated as "oh-three/thirty-one/oh-six."

I could forgive myself, though. See, this was 2006, the year where my friend Eric killed himself, the year where my grandpa killed himself, the year where I was homeless for two months, and the year where I was first fired from a job. Reading it was painful because it was trite, but it was also painful because it was true, an accurate representation of a kid attempting to sort through a mess of a year.

Just to hammer this infinity point home one more time, I noticed with some amount of irony that I had posted the lyrics to a song I had written here, and the song was about finding things you had written years ago and feeling both the nostalgia and cynicism that comes with that feeling. It felt like I had looped myself. I had found things I had written five years ago, including a thing that talked about how it felt to read things I had written five years before that.

And then we end up back here, at Racecar Brown, and it's like I got to the end only to come back to the beginning again.

It made me realize that I had always been a person who had Things To Say, with intentional capital letters. And it also made me realize that, for just as long, I have not particularly had a voice that made people want to listen. I mean that in the sense of influence, not the sense of actual voice.

It's hard to be a Things To Say dude, especially on the Internet where every voice has exactly the same amount of sway until an audience decides what to listen to. I've been trucking away for about a decade now, Saying Things. That's the way that I've attempted to do it.

Will it work? Probably about as well as Infinity Over Infinity did.

But the important thing is, in the words of Finding Nemo's Dory, to just keep swimming.