So Substack, huh? I started this a couple of years ago and uploaded some of my blog posts onto it, then very quickly forgot about it. Now that I have a handful of readers, I thought I’d give it another shot. Why? Well, I suppose there’s no better way to tell you than with some seemingly random anecdotes and observations. Let’s do it.
Between my junior high years and graduation, I saw inter-teen communication going from paper notes to pagers to instant messaging. Text messaging wasn’t common until I was 20 or so. I don’t pay a lot of attention to generational conventions, but I can see why my generation is sometimes called Xennials. We’re a little off because we were children without internet and were also children with internet. Not that the internet back then would be recognizable today. We could get into that but already a 43 year old guy saying “remember before the internet” is treading on some pretty familiar territory so let’s move on.
Anyway. Because I was maybe 2 years behind socially, I didn’t get notes, but I was fascinated by them. Those intricately folded packages held so much promise. Covered in various colors of ink from a multicolored click pen and adorned with that cryptic symbology— the hearts, the sorry so sloppies written in next to the classic six-line “cool S,” the creative dots above each i—they would be no less interesting if affixed by the queen herself’s wax seal and delivered by a special courier in tights who always made an awkward joke when dropping off mail. Why the joke, my dude? This is already awkward as is given the tights situation. I can see all of it.
Notes would often be wedged in the vents in one’s locker, I’m told, and as bleakly as I sometimes view the world I would still always maintain a bit of hope that as I opened my locker, a tightly folded white bundle would fall to my feet. And that it would be cute. It did happen one time. The note was written in typical multi-color pen with hearts dotting each eye. It was about how the note writer and all of their friends hated me.
I don’t remember details about why, which makes me think they were pretty vague if listed at all. Because if there’s one thing that sticks in ol’ Howie’s mind, it’s every specific critique I’ve ever gotten. It confused me then and baffles me today why someone would spend that much time to say something so mean, but maybe that’s part of why I never found a spot in any of the upper, or mid-upper, middle, or hell let’s face it, even mid-lower echelons in the junior high hierarchy.
When I create something on the internet and it gets a lot of attention, I imagine when I open up the app it’s still a junior high school locker. But instead of one or two notes that fall out, it’s thousands. Like most of the handwritten notes in the 1990s, they are usually nice. I bet like 98% of the time the content of a hand-delivered note mattered much less than knowing that your friend used all that ink and origami with just you in mind. But even when they’re mostly nice, I don’t think humans are built to handle thousands of notes at a time.
When they’re not kind, though? Well then that’s another thing entirely. The people who leave the messages never see your face when you open them. I think it’s a pretty cold-hearted person who would watch a tall, skinny, dorky kid’s face fall when realizing they’ve been duped into thinking someone had something nice to say about them and not get a twinge of guilt. Instead, though, you just put it in the slot, wink at your friends, and you all laugh as you walk down the hall in matching All-4-One t-shirts. That kid had impeccable music taste and you’ll never ever know. You’re loss.
I don’t know where the drive to post online comes from, but I can’t help but think it’s because that kid’s still in there. I was lucky because I always had a good 5-6 friends I could play Nintendo, do paper routes, and walk to the batting cages with. But beyond them, people either didn’t know who we were or decided that our anonymity made us good targets.
Once, three of us were on a band tour where we visited elementaries an hour north of our school and played songs from Disney movies. Our band stopped at a mall for a couple of hours to hang out and have lunch. My friends, like most boys of that age, had one thing on our minds when it came to visiting malls: video arcades. We scoured that mall and found none. Faced with the prospect of hours without Bad Dudes or the 4-player Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles machine, we walked across the parking lot to the Walmart and spent our arcade funds on gum.
We left the store just in time to see the bus pull away. I was told later that when they said, “everybody here?”, the only people who would have known we were missing were all in that Walmart. We used our last quarter to call a parent to make the 2-hour round-trip to bring us home and then wandered around the mall again to kill time. There, tucked in one of the hallways in the back, was an arcade. Out of cash, we just sat on the curb outside and thought about what this all meant. Thinking I would be the laughing stock of the school, I wanted to stay home. My mom said no and my fears were unfounded. Nobody knew we were missing.
I know some people thrive on people not knowing their name. Or are content with being well-known only among a handful of people they respect. I am many things, but in this case at least, I am not Some People. I am One Person Who Wants Other People To Know Who He Is. And for adult me, who still has junior high me in there not too far beneath the surface, the giant locker of social media is a big hole I can dump all of that into. And sometimes the hole shouts back.
Most of the time it’s saying nice things, because spoiler alert, it’s not a black void after all. It’s other people who maybe felt the same as I did then, or feel the same as I do now, and wow that’s a feeling isn’t it? It’s akin to wanting candy your whole life and then working in a chill tech office where there’s just candy out all the time. Full size Snickers. Starburst FaveREDs. Even some wild European stuff with coffee in it. Normal people walk by it all the time and just take candy when they really want some. People like me? Well, our teeth fall out.
All this to say that I’m trying blogging again. Though in 2023, we are calling these newsletters. The news I’m reporting is breaking, it may surprise you, and it’s this: I exist and am going to make it everyone’s problem.
BRAVO
I so so relate to middle school Matt and also wanting to have people know I exist. On another note, related to our conversation on Instagram earlier today, I listened to this post today on my walk with an AI voice via Substack reading it to me. And that made me really think about accessibility and the value of AI in that. Given that no one would’ve ever have been paid to read your post out loud, and mine only have personal audio because I take the time to record it, I wonder if I object to AI here. And now I don’t. However, a robotic female voice reading your words out loud is a little disconcerting and makes me think about how I relate to what I listen to and read.