1. 6985 Words about SXSW 2000

    Thanks to Phil Gyford, I just stumbled upon my recap of MY FIRST SXSW, 10 years ago. SXSW had the first ever panel about blogging, during which I CRIED because, at the time, I believed blogging was going to ruin the internet.

    Here it is, unedited.  MOST of the links below will probably be broken, as they point to their original, 10-year old locations.

    ENJOY!

    Do you know how many people were here in town this week for South by Southwest? I mean, there were a fucking ton of people in town this week and I know the best of them, and most of them are at least decently cute if not really fucking hot, yet still, still I, Ben Brown, Pop Icon, Folk Hero, did not get a single piece of action. Not even a little in-the-corner-between-panels action. None! Nothing. Not at all. And because none of you, and you know who you are, because none of you took my pants off, you are forever banished from my presence! (Or at least until you decide to have sex with me.)

    But seriously folks,

    Lane forces me to wake up at like 2am on Friday morning after I’ve been up all night writing code for this thing, that thing I’m building, and I mean, all I want to do is sleep, you know, but the he wakes me up at like 2am and it’s like “We’ve got to go to this venture capital thing and we’ve got to show them POWERPOINT slides and shake hands and NO you can’t wear the big pants, wear something nice for God’s sake, for OUR sake, these are VENTURE MOTHERFUCKING CAPITALISTS, do you know what that means man? Do you know what that means?”

    “Lane?” I say, and when he just keeps going, I hang up the cellphone and roll over. There’s nobody else in my bed tonight, so it doesn’t matter.

    I wake up again at 9 and drive shoeless to the office where I’ve been told that I must must must be so that we can “strategize our discussions.” “What the fuck does that mean?” I say. “I mean, if they have a technical question, I’ll answer it. If they have a business question, you answer it.”

    “Yeah, yeah, that’s all I wanted to make clear,” says Lane.

    “Oh. My. God.” It’s hard to wrap your mouth around a period like that, but I’ve practiced a lot so I can do it for effect. “So…”

    “We need you to put the 2 ton monitor in your car,” he says, and I realize that Lane misinterpreted the part where it says “Engineer” on my business card and thinks I shovel coal into furnaces to make trains go choo choo.

    A few hours later, we’re up to our noses in VC guys asking questions and throwing cards at us. I don’t know who to talk to and who to get rid of, and I’m sure Lane is terrified that I’m going to say something horrible and rude to one of these rich white men who want to give us money. But you know what? Nobody cares about our quest for venture capital.

    Starting a company is not hard. However, starting a company is really goddamned annoying and does not make for interesting reading (or writing). Sex is interesting. Booze is interesting. Sex and booze and drugs all at once is interesting, and when there is some rock and roll, my god, even more interesting. So I’ll tell you this, and then I’ll move on to the exciting parts: Things with Deepleap are going really well and you’ll be hearing a lot about us soon.

    Friday

    Friday morning rolls around and Maura wakes me up with a phone call from Saint Louis. “I’m stuck in Saint Louis and I’m thinking about you,” she says. There’s weather somewhere, and pretty much everyone is stuck somewhere. Michelle calls me and she’s stuck in Atlanta, and I can only hope that Jesse isn’t bound for another night stuck in HELL. Missouri! Who would have thought that Satan himself lives under that big boring arch?

    I don’t know what to do with myself before everyone comes in, so I toodle over to the office and piss a few hours away fixing bugs which I guess isn’t actually pissing hours away, but it’s not playing with friends, you know, so it feels like wasted time. And then Maura shows up ahead of schedule and we drive around in little circles and she loses her wallet and I’m thinking “oh no, this is going to put a dark cloud over the entire weekend.”

    “Maura,” I say. “You lost your wallet. Oh well. Not the end of the world. Someone will buy your drinks for you. Just have a good time.” Advice which it looks like she follows because she comes out to drink with us later that night at one or another of the opening night parties. First one was the official SxSW thing where we met up with Judith from NYC, Phil Gyford, and a bunch of WEBLOGGING DORKS (Hush! I redeem myself later…) I’m basically spending my time trying not to meet Cam, introducing Claire to people, doing my benbrown thing.

    “It’s gonna be a bit scary for you,” I say to Claire while we’re getting ready to go. “I’m a bit … wacky when I get around these folks. I’m a bit overexcitable. I’m like a little puppy.” She nods and ignores me. Claire learned the lessons necessary for living with me pretty quickly, and she doesn’t pay me much attention anymore. My office mates are still learning, and so they yell at me a lot, especially when I take my pants off and show them my butt. It’s a nice butt, so I like people to look at it in it’s pure, bare form.

    I bump into Heather Champ who I’ve never talked to before, online or off, but she’s cute and I’m kinda desperate, so I chat her up a bit and I offer her a ride to the next party, some thing at a hotel which, well, I don’t even remember what it was for, but it was ok and everyone was there so we went, right? And Heather, well, she’s a charmer, lemme tell ya, but my chances of bedding her were ruined by a) her not-so-single status and b) “You’re HOW young? Oh good Christ!” I may have the body of a twelve year old, but baby, I’ve got the moves of a porn star, I swear! (1) But I still have to finish that sentence I started back there, Heather and I drink a few drinks and then we run into Jason Kottke and then Maura and Michelle show up and everyone decides that the party we’re at sucks and someone yells “FOOD!” and we all rush off to some cafe to eat.

    Pableaux pulls some kind of Pableaux magic (2) and we get a special room, reserved just for us super famous web personality types, and soon enough, the crew from Disgruntled Housewife come and sit down at my table. I look around and I’m surrounded by chicks, I mean, it’s Michelle and Claire and these three chickclick girls and, shit, I don’t even know who some of these people are, but I’m the only guy at this table filled with hot girls, so I bring up my favorite pity inspiring conversation topic — My Fucked Up Relationships. Of course, because Disgruntled Housewife is home to the every famous Dick List, I tell them that I’ve always been afraid, ever since I read about the Dick List way back in like 97 when Wired Magazine was still cool, I’ve always been afraid that one of my psychotic exes, (not to be confused with the spate of non-psychotic exes I’ve had recently) will stick me up in there and that I will forever be branded as a dick. They’re the psychotic ex type, those chickclick girls, and so they turn it around on me and say something like “Well, if you’ve got all these ‘psycho exes’ then the problem is most likely yours and you probably are a dick,” so I decide to ignore them for the rest of the conference. Claire pulls me aside and sneers, “Feminists!”

    I’m thinking that I’d love to take one of these lovely women home and just, you know, give her a good wholesome humping, but FUCK, I’ve had a lot to drink and the best idea involves passing out as soon as possible, so that’s exactly what I do.

    Saturday

    I want to be a glam rock star for the Deepleap party we’re throwing Saturday night, so I drag all my lovely guests (Michelle, JCN, Claire) out shopping with me, and of course, I don’t find anything I want at any store. I want spiked wristbands, I want spangles, I want tight shiney pants, you know, I want Glam! I figure out that Austin has no stores that cater to the glam rock crowd, God, is there a glam rock crowd? I hope not. I end up buying myself a shiney glammy type shirt and settling for the spiked wristbands I already have, and we stop off and get a shiney red feather boa to complete the outfit.

    It’s 6 O’clock and the first party of the night, the SxSW Web Awards ceremony starts at 7, so we all try to take 5 minute naps to freshen up, and then we start getting ready. I put a lot of lipstick and glitter on, some eyeliner here and there, and I get myself all glammed up, suck my gut in as much as possible, you know, go for that drug addict look, and we’re off to some other hotel with more free drinks and more lovely fucking people.

    I ditch my pals at the bottom of the stairs and rush upstairs to give hugs and kisses to pals like Derek,Lance, Shauna, and Drue, flit around looking for the bar, bump’n’hump Halcyon as he’s on his way into the ballroom to MC the awards. Lane’s nervous because he’s up for an award, so I tell him that he’ll never win with the competition he’s got.

    “You’re up against Ana Voog,” I say. “You don’t have any nudity on your site, let alone nice shots of your tits. You’ll never win.”

    He fumes because he’s pissed, and rightly so, that Ana is competing in the personal website category. I mean, sure, yeah, her site is a personal site. But she’s got tits! And you can see them on her cam! That’s a proven method for hits hits hits, and it’s just not fair.

    Of course, Lane wins in his category and Ana wins in two others, and Ana beats him to death in the Best-Acceptance-Speech category, even though Lane mentions me. I mean, tits! Hello! And after the awards are done (which doesn’t happen fast enough, in my humble opinion. John was funny, but man! Who really cares?) I introduce myself to Ana and invite her to the Deepleap party, pretty much sure that she thinks I’m some kind of obsessed fan and that I’ll be waiting in rubber pants to attack her. But I played it cool, I did the “you know, we’d love to see you there, and well, whatever. Maybe I’ll see you later,” thing, and she makes some joke about how she paid ten grand for her tits and now she gets to go wherever she wants, something like that, I’m messing up the joke cause I didn’t pay 10k for my tits, but it was funny and she was so small and elfish, she’s really just so cute. It’s funny. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

    So we all piss off to dinner for a bit, I figure I’ll be late to my own party, and I’m chilling with Andy who I haven’t seen in years, God, since CSoTY 97, back when CSoTY wasn’t REALLY REALLY lame, and I dunno, we ate Tacos and if a bomb had been dropped on that taco place that night, most of the high quality independant content on the internet would have vanished all of a sudden and the big e-fucking-commerce sites would have won. (3) It was like we were just a bunch of pals out to dinner, which is what we were, but I mean, it’s just weird cause we live all over the world — New Zealand, California, Texas, Canada, hell, Phil has some sort of British accent but I got no clue where he’s from. But we’re just pals, out to dinner. And there were even some hangers on there I think, a few folks that had just had the guts to talk to someone and had been surprised when they got invited along to dinner with the internet superstars. Cause you know, we’re nice folks.

    At 10 I arrive at the deepleap party, only an hour late but there are already maybe a hundred people in the bar and everyone is on their way to being wacky wacky drunk. Bryan has the video projector playing blurred out shots of the super secret product andGregory and Stefan are peddling their wares and everyone is having a really good time. There are so many people there, shit man, too many to even type URLs (and if you don’t know them, I mean, who the fuck are you anyways?) Carl, Justin, Jeff Veen, Betty “Fuckertown” Ray, shit, it was a Who’s Who of the internet. And the best part was that all the weblogger kids were there too, Brig and Matt Haughey and all those folks, there were a fuckload of them too. Even Ana Voog came, and I sat and talked to her for like 2 hours, man, she’s fucking cool. So genuine, so offbeat, you know? Like, she just says these things and I’m thinking “this woman is absolutely off her rocker,” but it’s in a wonderful, innocent way and wow, I guess I’m just really impressed that I’m sitting next to her and she gets like 10 million hits a day and you know, gets naked on her camera. I’ve always wanted to get naked on the internet.

    I excuse myself from the table I’m sitting at with Ana and Halcyon so that I can talk to a few more people and I spot Meg in line for the bathroom, so we chat and it’s really good to talk to her and see her since we used to talk like 24 hours a day and then we decided to not “See” each other anymore which I guess means we don’t talk anymore, but that really sucks so I was, like I said, really happy to see her. And we’re making talkytalk when someone vacates the bathroom and Meg says “Hey, wanna just come with me?” and because I’m drinking my second pint glass of gin (kick in the tongue) I say “Sure,” and then I’m sitting on a stool while Meg pees and my thought process was something like this:

    “Oh god, why am I in here while Meg is peeing? This is so horribly traumetizing. Oh god, oh god this is terrible. … … Hey, wait. This isn’t at all as bad as I ever thought it would be. Why am I so fucking neurotic? I mean, this is just fine. I’m fine with this. She can pee, I can pee, we’re adults, it’s fine. Oh! But now I’m traumetized by not being traumetized and oh!”

    And so, she flushed, and then I peed, and I say something like “Hey, so now that you’ve seen me pee, wanna have sex?” which goes down in my book as the number one thing I regret having said. I mean, if we had not had a thing, it would have been funny and may have actually worked, but we had a thing, you know, and it was just in bad taste and didn’t come out funny at all. So. Oops. But I mean, nothing can be taken serious when the person who says it is squirting pee out of their penis. I mean, really.

    (The second thing I said was to Ana Voog. “Hey, if you’re gonna be in town and need anything, you know, heheh, if you need any help or anything, give me a call.” And then I realized that it sounded like a come-on, like “Hey, if you want to fuck me,” right? So I say “Like, I mean, if you want to eat some good BBQ,” which made it seem like I was covering up a too obvious sexual advance which I was, but I wasn’t really, you know? She’s so out of my league.)

    People start to filter out eventually, so I walk up to the balcony area where Lance and Shauna and Drue and Alli are hanging out and I start talking about the drug addled orgy I witnessed at Burning Man, man, my eyes have seen some crazy shit, and then all of a sudden we’re discussing how much it would take, how much booze or drugs or what it would take to have me have sex with Douglas in Drue’s room while they all watched. “Lots,” I say, “but not so much if it was Carl…” who hear’s his name and wanders over. Gin + Desperate + Carl = I lean over and give Carl a big hickey on his neck and he screams “What about my wife?!” and we all giggle. God, I wish I could have a little Carl love doll. He’s such a tease.

    (the lovely ladies tell me that I’m a big boy tease myself. “You’re such a top.”)

    I’m piss drunk and it’s approaching 2am, so I tell everyone to come back to my place, but all I’m capable of doing is serving everyone a beer and passing out. I guess everyone leaves at about 3, but I don’t remember because my brain was just, wow, I was drowning in gin.

    Sunday

    I think I must have slept through Sunday. All that I remember is that Bryan talked really smart on his panel.

    Monday

    It’s strange that by monday I had already had three straight nights of drunkeness, or maybe not so strange, but Monday morning was not the happiest of mornings for my guests and I, so we didn’t manage to get to the convention center until about 2 minutes before the panels started, and I ended up standing outside of Peter Merholz’s “Interface Culture” panel. SxSW is great, except that at any given time, there is probably 1 thing that everyone wants to go to and 4 things that some people are like “eh, if I can’t get in, I’ll go to something else,” so I spent a lot of time squeezed in the back, trying to look cool and comfortable while people babbled on about how using the word “Trust” on Epinions is risky business and whatnot, I dunno, interesting to a point but I’m much more interested in the people behind the sites than the sites themselves.

    In general, and I’ll switch tenses for a second here, the shit that happened at the conference on Monday was pretty tame. I pimped it at Cocktails with Courtney, Lane got on the news, blah blah, business, schmooze, etc. Again, doesn’t make for terrific reading. Everyone headed to Pableaux’s for some magical gumbo, gumbo so good it can kill a man because he can’t stop eating, can’t figure a way to stop the fork from going into the bowl just one more time, just one more damned scoop of that amazing stuff, Goddamn it Pableaux, you’re going to make me so fat if you keep feeding me like this, and when that was done, most of us headed over to some sort of party thrown by some sort of company, oh, some shitty web app kinda thing that may or may not be vaguely in competition with deepleap, anyways, switching tenses like I switch gears…

    So we get to this terrible party at this really good bar with no free drinks, and that’s a shame because the bar really is really good, and there’s this woman on the stage who obviously makes web pages for a living but is trying to break into standup. I don’t even know what she’s saying, but God, it’s not funny. Lance and Derek and Jason and I are kinda looking at each other, looking at the stage, shaking our heads. The girl, whoever it was, God, don’t hire her to write for you, ok? Whatever her name was introduces some other woman and this new one doesn’t even have looks going for her, and then she starts in with her jokes.

    “So finding an apartment in San Francisco is pretty hard. It kinda reminds me of Nazi Germany. Like, man, I can’t find an apartment! It’s like when all the jews got killed.”

    Ok, so that’s not exactly what she said. She was, however, comparing the difficult of finding a pad in SanFran to the holocaust, and us folks, us extremely sensitive and well rounded folks towards the back of the bar, we’re just horrified.

    “So Lance, what I’m getting here is that not being able to find parking in SoMa is like being shoved into a gas chamber with your family and getting baked! Is that true?”

    “Oh yeah, it’s really hard.” We giggle uncomfortably because we want to be laughing at this woman, but God, I mean, REALLY, when did it become ok to poke fun at the holocaust?

    “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” says someone, so we all walk across the street to some chickclick thing which I’ve decided I won’t like because I don’t like ChickClick, but it’s ok even if the drinks still aren’t free, and I suggest that everyone comes back to my house for a shindig. I guess I kinda just stood up in the middle of the bar and said “Everyone come to my place” because fucking the whole bar follows me out of the club and gets in cabs and comes to my house.

    I got beer, Bryan brings over his dreamcast and video projector, so 10 minutes into the party and we’ve got the entire cast of Homepage, The Movieplaying Soul Calibur while it’s being projected, 20 feet high on my workshop. Half of Wired Digital is there, there are people dancing in my living room to Daft Punk, Drue is prank calling Esther Dyson from Justin Hall’s cell phone. And I’m just walking around, dumbfounded that I’ve got these fabulous people in my house, that I can call these fabulous, wonderful people my friends. My friends! These are my people, my friends, my god, I’ve seen some of them naked! I’ve seen Lance’s dick! This is what I was looking for in highschool, this is what I was looking for in college — I’ve got this group of friends who are actively following their dreams, creating their art, changing the world and I’m a part of it and my lord, god, we’re all so wonderful. We’re motherfucking rockstars. (4)

    At like 4 am, I find myself sitting in the grass out back with Drue, Lance, Michelle, Fabulous Jennifer, Alli, shit, just a bunch of really good folks, and I’m telling them about Priscilla, right?

    “So we went out the first time,” I say, “and we ended up going back to her place and she went and put her jammies on and I was giving her a backrub, but I guess I wasn’t getting any signals so I just ended up going home.”

    “No signals?! You’re an idiot Ben! She was in her jammies! Pajamas mean sex, you fucking retard.”

    “I dunno,” I say, “I don’t think so. So anyways, I call her a few days later and she was telling me how she was in the process of cleaning her cat, and so…”

    “She was cleaning her cat? Oh good christ. You call this girl up and she says ‘Oh hi, I’m washing my pussy right now, do you want to come over?’ and you didn’t pay any attention.” Everyone laughs. “Cleaning her cat! Oh god, you’re an idiot.”

    “Yeah, so she comes over and I cook her dinner, and she explains how she doesn’t want a relationship and she doesn’t like to date, and so I guess I just kinda lost interest. I mean, she was dressed up really nice even though she told me that she was all sick that day, but I mean, I dunno. Maybe she just dresses nice. And we were sitting on the couch, but I didn’t know what to do, so she just left and I haven’t talked to her since.”

    More laughing as everyone tries to overcome their disbelief that benbrown, pop icon, doesn’t know how to behave around girls. Drue takes my hand and says, “Tomorrow at noon, you are going to call that girl and ask her out, you’re going to ask her out and then you’re going to have sex with her because she’s sending you all the signals, but you’re a retard and you’re ignoring them. She wants to have lots of sex with you, lots and lots of really amazing sex, and then when it’s done, she wants to go home and you won’t have to worry about girlfriends, dates, etc, etc. You’re just going to have lots of sex with her. So you go do that, you go call her, and when you’ve done that, report back to me.”

    So I did. The next day, I called her up and I asked her to come out with us to the parties that night, to come and party with us fabulous people, and you know what? She said yes. And Drue hugged me and Jennifer hugged me and we did a little dance. And then, well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

    Tuesday

    If I don’t particularly like your website, something in me causes me to not particularly like you. This is a really easy thing to do when you are on the opposite side of the country and my only interaction with you is typitytypity once in a while. It gets a lot harder when I sit down across a table from you and talk to you and realize that you’re pretty good looking.

    So when I sit down at the weblog panel and look at all these folks who I just poo, I just dislike these folks so much because WEBLOGS SUCK, right? Webloggers are lazy, they’re ugly, they’re terrible terrible people and I hate them so so much! Ooo I hate them! Oh. But look! They’re so nice! And that one sure is cute! Oh what will I do?

    And so the people start talking, and what I’m hearing, it’s just killing me. “We do weblogs because we don’t have the time to do anything else! It’s so easy to do and people come back and read it, and you know, I always wanted to have a website, but I just didn’t want to put that much time into it. I had a website once and it was wonderful and beautiful, but man! this is so much easier.”

    And my hands start shaking, and I’m sweating, and I can feel my heart beating in my chest. Good god, these people are destroying my dream! Everything I’ve been working towards for the last five years, it’s all being flushed down the toilet by these lazy bastards! And so, when I think I’ve got myself under control, when I think I’m not going to vomit as soon as I open my mouth, I raise my hand and Derek calls on me. I take a deep breath. Everyone in the audience gives a nervous giggle — they know who I am. I’m Ben Brown! I hate weblogs! I’m the Enemy.

    I can’t tell if I’m standing up or sitting down, I can’t tell if I’m at a fucking congressional hearing, I’m so damned jittery and impassioned, I just let go:

    “I’m gonna try not to cry here… My hands are shaking and I’m having a pretty hard time sitting here. It’s making me really sad to hear what you guys are saying. I mean, a few years ago, people were talking about this internet revolution thing, people were saying that it was so amazing that anyone could go out and publish their own manifestos, their own magazines, people could connect on whole new levels because shit! you can do it all from a computer and it’s so much easier. And everyone can do it, everyone can write their novel, everyone can say what they need to say. And now, good god, now you guys are telling me that the revolution, the way that independant personal content is going is to the WEBLOG? It’s quick, it’s easy, but is a link to a wired news article and a snarky comment content? Is that what you want to be reading on the net? Is that what you want the future to be? Jesus man! That’s not content! That’s the patter for a radio ad!”

    I’m shaking really hard, I can barely breath, I don’t know what’s going on. Derek says something like “Are you sure you’re done?” and he smiles at me because he’s nice, Derek’s nice and he’s good, and I say “yeah,” and then I say “No, no wait. A few minutes ago, Derek was saying that the organizers here at SxSW wanted to do a panel on personal publishing, you know, journals, zines, that sort of thing. And Derek said ‘Oh no, that’s so uncool now. Do it on weblogs.’ and see, that’s exactly what I’m talking about here. A year ago, people were publishing zines! 10 people writing these 3000 word essays together, putting them all up online, making some noise! And that was fucking amazing. That was cool. And now, you guys say that the future is these little snippets, these little blurbs, and man. I’m one of two engineers at a brand new startup, ok? I’m building this big huge application, and I still find time to write 3000 (5), 5000, hells, this one here that I’m writing now, it’s like almost 6000 words already and I’m not done yet, you can find time for your art man! Don’t wimp out, don’t write TV Ads! You can write your entire life out online. And that’s a revolution, man! That’s beautiful.”

    Of course, it doesn’t sound as good as that when I actually say it. I stumbled over myself and I was tearing up and hells, I don’t even know if that’s what I really said, but it’s mostly what I meant, and then panel ends shortly after that and I stumble outside and I breath. In Out In Out. And after that, calling Priscilla is easy, and I ask her to come to a party with us that night like I said already.

    So a few bloggers come up to me afterwards, and I’m expecting them to tear me a new asshole, you know, “How dare you defame our medium!” but they don’t! They come up and they say “Wow, thanks for saying all that stuff. I thought it was really interesting.” Derek and Halcyon and Jason, they come and give me hugs because they know I need it, they know that the death of 0sil8 (or the stagnation, or something) they know that it hurts me, and people are coming up to me and saying “You know, I never thought of it that way,” and all of a sudden, I realize these people are just doing the same things I’m doing. A year ago, you got on the net and it was an obvious choice — you got a geocities account or you used your university account or whatever, and you started telling the world about yourself, you started a zine, whatever. The tools you had made it pretty obvious. But now, the cool tool is Blogger and Pitas and so the newcomers, they’re just starting up a blog instead, and they don’t even realize that they CAN go and start essay sites or journals. They don’t realize they’ve got it in them, they’re scared of being too open, they really just don’t have enough time, and you know? And so, that’s ok. That’s good. And when they realize that it’s not so hard to write something like this, it’ll be a great day. And it’ll happen, and it’salready happening, and it’s fucking amazing.

    And all of a sudden, I find myself more compelled to read these people’s weblogs, not just because I met them and they were nice and wonderful and sweet, but because I can delve into their thoughts, read their lives, and now, their links become so much more relevant! Now I care what Brig and Matt and Jack say! Oh god, my daily surf is getting so much harder. Lane is gonna kill me cause I’m not going to get any work done cause I’ll be reading pages all day long.

    So.

    I go to this party at Bruce Sterling’s house, you know, best selling author Bruce Sterling, and everyone is there and I’m talking to webloggers and I’m talking to journal people, and they’re all wonderful and they’re doing their own thing, and that’s awesome! that’s what the web is about, and goddamn, how did I get so lucky to know all these folks? But 9 rolls around and I gotta go pick up Priscilla so she can meet my amazing friends!

    I hop in the car and drive the four or five blocks to her house, but I can’t remember the address so I call her up and her housemate answers. “Hey, is Priscilla there?”

    “No,” she says.

    “No?”

    “She’s out to dinner and she said she’d call you when she got back.”

    Ok, so… “Wait, so what you’re saying is that she’s ditched out on me and my friends and my party, she said she’d be there at 9 and now I’m there and fuck, she’s not there? Well fuck me, fuck you, fuck her, Goddamn it, why are you all so fucking crazy?” … but instead of saying that, I say “Oh, cool. Yeah, have her call me.” I’m so fucking glad I didn’t remember that address because if I had shown up at the door and not had her be there, man, that would have been just fucking great.

    I go back to the party and I go up to Drue and I say “in YO face!” cause it wasn’t just me all along, it really is her, she really is weird, and so I go back to drinking as much beer as I can get into my system in one sitting.

    So here I am, sitting on Bruce Sterling’s porch, drinking beer with all these wonderful folks, all these great writers and commentators and designers and artists, my god, this is a really amazing thing and the beer, my god, it just keeps coming, and we’re the cream of the damned crop, no matter what kind of stuff you’re putting on your website cause damnit, you took that leap and put yourself out there and that’s amazing. And I don’t care if I got ditched by some girl, cause I’ve got my friends here, my friends around me and with me and in me and through me, and we’re all in this together, let’s have a big love fest.

    The End.

    I’m leaving out the part where everyone goes home and I’m sad.

    Footnotes:
    1: She’s gonna kill me for writing this because I was so not obviously flirting with her, but she was the easiest victim of my lusty internet writings. Plus, she really is nice and she really is charming and I forgot why I started this footnote in the first place, but I might as well tell a little story here. Heather and Claire and I and maybe some other folks, we were sitting at this bar before the second party started, and whatever she ordered came in this tiny little baby shaker thing. So as we’re leaving, she’s like “here, sneak this out,” and I stuck it in my big pants and boom, we were home free plus one tiny little baby shaker. “Wow,” I thought. “Not everyone from Canada is as afraid as Lane.”

    2: Pableaux is full of magic. I can not explain it.

    3: Drue says “If you’re really so worried about being blown up in a plane, you should bring your own bomb on with you. The chances of there being two bombs on one plane is so small that it’ll never happen.”

    4: I realized a few days later, after the interactive part of SxSW ended and the music part started that we are not, in fact, rock stars. The people who rolled in for the music bit, they’re rockstars. But we’re still damned attractive.

    5: And for some reason, this magical 3000 number has become this new meme, this new thing to do, and a bunch of folks have started 3000+ sites which is just great and fun, and they’re all linking to me as their inspiration which is also great and fun, but kids! Don’t get ahead of yourselves. The essay format isn’t something new, and it can be done poorly! It’s been going on since the beginning of the net — but that’s no reason to not do it! And it’s not about the magical 3000 number either. It’s about putting yourself up for people to read, saying the things you need to say, not being afraid to go all out and sacrifice some time and energy for something bigger and better. Oh god, I’m starting to sound like some kind of self-help monkey, so I’ll stop. No. One last thing. Take the time to make something wonderful. It’s worth it.

    posted 5 months ago on Mar 11, 2010 | Permalink | 26 notes

  2. Tumblr Notes

    1. otwas reblogged this from trenchant
    2. mandazee reblogged this from meaghano and added:
      haha this is really funny.
    3. meaghano reblogged this from benbrown and added:
      favorite part, ha:
    4. trenchant reblogged this from benbrown and added:
      Brown: 6985 Words
    5. melissa reblogged this from benbrown
    6. maura reblogged this from benbrown and added:
      Austin (although, ha ha,...actually remember this?)
    7. benbrown posted this

Recently on Flickr

Recently on Twitter

This is Ben Brown's blog about technology, community, and life in Austin, TX. View the archives.

Subscribe

Search

More Ben Brown

Links