Adventure is just one mistake away.
A Softer World #27 features a photo of me.
I don’t remember Emily taking the photo, but based on certain clues, I can work it out. The siding in the background belongs to the porch of a house where we were once roommates. My hair’s real short in the photo so I think it’s after a breakup. I used to do that after a breakup — shave my head.
I introduced Emily and Joey. This is my claim to Internet fame, now immortalized in a Kickstarter update. In the update, Joey talks about working the ISP call centre late shift. On a night I had off and he was working, Emily and I dropped by. For some reason, he left out the best bit, so I am going to tell it to you now:
We’re in the mall’s midnight-empty food court — talking, telling stories, and laughing louder and louder. Mall security comes. The guy is about to kick us out but Joey and I flash our employee badges.
“It’s OK sir,” Joey says, dead serious, “We work for the phone company.”
It’s hard for me to read early ASW as a comic. It’s full of people and places I know — old friends, people I went to college with, exes. There are shots I recognize from crazy nights, outings with cameras, and long road trips. It’s more like a family album that someone’s scrawled all over with words. It’s better than a family album because it’s got jokes. Award-winning jokes. About suicide.
Most people celebrating or mourning the end of ASW are celebrating/mourning a piece of media. For me, it is very difficult to disentangle the media from my friends. So I would like to tell you a little bit about my friends.
Joey and Emily taught me about pursuing curiosity with fearlessness. I grew up a skinny, bookish, nervous nerd, well-liked by people in authority. So many of the coolest things that I have done in my life happened because Emily or Joey did them first and then invited me along.
Emily was this fiercely intelligent classmate, a year behind me. Once I got to know her, I started specifically picking courses because she wanted to take them too. Joey was this fiercely intelligent co-worker. On days when we had overlapping shifts I’d sometimes end up staying late, hanging around banks of telephones under harsh white lights because it was so fun.
In the first year or so that I knew each of them, I took more risks, explored more places, talked to more strangers, and was asked to leave by security more times than in the previous 18 years combined. I learned that I could get away with far more antics and be welcomed in far more places than I'd ever imagined possible.
I'm implying legendary adventures because that is fun and exciting, but I am also talking about really basic stuff. Exploring weird parts of the Internet, daring to interview live humans for school essays, going to parties, leaving a steady job to work for a start-up, learning to pick a lock.
I owe my current writing career in part to the fact that Joey and Emily managed to cobble together something like a living off of the comic. In Halifax, it seemed like all the jobs were call centre jobs and we spent a lot of time talking about how to get away from that.
One time, Joey and I calculated out how much money we’d need to live if all of our best dreams collapsed. How much could we give up and how many of our friends would give us a couch to sleep on for how long without overstaying our welcome? How much should we contribute to their groceries so we weren’t taking too much advantage? What clothes and equipment would we need to start over? How might we rebuild? The calculation was hilariously flawed, but the number we came up with — $200 a month — made anything seem possible.
Over the years, Emily, Joey and I have talked about their early struggles with distributors, first experiments with crowd funding, sudden huge hosting bills when they got linked by someone famous, the details of negotiations with publishers, and the general business of trying to make bank as an indie on the Internet.
I never tried to pay rent by selling merch about weird architecture, but the (probably false) belief that I could if I did things well enough for long enough kept me writing until I started getting offers to write for pay. They got there first and invited me along.
12 years is a long stretch and at different times we've each drifted closer and further apart. But even during the days when the threads of friendship have been thinnest, I've always had the comic. A funny sad window into my friends' funny sad worlds.
