My dear friend Matt Mullenweg turned forty today, and as a birthday gift he’s asked all of us to blog. With pleasure.
I started blogging almost twenty-five years ago, on a website called Open Diary. I was fifteen and it felt radical to write words on a screen that a stranger could read thousands of miles away. It still feels radical. After Open Diary, I used Live Journal, and after Live Journal, I used a beautiful, custom blog that Matt had made—among the very first WordPress blogs to ever exist.
Matt, here’s your birthday present: a post from all the way back then, from May 6th, 2002. We were about to graduate from high school.
Immortal Soul
This moment, ad infinitum, spirals into itself.
I type I type I click my fingers on the board I listen half-heartedly to the forced cheer of TV commercials.
Recorded forever, at my disposal to delete in a second, a flash of wires of zeros and ones. Can you sense my strain as I write this? This moment exposed, a nothing moment, meaningless. Clicking at the computer.
I’m not unhappy now, or maybe I am, I don’t know. My knee leans against the table. My tailbone begs for me to shift my weight. My cuticles are torn, and I look at the pink flesh and wonder if they will heal for prom. Nothing heals. Nothing is ever broken. I always bit my nails.
Tap water flowing behind me, basketball color commentary to my side. I curl my toes rhythmically. My bra strap is showing. I can feel the earrings lodged metallically in my earlobes, it’s an odd sensation to feel their weight.
Goosebumps. Cold. Click. Click. Pause. I can recreate a moment, recreate life in this virtual manner. This moment is instant and yet infinite. I am seventeen—I was always seventeen. Sweet sixteen—a pleasant euphemism, echoing blandly. I am seventeen now. There is no euphemism to gloss those edges, except perhaps “almost-eighteen”. How odd to define an age as almost something else. I am what I am.
Philosophical lightweight. I flex nothing but my fingertips in this entry, this exercise. The track lights create three shadows of my hands on the keyboard, on my thigh. My father pulls away the pillows from behind my back, and puts them on the bed. My brother hoots at some play during the play-offs. Jon Stewart cracks jokes on Comedy Central, and breaks to commercial.
Julie Sugar 