To a Ghost of Web 1.0

A writer remembers a lost friend.

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There is only one Lillian Wang Selonick in this world. I am Googleable. Bingable. You can even Duck Duck Go me. I cannot hide behind the plausible deniability of digital doppelgängers. If my name is on the internet, it’s me.

But there are about a million John F—s. Even worse, at least one of them was famous. A governor in the 19th century. And, I can’t quite remember anymore, but I think he was one of your ancestors. I think you have the same middle initial as the famous one, so that’s no help, either.

It’s been almost seven years since you died, and I went looking for your obituary today. I never saw it. I heard the news a month and a half after you’d gone and done it from a friend of yours in a direct message on Couchsurfing, of all places. It’s like a socialist Airbnb for gutterpunks. Make your couch available free of charge to friends of friends or strangers passing through town, let them return the favor when you’re traveling, that sort of thing. I made a profile right after college but chickened out of ever using the service. A rare bit of good judgment during my early twenties.

So Ben P— (another unhelpfully common name, to the point that his email address is “anotherbenp—”) slid into my Couchsurfing DMs in September of 2019 and said he was a friend of yours and wasn’t sure if I’d heard the news. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. I hadn’t heard anything from you in two years, after you sent me fifty pages of your novel and asked me for honest feedback, and I said are you sure and you said yes, rip it to shreds, the last thing a writer needs is bromides and I took a red pen to it and scanned it at my internship and told you what I really thought and never heard from you again.

A surprising number of John F—s have died in the last several years. Searching “John F— obituary 2019” yields a flood of results, but none of them are you. I didn’t realize there were so many to spare. I entertained a fleeting fantasy that you weren’t really gone, that you had faked your own death, but that’s not really your style.

Ben P— said he’d encountered you at his dorm in 2009 during one of your short-lived stints in higher education. He recognized you immediately as a dazzling interlocutor. You’d debate religion and politics and deliver impassioned disquisitions on such topics as Welsh separatism or syphilitic psychosis at 3:00 a.m. during a Halo 3-and-amphetamines binge. Ben remembered my name from stories you used to tell him. He didn’t say what the stories were, and I’m not sure I’d want to know, but it made me feel good to know that you spoke of me. Everyone knew you were brilliant, bold, magnetic in the true sense of the word: you repulsed as many people as you drew in, and you delighted in that. Everyone felt your presence and charisma, but I liked to think that there was part of you that belonged only to me.

We met when I was twelve and you were fourteen or fifteen at a summer camp for smart kids. Even in a program full of awkward nerds my shyness was extreme. You stood out: tall, broad-shouldered, with dark chin-length hair that would’ve been called emo if not for your athletic build and mischievous, lively eyes. Even at that age you were close to six feet tall and had a few more inches to go. In my mind’s eye, the first time I see you you’re wearing a Columbine-style duster, but that can’t be right because we met in the summer. My friend K— was laughing and pushing you into the girl’s bathroom. K— was outgoing and spunky, a year older than me. I had met her the previous year and glommed onto her. She had accepted me as her introverted tag-along. The previous summer, she had taught me how to smoke Newports. This year, she would teach me how to smoke weed. She knew how to talk to boys, how to flirt. She flirted with you, and I watched.

The three of us formed a nexus. We were the bad kids at camp. I had begun my experimental raids of my parents’ medicine cabinet at age eleven. I assign no blame to K—’s interventions, nor yours, even if you were the one who first showed me the psychoactive encyclopedia Erowid.org. I was quiet, but you drew me out. I don’t know if we were friends that summer, though. I was too shy, too awkward. It wasn’t until camp ended and we exchanged AOL Instant Messenger screen names that we became what we were to each other.

We talked about everything, late into the night on our family PCs. We got high on over-the-counter or illicit drugs and compared notes, or just chugged Monster and went down Wikipedia rabbit holes together. I’d never known anyone so assured in his beliefs and so eloquent on so many topics. We sparred and argued. You always ‘won,’ of course. I didn’t mind; I didn’t care about the outcome of any given debate (although I could get heated in the moment). I just enjoyed the flexing of cognitive muscles and quickness that a conversation with you demanded.

You see, in the years since we last spoke, I’ve developed a theory of general intelligence. I believe that there are at least two axes to G: one axis is intellectual horsepower and the other is speed of cognition. A person can be smart but slow or stupid but fast. I’ve come to think of myself as smart but slow; it takes me a while to arrive at a conclusion, but when I do I’m usually right. I’m not known for my lightning-quick wit—it’s why I’m a better writer than speaker. I need to turn the words over in my mind before I can put them into the world. The rarest combination would be someone who is both smart and quick on their feet. That was you, and I admired you for it.

I always knew you were smarter than me; I just wanted to be the smartest person you knew, too. IQ measures become inherently unreliable above 150 or so. It’s just the nature of statistical extremes. But I believed you when you told me that your measured IQ was 175. I believe there’s a meaningful difference between your five standard deviations above the mean and my three. Not that it did you any good. I’ve developed another theory of G since we last spoke: anything over two standard deviations hurts more than it helps.

I joined the religious debate forum you started as co-admin, an offshoot of some corny Christian teen forum where you had trolled day and night until you managed to peel off a dozen or so of the forum’s most skeptical denizens. You recruited me to bolster the obnoxious atheist bloc. I think it helped that I was raised Jewish. In the pre-Facebook years, that’s what the internet was to me—it was the place I went to argue about religion with Christian and post-Christian teens and young adults. It was a bizarre and tight-knit community. I came to really care about these people. We would talk about them like they were part of our friend group. In retrospect, that one guy from Alaska in his twenties was probably a pedophile. He knew I was thirteen and he talked to me a lot. Asked lots of questions. But overall it was harmless and I think of that forum fondly. It exists only on the Wayback Machine now.

You treated me tenderly when we were kids. I was in love with you for a while, in the beginning, or at least I thought I was. When you’re twelve and feeling your intense adolescent feelings for the first time it’s easy to confuse intimacy with romance. Despite rarely sharing physical space, we shared an intimate friendship, and you were so kind and gentle with me while I figured that out. You taught me that platonic relationships can be just as meaningful as romantic ones.

You saved my life. There were so many nights that I wanted to die. I had barely lived, barely suffered anything that wasn’t in my own skull, and yet it was almost too much for me to bear. You were there for me on those nights.

After high school, I started to push you away. I was ensnared in an abusive relationship with my predatory psychiatrist and he didn’t want me to see you. I don’t think I ever got to tell you that story. It’s a long one, unfortunately. If I had been honest with you, I think you could’ve saved me from him, too. I knew that you would. That’s why I didn’t tell you.

But even after that dark era of my life ended, I couldn’t find a way to reconnect with you. You had gone down a strange path. You were posting groyper memes on Facebook. You were trolling in a way that felt different, crueler than before. I remember you the way you were at seventeen, a crusader for truth. Sure, you spent a lot of time on 4chan, but who didn’t? You trolled the Christians conservatives and the godless libs alike with infuriatingly well-reasoned arguments, then—none of this asinine edgelord shit I saw creeping into your online presence in 2015. I couldn’t get through to you.

The last time I saw you in person was Christmas Eve 2009. You were back from your freshman year of college, I was a senior in high school. You didn’t look good. I’m not sure if it was a manic episode or just an uppers bender, but your hair was greasy and your eyes were glassy and when I got into your car there was a glass bubbler in one cupholder and an uncapped bottle of Adderall IR in the other. I had heard there were open-air drug markets on the West Side of Chicago, so I plugged an intersection into MapQuest and off we went in search of heroin. We overshot our exit and ended up all the way on the South Side, and by the time we located the correct quadrant of urban blight, it was 9:00 p.m. and sleeting and Christmas Eve and all the dealers had either gone home or retreated too far for a couple of kids from the suburbs to find them. No dope for us that night. I chainsmoked Camel Turkish Silvers and you drove all over the deserted city and ran red lights and talked and talked and I worried about you but it was nice just to be in your orbit again.

When you sent me the novel excerpt in 2017 you said you had finally gotten sober. Thirty days. I should’ve known better than to attempt to provide literary criticism to you in that state. Thirty days sober is an achievement, but it’s also nothing. You were still one big raw, throbbing wound at that stage of sobriety. I should have said this is a great start, keep it up, can’t wait to read the finished book. But because you were my special friend and we never lied to each other I went line by line and tried to improve the manuscript and told you that in spite of its promise, the tone comes off as very self-impressed and belligerent and maybe you should get a sponsor and work some steps before attempting to write a book about addiction and recovery.

And you never talked to me again.

I’m a fucking idiot. I should have been gentle with you the way you always were with me.

John, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to save your life.

I’ve been visiting with your ghosts today. I can’t Google your name and find your obituary, but I still remember your screenname. You were remarkably consistent in your branding. By the time I met you, you already had your own personal logo designed and everything. What kind of fourteen-year-old does that? Maybe it’s normal now that everyone is expected to be their own product marketing manager, but in 2004 you were like a character from a William Gibson novel.

I can see the Wikipedia pages you edited. What business did you have contributing to the Sri Lankan Civil War entry? This triggers a memory (is it real or implanted?) of our discussions of terrorism and suicide bombings. I probably learned about the Tamil Tigers from you. You posted several times on a neuroscience and mental health forum about various prescription drug combinations. I can read your comments on an MBTI forum from 2010. You were an ENTP, which makes sense. Did we talk about that? I can’t remember anymore. I can see your caustic provocations on the religious debate forum in 2006, witness your gleeful wielding of the banhammer—and remember how you wrestled with the philosophical implications of that authority as a committed free-speech libertarian.

I can’t remember your middle name or your birthday, but I remember the tiny jolt of joy I felt every time I saw you log on to AIM. We never took a picture together on those unwieldy digital cameras we owned. Your parents took your Facebook account down. I don’t know how to find you except in these little crumbs of data scattered around the old internet. When Web 1.0 is finally gone, what will remain of you? All these fragments and I still can’t piece it all together.

From John F—’s Wikipedia user page:

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