Wayward: Fetching Tales from a Year on the Road

woe was me

I am in a Berlin apartment, looking over at my boyfriend who I will break up with tonight, who will leave this dimwitted ‘living together’ experiment and who will have solid ground for telling everyone that I know that I’m impossible to deal with in the long term. Looking at him over there writing his play, I can’t help but wonder why I haven’t progressed emotionally from my first real relationship, one that I can’t help but put on paper tonight. The tale of Dan’s Diary.

I met Dan through a dial-up modem in 1996. It was a challenge to access the World Wide Web in those days, let alone view anything that loaded in under five minutes. I had just been given a monstrous laptop from my new employer, which accessorized perfectly with my lunchbox-sized cell phone. I began doing something called “surfing,” which meant finding websites linked from others.

As everyone knows, the Internet was originally invented for scientists and lonely gay people. It was the shot-heard-round-the-world for men who had the brains of DNA researchers but the abs of a pastry chef. It was also the most embarrassing place to meet someone romantically, thought of as a sewer where rats met and bred. Thousands of mid- nineties relationships were given false beginnings to the outside world. “We met in a bar, mom” was much easier to swallow than “We met in an AOL message forum about Vulcan role-playing.”

My modem was constantly dialing, trying to find a local number that would connect me to America Online’s labyrinth of message boards. It was during one of these sessions that I discovered Dan’s online diary.

It was a seemingly simple site, which required hours of programming back then. The idea that somebody would regularly document his life was crazy talk. The webmasters of those days were regarded as gurus, pulling off something that any three-year old can now do with an iPad and stolen wi-fi.

The truth is, Dan’s blogging preceded the term by ten years. He was a Woe Pioneer.

I read as many entries as I could in one day, before packing my massive black laptop into my bag and flying to Cincinnati for a business trip. I finished the final entries on an airport floor, dialed up through a newfangled port on a public pay phone.

There is no understating what Dan’s Diary did to me. It made me feel like there was some other young man exactly like me, a real person capable of breathing the same air that I breathed. He even liked my favorite band, a semi obscure shoe-gazing outfit called Spiritualized. It didn’t seem possible there was someone on the end of another computer talking about the things that moved me, the things that ached in my head everyday, the things that I couldn’t tell another person.

I wrote the email to Dan all night long. I knew that it was a futile exercise; that I would never see a reply from someone who probably received dozens of emails every day (dozens was, like, a lot back then).

The letter was the most honest thing I had ever written. It was the first true proclamation of my homo-whatever and one of the few times that I showed all of my cards. It scared me as I wrote it, thoughts that I knew I could never pull back from my fingers. I confessed my huge high school crush, unlocked images of my abusive father and quoted my favorite Mazzy Star song lyrics. I pushed send as soon as it was finished, for fear that I would lose my connection.

Then, nothing.
Then, something.
Two days later an email arrived. It was surprisingly long and began with a confession. Dan was not, in fact, writing the diary in real time. He was posting bits of his early 20’s experience while now in his late 20’s. It was more a memoir and less a diary. This did not bother me because he went on to write the best letter that I have ever read. It was a letter to me, it was lengthy and specifically told me that Dan had written the diary in hopes of creating a situation exactly like this. It was like a songwriter telling me that I was the guy from the lyrics in his songs.