Ghosts of long-dead running-banter have surfaced, albeit with little fanfare
Message-board voices from decades ago are still moaning and groaning at my virtual door. Better yet, they're still running
Having been nudged this week into reviewing the truckload of newly unpublished Running Times Runner’s World articles I wrote between nine and twenty-four years ago, I’ve been exploring some of the other running-related material on my hard drive that was once in the public domain and has gathered not only dust but crust. This includes the files from the personal website, kemibe.com, I deleted from the Web a little less than two years ago. Because I wanted to be thorough about that move, and because my tantrums are often admirably methodical, I had the site scrapped from archive.org as well.
I purchased the domain name kemibe.com in the spring of 2001, shortly after that year’s Boston Marathon, where I ran what proved to be, so far, my fastest lifetime marathon. I had already had a website up since sometime in 1998, using the server space allotted by my Internet provider at the time, MediaOne (later eaten by Comcast).
When I bought the domain name, I also rented server space through a hosting company in Canada, eventually being granted root-level access and learning a fair amount about webservers. And while anyone can learn HTML, I had a modest background in computer programming and picked up a little JavaScript and Perl along the way. I didn’t need any of this shit for the website I was running; I just wanted to learn how to make stuff work for the same reason I wanted to create a functioning knock-off of Zork in BASIC in 1981 or 1982. Building things that work well is satisfying even when the levers are invisible strings of ones and zeroes and the building materials are lines of letters and numbers.
I had a message board associated with my website. Once kemibe.com was live and I could implement an open-source PHP-based forum on my own server, it looked like any other message board of that era. But before that, sometime in the year 2000, I had found a site called Network54.com, now long in the ground, that allowed anyone to set up and administrate a message board in exchange for a single lonely rotating banner ad. I created such a place, named it “A Clearinghouse for Bursts of Verbal Flatulence,” and linked it to my MediaOne-hosted personal site.
Although no known traces of kemibe.com exist outside of my hard drive and a thumb drive I’ve probably lost, traces of the message board exist in the Internet Archive because it was hosted off-site until May of 2001 or so.
This is the last of the few captures the IA made:
The period “covered” is from early December 2000 to early March 2001. I was averaging well over 100 miles a week at the time preparing for Boston as well as teaching and coaching at a local high school, and I had a girlfriend I practically lived with and a relentlessly awesome yellow Lab. Yet find time for this shit I certainly did.
You can see that the interface is in some ways reminiscent of a Facebook timeline. Also, none of the individual messages were archived (alas? Maybe?), but while you can’t read those, the post “titles” offer clues about the topics and general flow of the small conversations.
A few people besides me actually used this space to present running news, such as Colleen de Reuck becoming a U.S. citizen. De Reuck would win the 2004 U.S. Olympic Marathon Team Trials for women shortly before her fortieth birthday, and thirteen-plus years before becoming my personal trainer while I was rehabbing a shitty knee.
The posts titled “Swing Time” refer to a short story I was working on. I don’t remember presenting chunks of it on the forum as the story progressed, but apparently I did. It eventually reached around 10,000 words. In those days, mostly in the late 1990s, I played around with short fiction. “Swing Time” was ultimately included in a compilation of short stories that Lize Brittin and I self-published in 2013. Only tonight did I learn that each of the stories in the collection, including “Swing Time,” can be purchased individually on Amazon. I don’t know that I will ever be truly satisfied with any stories I write, but “Swing Time” has to be the best.
Most striking is that at least four of the handles I see on that page are associated with subscribers to this newsletter. I’m sure a few others are out there. I wound up zapping the message board without notice in the summer of 2004 because for various reasons it became too much of a pain in the ass even when I left it alone for others to embroider, besmirch, or flirt on.
I also instituted a blog on kemibe.com right before ranking the forum, which by then had been renamed “A Donnybrook of Overstated Jibber-Jabber.” The blog—and these were rare then—earned the name “The Pungent Aftertaste of Cognitive Emesis.” I may have access to some of the HTML files from the blog, but it soon became little more than me bitching about living in South Florida and disappearing for stretches to address, and zealously overcorrect, a perceived ethanol deficiency.
I honestly believe that I am no more edgy or abrasive now than I ever was despite how many people can’t stand what I write. In fact, twenty or so years ago, most people were more their authentic selves than they are now. Virtually every online tool added since (photo filters, user-block buttons, and much, much more!) encourages frank inauthenticity. Also influencing people’s online conduct was that the primitive bots of Google Search, then only a few years old, took a far longer time to crawl the Web and index things; for the most part, people wouldn’t see what you wrote on the Internet unless you or someone else gave them the link to the pertinent page. Everything felt more cocooned. It wasn’t the same Web, and it showed different sides of people who go to any lengths to conceal who they truly are, whatever the resulting judgments.
Social norms were different, too. Believe it or not, cheaters, liars, racists, morons, and whiners were mocked rightly to the sidelines for their behavior, not handed HOKA sponsorships and book deals. And anyone claiming that men should be able to compete “as women” for any reason would have been advised to taper more slowly off the haloperidol. That’s significant!
And you might be surprised, though probably not, at some of the adjectives and jokes figures prominent in the sport today used to unfurl. Once Google’s indexing became near-immediate and social media interconnected uncountable numbers of people, conformity of expression became more the norm—well before social-media censorship, cancel-culture, and sham-social-justice lunacies turned people like me who continued observing and reporting on things as we saw them, rather than in the way that earns the most instant, mass approval (or at least precludes untenable levels of instant, mass disapproval) into only pariahs but caustic twats not to be engaged or acknowledged at all.
Apparently, I have a habit of talking to the World Wide Web that doesn’t waver much in its profane style or its insistent and often hapless theme—that people simply need to wake up and smell the bullshit and act accordingly. My external acclaim in this world will always be inversely proportional to the flux of bullshit into my central processing apparatus, and if I could have it differently, I absolutely would fucking not. And since I seem to have dragged a few people along for the entire long, crusty ride—among them folks no one would dispute are excellent people—maybe that’s the way it should be.