Welcome Back

He sat on his computer wondering why exactly he was doing what he was doing. I mean, he left the place and had not looked back for about a year now, only visiting sporadically in his time before that. He looked back at what he had done before, the stories he weaved, the conversations he had, and most importantly, the idiotic ramblings of a thirteen year old kid who thought he was smarter than he was that adults had to deal with. It was shameful. Sure, it was just a website, but it was a website full of real people. Real people had memories. Obviously when he was thirteen it seemed like everyone on the site liked him, but now? Who knows. His minor confrontations he would have every so often might have been a plea by a mature userbase for the resident person-who-thinks-he-is-more-important-than-he-is to just get up and leave. And he did. He didn't burn out like some would advise; he faded away. With months stretching between the articles he wrote. He even stopped looking. He didn't want to know what his former home had become.

He used to visit this site so often. During the long, wasted hours of summer, he would sit on his computer desperately trying to think of an idea for him and his "friends" on the site to write. Normally they were awful, but that didn't make him enjoy writing them any less. He'd wake at 12, sit on Recent Changes for hours refreshing and finally begin writing sometime after eating dinner. It was an odd way to spend his free time, but he enjoyed it. He had over 300 articles to show for it. Then again, that's not much to show for it, but it's still something. He reread some of the better articles he wrote and still cringed. It's not easy looking at what you used to say. How he daintily used words like fuck and shit with asterisks or censor bars. How he would write articles with a specific axe to grind but wouldn't realize that it was really obvious that that's what he was doing. How he would make references to things that either had no business being referenced or were just for the sake of referencing something. Or most cringe-worthy was how he would write all of his articles with a sense of self-importance that wasn't even close to being accurate. He would put himself in his articles and thought people would give a shit. He wrote an entire article that is just him systematically making fun of all of the sporadic things he had done on the site up to that point with references and jokes that only he himself would find funny, but he was too delusional to see it. Granted, he was twelve, but I'm not sure that excuses him.

So now, he looks on this site and wonders if he should write something or say something. It's fun to look back nostalgically and remember what you used to do. So much history of yourself is buried in sites you used to frequent. He recalls how he would espouse his ridiculous middle schooler views in most of his articles, writing whole stories about playing Halo 3 on XBOX Live, as if that wasn't the only thing he knew about. It's dumb how little and much thought he put into his work. He clearly put tons of effort in, but he clearly didn't put enough in to realize that all of this effort was for naught. He gained nothing by writing all of these ridiculous articles. All he did was gain a catalog of musings that could be used in a smear campaign against him at the drop of a hat. There is no skill shown in the articles. They're littered with in-jokes, references, and vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity (because he was 13). He wishes he could say something positive about his articles.

He reads on slowly seeing improvement in what is written. First, the ideas get better. A story about a man with short-term memory loss who thinks he invents stuff that's already been invented? Now, that's a story. It's most certainly an improvement from a ten-chapter ordeal about a piece of Toast that lives in France that was voted to the front page the same way that a guy who dies wins an Oscar. He felt that way about most of his features. He looks at how meticulously he organized his articles page. Color-coding nonsense with bolds and italics as if anyone other than himself would give the slightest damn about his catalog of articles. They're all orphaned children. You could have said something nice about them, but he was too busy doing nothing else to notice. He struggles as he reads on to remember exactly why he left the site in the first place. He has no bad memories (except, of course, when his real-life friend lost a User of the Month vote to Apathy), and enjoyed his time there.

Then he remembers what he realized earlier. He left because if he stayed, he would forever be associated with the boy who wrote all of his articles like lists and felt the need to tag each of them with a stamp: the equivalent of a troubled youth scrawling "Derrick was here" in every armchair a therapist asked him to sit in. He didn't want to be associated with that. Every year, you get more mature, and he felt as mature as he ever had. He was 17. He didn't want to be the same guy who forgot to color the pants on the MS Paint picture of an alien that was supposed to be his magnum opus four articles into his career. He had basically reinvented himself going into high school, and his account on that ridiculous humor website was one of the few remnants of the person who was elitist, overly self-important, and unfunny. He didn't want to be treated like that person ever again, and he knew that that's who he was on the site. He left slowly because even he didn't realize why he was going away.

But he realizes now that that's stupid. It took a certain level of maturity (specifically that of an intelligent 15 year old) to want to run away from an online identity that your stupid, asshole 13-year-old self invented, but it takes another level of maturity (17 years-old, I suppose) to realize that that's stupid and that you were 13, and you acted, appropriately, like a 13 year old. There's no reason to run away from that because as he realized, everyone else who was that age matured with him, too. Leaving a place like that is a vicious circle. The longer you're away, the harder it is to come back. That's why he doesn't know if he's going to stay because it may be too hard. He is unaware of what has happened with the userbase. Has it shifted in a younger, less mature direction? Is it funnier? Should he be concerned that there's only been one featured article in six months? Can he still write this style of humor?

What he does know is that this site helped him mature as a person and most importantly, a writer. He plans to pursue writing as a career and can owe a great deal of his experience learning to write comedy to a stupid little site with a banana as it's logo. He will never take his experiences on the site for granted, and he is forever grateful.

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But seriously, thanks anyone that is still around from my days.

Yours Truly,
T3canolis