We are broadcasting live from Las Vegas, where the expected array of oddities and excess is delivering on all expectations. So much has been written about Las Vegas in the last decade-plus as it emerged as a de facto inevitability for a certain set of Americans that there is little left for me to share about the city that hasn’t already been reported.
Getting here was as anthropological as it gets. The morning on Day Five of this trip started late and found its early shape at the Main Street Cafe in Hurricane, UT. My buddy and I were referring to it as “Mom and Pop”--“Do you think Mom and Pop have wi-fi?”--because it was little more than someone’s personal kitchen and patio. All the same, according to UrbanSpoon, it was the highest-rated, most beloved restaurant in Hurricane. Mom and Pop beat out a few little-known Mexican chains, a number of national restaurants we were shocked to find in a relatively sleepy place, and some joint best captured by a local’s pithy review: “For food that’s overpriced and service that’s incredibly slow, it’s really pretty good.”
Set inside a small A-Frame with open seating and a kitchen that only barely bridged the gap between commercial and residential, Mom and Pop was what most people would call “charming.” The patio was lovely. The breakfast menu at Mom and Pop was generally sensible--waffles, eggs, yogurt parfait. All went well until the food arrived, but then, the day took an unfortunate turn. Mom and Pop, despite its storybook visuals and a host of factors that middle-class liberals champion when touting favorite out-of-the-way discoveries, is an enabler of America’s inexorable decline. The food comes slathered in mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise is disgusting. It is, essentially, a temperamental fat paste that doesn’t like the heat. Mayonnaise is either unnervingly viscous or sometimes a dissociated mess of nauseating liquid and the fatty, white epoxy from whence it came. It usually overwhelms the items with which it gets paired, be they eggs, potatoes, coleslaw’s elements, or anything else. Surely, human error exacerbates mayonnaise’s devastation, but the same can be said of uranium, and for good reason, we don’t put that in or on everything. With mayonnaise, America runs wild. It is a staple of childhood, an easy way to add flavor and cohesion to sandwiches. Those ham-and-cheeses are gateway drugs; they promote the theory that mayonnaise, salty and sticky and creamy, can beneficially lend itself to almost any dish. That’s why there is the insidious theory circulating to an alarming extent that mayonnaise can be served on a hamburger. America has allowed its love affair with mayo to grow toxic.
Never more poisonous was this mayo fascination than on Friday morning, when Mom and Pop ruined a perfectly good and reasonably healthful egg-white breakfast sandwich by tainting the combination of the eggs, the cheese, the turkey sausage, and the homemade multigrain bread. The naturally complementary flavors of the sandwich were subsumed into a sickening taste that approximated rot. The mayonnaise ruined everything, infecting the spongy texture of the eggs and the cheese’s gooey goodness with too much cream, the sausage’s savory flavor with the awkward tang of too much sodium and an unwelcomed sweet aftertaste. No amount of napkins and scraping could salvage the sandwich. This is why we’re fat.
A spoiled breakfast could not stop Day Five, though. Leaving Hurricane, we drove southwest, following a diagonal from the Zion region to Vegas. Along the way, we passed St. George, UT, a ballyhooed regional destination. Radio signals in the area were broadcasted from St. George and the mileage signs since we entered Utah touted St. George. The city--we assumed it counted as a city--was purported to have it all: lawyers and doctors, access to the Virgin River, a rodeo, outlet shopping, and more. St. George was so famous and so important that motels in other towns along the way carried a broad catalogue of brochures and pamphlets that further venerated what appeared to be a southwest hotspot.
St. George appeared on the horizon suddenly. The path from Hurricane to Las Vegas descends from short mountains and smaller foothills into the desert, so much of what’s coming is visible around bends and at the bottom of slopes. Finally, this oasis in a wilderness of sleepy hamlets and trucker stops was shimmering in the desert sun, resplendent along the highway. El Dorado would not have looked as beautiful.
The sign for Red Robin flew past us on the right. Naturally, I was jazzed up. Another, for Olive Garden, was next. There was no stopping them; the signs kept whizzing by. TGIFriday’s. Red Lobster. Cracker Barrel. McDonald’s. Burger King. Wendy’s. Taco Bell. This was the American destination of our dreams! Our enthusiasm was palpable, but the national food brands didn’t enjoy exclusive access to it. On the left, we saw signs of St. George’s imposing, impressive retail titans rising to eye level and beckoning us to pull over. Nike wanted us. Polo, too. Gap. Timberland. The outlets were amassed over a ridge, tucked into the side of the road like a pot of gold uncovered. St. George was such a shopping bonanza that the outlet mall even had an Old Navy store, and that, of course, seemed like an oxymoron. Isn’t Old Navy already something of a Gap outlet? Can an outlet outlet itself?
As quickly as it started, it ended. Intent on getting to Las Vegas in time to enjoy a Friday afternoon at the pool, we didn’t stop in St. George, and after a few exits, it was gone as suddenly as it appeared.
St. George receded into memory somewhat uncomfortably. As it grew smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, its attendant stature was strikingly sad. Billed throughout Utah as a premium destination, and held out as a putative civic anchor for the region, St. George was nothing more than a few square miles of national chains and housing clusters. St. George’s modest reach was so circumscribed that the desert’s endless rows of shrubs--these small, green bushes that clearly aspire to something more but will never grow beyond such humble means--were always creating a natural border. And even then, the border was only literal, because St. George ultimately fit in well among the small-time scenery with ideas of something greater. Like the morning’s mayonnaise, St. George became an odd symbol of what America thinks, expects, and asks of itself.
After Utah came Arizona, but only briefly. Too bad. The northwest corner of Arizona was twenty minutes of red stone and rock structures that count as mountains for New Yorkers from the Midwest. Working around the curves in those canyons, arriving upon one vista after another with stone walls that encourage claustrophobia but blue skies and widening view corridors that suggest opportunity, was as thrilling as navigating through the snow-capped Rockies. But Arizona’s arresting scenery was quickly replaced by the American desert of Nevada, a searing stretch of green and tan dotted only by power lines. If southern Utah felt like another planet, Nevada felt like an alternate universe, a version of the present that might have been conjured on Lost or some disaster show intent on the unique titillation of low-level fear mixed with excited curiosity.
Little thrives in the desert, but casinos have a reliable place in the ecosystem. Passing by miles of dry terrain, actual tumbleweeds(!), and those omnipresent power lines, we saw as many casinos as there were exits. Ranging from slot machines serving as an ancillary gas-station service to, well, Las Vegas, the casinos of the Nevada desert are manifold. Needing a break, and eager to gamble, we stopped at one, the Virgin River Casino, in Mesquite, NV, that roadside billboards had advertised since Wednesday.
Virgin River was exactly what I assumed: dingy, kitschy, and awesome. Old people motored along in wheelchairs with oxygen-tank jet packs while women too old and too tired for their outfits brought bad drinks to the gamblers. The casino advertised its loose slots (unembarrassed, as you might expect), and it touted a sports book that had a strong resemblance to the sunken living room of a 1970s ranch house. At the blackjack tables, dealers wore nametags that listed their respective nations of origin, a practice which struck me as some kind of useless xenophobia veiled in a contrived attempt at community. Maybe I would have thought differently had I stopping on the side of the road in a region of the country unafflicted by immigration paranoia.
My buddy and I played blackjack for about a half hour. The table was using just two decks--probably no need for more on a Friday afternoon in late April at a small-time outfit--and to thwart any attempt at card counting, players had to keep their cards face down and could only touch the cards with one hand. As most know, normal casino blackjack allows players to see their hands, the hands of the other players, and the dealer, while also allowing players to legally handle the cards as they please. Adjusting to conventions which only reinforced that Virgin River was playing casino proved difficult as the condescension rose and the intoxication of gambling carried us toward levity. By the time we decided to make our final push to Vegas, I had won $45, and that seemed fitting.
For Day Three of my trip, the goal was simple but challenging: make it from Colby, KS to Hurricane, UT, with a stop in Denver to pick up a buddy. At nearly 900 miles, my itinerary was likely too ambitious, but I had three secret weapons that complemented each other: a deep reservoir of naturally occurring energy, an unusual excitement about scenes that other people find unremarkable, and an inexhaustible quotient for time spent in the car. With these assets, I couldn't lose.
Winning looked, well, weird. So enthused by my time in Kansas, I entered Colorado looking for more of the quiet, remote, usual America that compels me to excitedly scream out, "Today is the best one ever!" to no one in particular as I motor across the country. I wasn't disappointed. If Kansas had introduced me to fake highways and glorious expanses of nothing, eastern Colorado combined these elements with the impressions of a lawless, wild west that naive New Yorkers like me romanticize.
My first few hours in Colorado were full of rain, cows, and projection. The High Plains are gorgeous swaths of grass over which cows majestically roam as though humans were the animals. Irrigation systems, specialty barns, and massive farm machines I can't even describe keep cows well-fed and handsome. More muscular than your average cow, the Colorado cows were thoroughbreds, and that, of course, made them tantalizing for slaughter. I had never known Colorado as a cattle state. Really, I hadn't known Colorado as anything. What is the state's character in the mind of an outsider? It has some mountains and some skiing, but without seeing them live, those are characteristics that tell a boring story.
The cows, though, made Colorado something different. Suddenly, across endless emerald fields, Coloradans were cultivating their character. Not only leisure-time ski bums, Coloradans were taking great pride in raising, selling, and killing exquisite beneficiaries of agricultural science. You could see it everywhere along U.S. Route 36, another of these HINOs where you see no one, can buy nothing, and forever pray that you don't break down or get got. No one would ever know. But Route 36, unlike 24 in Kansas, had craftsmen who were so proud of their work that seemingly every dirt road originated under a handmade banner advertising a ranch. The signs were artistic. The land tidy and organized. Everywhere, the lines were clean and the seams hidden. All I could see for miles was a kind of understated virtuosity: these Coloradans could raise cattle.
Naturally, I ran with the narrative. These weren't just farmers trying to pay mortgages and educate their children. These were frontiersmen who were working the land in a fashion that vaguely recalled my own silly notions of self-determination, Protestant work ethic, noble cowboying, and even manifest destiny. With no one on the road and no one in sight across any horizon I could find, I sped along with palpable joy that I had found yet another pocket of American life that was incredibly different and normally so inscrutable that I could make of it whatever I chose.
Also, the landscape encouraged this kind of soaring self-indulgence. I stopped on the side of the road to snap this picture as I said aloud, again to myself, "This, truly, is the endless Kingdom of Heaven." Sorry. I got carried away.
But in my defense, it's hard to drive along and see these kinds of scenes without immediately writing an attendant story:
My enthused sightseeing, without actual sights, never subsided over my fourteen road hours. (This is where I tell my parents, who read this site, that I shared the driving. Worry not.) Driving through the Rockies was thrilling, even if mitigated by a low-level contempt for the opulence reflected in the condos and specialty groceries that line I-70. On the other side of the Rockies, my esteem for the ordinary only grew. Steadily descending from the mountains, my friend and I found ourselves in the greater Grand Junction, CO region, an area that probably should count as the American steppe.
Once you cross the Rocky Mountains, the United States starts to resemble pictures in The Economist. Verdant plateaus that only make it a few thousand feet off the ground look like the Chinese foothills that accommodate industrious peasant farmers. Fields of yellow grass littered with shrubs suggest central Asia. And the beginnings of desert summon notions of famous tundra elsewhere, while also inviting questions about how, exactly, Americans decided that always-on air conditioning and diverted rivers were good ideas. The near western side of the Rockies is slept on as a field of curiosity.
Then we got to Utah and shit got strange. If you drive into Utah on I-70, you enter space that feels like science fiction brought to life. Nothing makes sense, there is no discernable explanation for anything, and you're 110 miles away from even hoping for answers. This is what we saw for a few hours:
This is the Utah that has nothing to do with Salt Lake City and Mormons. It is like a different planet. Southern Utah has few people. A sea of small mounds and oddly shaped mountains make all places look boxed in and a little fake, like movie sets. Not only are there no gas stations and no restaurants, but all of the highway exits--"all" being something like five of them--sound almost smug as they say, over and over, "No services." There aren't even roads. ROADS! Along the HINOs of Kansas and Colorado, there were dirt paths running off in various directions which suggested that out of sight, life continued. Utah makes no guarantees.
Much of Utah feels like this--like Tatooine, but with less sand and fewer space people. Utah might even have three moons. That wouldn't surprise me. It also is beautiful, though, and after a long day and night of driving, Day Four was all about Zion National Park, an indescribably beautiful collection of canyons. Here are pictures:
Fear not: this post also includes some, uh, different stuff. To wit: This Springdale, UT petting zoo is set up as a miniature old west village, and inside, they sell a collection of goods that I like to call "exploitative":
The store's proprietor recommended that I check out a local sports bar to watch the NBA playoffs. When I asked her where she liked to go, she said, "Do you have a four-wheel drive with a high clearance? Because if not, you can't go where I go." Also, the people in Hurricane, UT are getting ready for an event that the television ads bill as "like cowboys on steroids with guns."
(N.B: You will most enjoy this post if you click on the images to enlarge them. Start with the one above.)
The best way to get across Kansas when traveling from Clay Center to Colby is to drive along a stretch of road called U.S. Route 24. It is considered a highway, but that really isn't fair, neither to Route 24 nor to actual highways. I-95 and I-80, with their endless trucks, sometimes 10 lanes, and a steady, sterile procession of McDonald's and warnings about the next rest area--those are highways.
Route 24 is something else. There are no entrance and exit ramps, for example, so you might not even know when and where to get on. I was told that it was three lights down, across from the Wendy's, and "past the third green house--if you see them through the passenger-side window, you're on it."
I had arrived in Clay Center from the south and had stopped at the liquor store that greets visitors and lets them know they have once again found civilization. The liquor store was typical of rural Kansas: only liquor and alcohol (by license--you can't even sell bottled water); simple wooden frame with windows illuminated by beer-company signs; television in some elevated corner, tuned to a news channel (never MSNBC); kind, tender, older white person behind the counter, doling out wisdom and conversation as though liquor stores double as guidance offices for those of us well beyond high school. A consummate fan of the rest stop, on that drive, alone, I had stopped at three different liquor stores assuming that each was really a sundries shop where I could get Yoo-Hoo!, water, and either Munchos or Combos. Instead, I usually found disappointment and someone with a cane. One of the people even had an oxygen tank.
The woman in Clay Center was named Barbara, and she's the one who told me about Route 24. I'd like to see I-70 enjoy such quaint confusion as to how one uses it. Anyway, Barbara also suggested that if I was "going any kind of a distance," I fill up on gas. "Not a whole lot on that road." She wasn't kidding.
A real highway is the center of an expansive asphalt universe. It is consistently paved, it has a shoulder or two, its ascending and descending ramps are legion, and every few miles, a gas station and national food brand are waiting to serve you along some access road with a reasonable speed limit. Route 24 enjoys none of these amenities. It is, instead, one of those HINOs--a highway in name only.
I grew up in New York, where driving was not a consideration. When I left Manhattan, I primarily relied on I-95, and when I got to any place that wasn't New York, the contrast between I-95 and everything else relegated the everything else to the "road" category. Since living in New York, I have lived in Ann Arbor, where I didn't have a car and primarily walked to and from football games, and St Louis. In St. Louis, I drive everywhere, but I only think of the actual highways--64, 44, 70, 55, etc.--as highways. The city's appellation scheme accommodates this formalistic but effective thinking. To wit: the 40-mile-per-hour street with traffic lights breaking up the extended driving stretches is considered a parkway, not a highway. Everything stays well organized.
A HINO like Route 24--and like the road I used to get from Kansas City to Junction City the previous evening--throws the system into flux. It is tantamount to a Main Street with little on it and an intermittently high speed limit. Intermittently because Route 24 actually is Main Street at times. Every so often, warning signs--literally--appear along the horizon, heralding that a reduced speed limit is imminent. And then the bottom drops out. You have to slow down from 65, to 55, to 45, to 30. Sometimes the speed limit can go as low as 20, and you need to make your change in about a minute. The reason for what can functionally be a screeching halt? Take a gander:
That photo is from a small town somewhere around Alton, KS. It is representative of the drive from Clay Center to Colby. Not pictured? What else--the liquor store where the kind, tender, older white man was watching CNN. This is how it goes along Route 24. Sometimes there are three or even five blocks of developed land, though many are often dilapidated and surrounded by trucks in similar condition. Then it's back to what people who grew up on the East Coast expect of Kansas: expansive stretches of farm land dotted with cows, fences, cinematic brush, and homemade signs about abortion, Christ, and ranches.
For the first 90 miles, I saw two gas stations, one of which hadn't been operational for years. I saw a single Sonic, a single Dairy Queen, and they were across the street from each other in one particularly lucky community. There were no signs for anything, and nothing but Route 24 was paved. In the distance on either side, there was more of the same. It felt remote, and pondering various hypotheticals--what if you were to run out of gas along here at night?--began to feel uneasy. Route 24 is not a highway.
But that was fine by me, because along the way, I got to lose myself in the scenery. While hurtling past a lake, I envisioned what life is like in the houses looking down from the adjacent hill. At a field full of abandoned trucks, I stopped dead in the middle of the road to enjoy an extended viewing. I caught a glimpse of a functioning wind farm and even had a David Brooks moment, championing America's self-aggrandizing mythology because I had beheld the power of our capitalist engine at work in such a simple and unexpected location. I quickly stopped and felt embarrassed by my willing condescension, and recognizing it was a relief, because I could instead appreciate that there are many different ways to work and live in this country. For all of my cynicism and sarcastic humor, I do genuinely enjoy opportunities to witness, partially experience, and better understand life in places where I have never been.
Route 24 also was a wonderful companion to the day's first movement. The morning had begun in Junction City, KS. My itinerary was simple: stop at the bank, stop at the U.S. Cavalry Museum, and get to Colby. Things went awry.
On my way to the bank, I rolled through downtown Junction City, a town of 22,000 people with a built environment that suggests little has changed in fifty years. Little but the pockets of modernity housed in strip-mall developments. Modernity like this:
Yes, that is a hair salon with a sexually suggestive logo and a large sign in the door forbidding children. Your eyes don't deceive you. Even better, it sits across the street from the Junction City town square, a monument that doubles as a Vietnam War memorial. Witness:
It was a perfect way to frame the day, the kind that illustrated why this road trip appealed to me and reinforced that I would, indeed, experience American scenes that I love. It's the same part of me that will do damn near anything to attend a state fair. So I set off toward the bank with renewed enthusiasm following my pleasant surprise. I was cruising down Main Street in Anytown, USA with the windows down, the Big K.R.I.T. bumping, and my law-school earplugs flapping in the breeze.
About that last part: law school exams are miserable, ill-conceived, and counterproductive. After thirteen weeks of class, hundreds of pages of reading, and no grades along the way, a typical law-school course culminates in a three- or four-hour exam. The set up is simple: you walk in, sit down, pull out an outline you've compiled from your notes, and then wade through a dense fact pattern designed to both demand recall of a broad spectrum of course topics and shame you after you walk out and realize you forgot an issue that was purposely obscure. The tests are shaming because these exams are often the sole determinant of your grade--if you get an 82 on the test, you get an 82 in the course, regardless of whether you were a genius in the class; likewise for the kids who get 93s after saying and reading nothing for months. Forgetting something can sometimes mean forfeiting an entire semester's worth of work. Never mind that practicing law will hardly, if ever, demand that you hurriedly read a purposely contrived set of facts in five minutes and then throw up onto your computer screen everything you can summon in four hours.
To assist students trying to survive this process, my law school provided us with earplugs at every exam. That way, we could be alone in our rushed, resentful thinking and insulated from coughing, from the kid whose computer makes noises, and from people shuffling in and out of the room.
I always liked the earplugs: the plugs, themselves, are white with marbleized pastel streaks embedded in the foam, and each plug is a termination point for a plastic lanyard that is made exclusively for law-school earplugs or cheap toys you can buy in gumball machines. Wearing the plugs looks goofy, so naturally, I loved doing it. Just as I loved wearing them for no reason after an exam.
So excited was I to finish school that I forgot to take off my plugs, instead tucking them into my sweatshirt and letting the plastic hang around the back of my neck as though I were wearing a necklace. I didn't realize this until Kansas City, a full four hours from St. Louis. By that point, I decided that these plugs would be a totem for my trip, so they endure as an everyday fashion accessory.
God wants it this way, and I know that because as I drove to the bank, I passed by an indoor shooting range. Initially, I thought nothing of it beyond realizing that I don't commonly see them. And then, while yanking on my earplugs in a fashion that is becoming regrettably reflexive, I realized that I should, for the first time in my life, fire a gun.
I walked into the range a little frightened. Guns make me uncomfortable. I had no experience with them, and as a result, the power they produce was, and remains, alien and scary. Still, I was intrigued, particularly because shooting a gun is portrayed and spoken about as a cathartic, unique experience. So I went forward with it. I explained to the clerk behind the counter that I was a novice looking to understand what was up with these "guns" that everyone's been talking about, and also hoping to get a little gullier. She suggested that I use a 9mm glock, which instantly satisfied my hip-hop impulses. I then had to pick a target, and I went with Saddam Hussein because that seemed like the most absurd choice, even more so than the zombie Nazi.
My shooting was OK, but I hated every minute of it. Even while only practicing my grip with an unloaded weapon, I felt morally conflicted and physically uncomfortable. Grasping the cold, heavy metal of the gun was perverse theater: clutching it dearly indicated that I yearned for its power, pulling the trigger gave me agency over a tool of violence, and yet I wanted nothing more than to throw it away. After fifteen rounds and some encouragement from the range instructor, I had experienced enough. The loud pop of the gun's small explosion amplified the terror inherent to activating such a powerful weapon, and far from cleansing or empowering, firing a handgun made me feel small. I shot at my target as I had been told, lining up the sights in front of my eye and holding my form without anticipating the release or dramatically accounting for the recoil. Yet really, I tried my best to keep my arm extended in front of my face because I wanted to hide.
At my breaking point, I put the gun down on the table. I then unloaded the magazine, returned my rented glock, washed the residual lead off my hands (I eat with them sometimes), and walked out, clutching the proof of a life experience for which I am thankful. Particularly because I will never do it again.
Route 24, small, quiet, and wonderfully different, was the best road possible, by any name.
During my first year of college, I took a lot of naps. Time was not fixed to a schedule in the way you might pin up streamers across a wall. Instead, it was a blob, an easily reconfigured mess of a resource resembling those beanbag chairs of which college kids are so fond. I did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted because time was under my control. The nap was the weapon through which I wielded such incalculable power. I would use it as necessary to catch up on sleep, which, really, was just time I'd allocated to other pursuits. One night, I drank an entire case of soda and then "went to bed" at 11 AM. Why? Because. I was eighteen, and a lifelong nocturnal streak was no longer inhibited by parents and high school.
My first year of law school, I reprised the napping. My schedule was more fixed than it had been in college, but still, graduate education accommodates sleeping during daylight hours. Law-school naps can be dangerous emotional endeavors, though. No one mentions this when you enroll, but law school is an elaborate, protracted experiment in guilt tolerance. There is always something else to read, and you sleep uneasily knowing that even when you're not working, someone else, someone against whom you'll be graded, is. So when you nap, you kind of sleep your feelings. It's healthier than eating them, I suppose, but sometimes napping can feel less like slumber than stupor.
My napping days, advised or otherwise, are over, though. I finished law school yesterday. The reality has not yet sunk in because I find myself greeting downtime with a guarded fear that I have forgotten something. I hope that by the time I return from a two-week road trip, this has subsided. In the interim, I will be consuming americana, regional culinary delicacies, and a healthy amount of playoff basketball. I also will be writing more regularly, again.
My first contribution is a piece I helped my friend and idol Tom Ziller put together. See it here.
Now, I need to go visit a George Custer museum so that I might reconnect with the seventeen-year-old Joey who wrote a short hagiography about Custer for an American history class. The same class that ended with a substitute teacher crying about Judy Garland and giving me a 97 for another term paper about Allen Iverson, bad shooting, and the decline in NBA scoring. We were assigned a simple project: write about anything historical and based in America. The comments accompanying the grade: "I have no idea what most of this means, but I've heard of Michael Jordan, and I can tell that you are excited about this topic."
FreeDarko went out of business this morning. A collection of writers who have contributed to the site over the years shared closing thoughts. Mine are there, forever memorialized alongside august company. As a sometime contributor from FD's second life, I do not and cannot claim true ownership over the site. Really, I just felt fortunate to find people living there who shared my interests and approach to them. FreeDarko going dark marks the passage of time in a particular way, though, and watching BethShoals shutter up that storefront leaves me feeling that much lonelier on the block. (And I recognize that SB keeps unpredictable hours and runs out of inventory too often.)
FreeDarko built its first audience around the same time that Straight Bangin' was born, and I befriended Nathaniel after we recognized a mutual admiration. FreeDarko was among the wave of important blogs that cropped up between roughly 2003 and 2005. These sites did not merely reflect that blogging was gaining credibility as an alternative to traditional media. They also demonstrated that through the internets, better writing from more sources would give many people long under served by traditional media their respective voices. If you can remember this far back, recall the time when the cringe-inducing columns of Rick Reilly were almost solely what passed as irreverent and alternative. Before FreeDarko and blogs of that generation, sports conversation was unfortunately that limited.
Blogging changed everything for me. When I wasn't reading FD, I was reading Byron Crawford, and the O.G. Different Kitchen, and Sexy Results, and Passion of the Weiss before Jeff was actually a real person with a sterling reputation. I was feverishly leaving comments and working on my actual work later in the day, if at all. I would wake up, read what Hussain and Daily Kos had posted, and feel good on the subway because there was finally a conversation taking place that accounted for what I felt. I was inspired to write because I finally had role models, and it was titillating to join them in a guerrilla medium that felt like a secret society.
Blogging is now as commonplace as corporate websites, and it really is not remarkable when bloggers emerge as authorities, let alone alternatives to the newspaper. Since the middle of the last decade, I have found evenmorevoices that are critical parts of my information stream, my entertainment universe, and, when most lucky, my group of friends. But still, things done changed. As natural consequences of blogging's ascendancy, the space is less intimate, the names less familiar, and the product less reliable. There are new writers who are wonderful and admirable, but there also are plenty who are terrible. There are bloggers who read FreeDarko, who came up on Jay Smooth, and now offer weak derivatives that a larger audience and its diminished standards celebrates all the same. Some of them even write for media leviathans like ESPN, the ultimate proof that whatever blogging once was has been lost, by definition.
FreeDarko passing into its fossilized state will preserve the past but accelerate the steady surrender of the future. It isn't all bad, of course; as noted, there are some great writers working today. FD's retirement does animate the ongoing gentrification of the online neighborhood that FD helped to make desirable, though. Shoals will be heard elsewhere. Hopefully, the rest of the team will be, as well. I'll be here refusing to sell, even if it holds up the Nets' new arena. And on my stroll home, seeing the lights forever turned off at FD, at Start Snitching, and at all the rest, I will be left feeling like Red in Shawshank Redemption. I guess I just miss my friends.
