My Origin Story
A famous man once said, ‘We Create Our Own Demons’. Who said that? What does that even mean? I don’t know, but I’m re-posting it because I saw it in one of my favorite movies growing up. Never-did-I -ever think that the irony would pan out into my actual life to the point it’s surreal.
I don’t .. Uh.. Let’s track this from the beginning. . .
Before I ever dreamed that I could make American history or break national sales records for global entities, or produce content online in magnitude, I was a really introverted, awkwardly shy human being. I went through many different phases in my life, and before I knew it, my daily choices and actions all seemed to start shaping my future.
Some of those habits, left lasting impressions into my mind that I swore would start to take full-control of my total imagination if I let it, but I’d never get anything done. They weren’t always productive separately, such as comics, drawing, editing, and a really, really bad video game craving.
Most of my life was subtly happy, no jet-setting and Lamborghinis, just a very humble beginning with a really tight-knit family. The internet was born when I was, and with it, technology wrapped itself around aspects of my life without being aware.
I’ll never forget walking home from school one day, which I usually got A’s & B’s but didn’t feel challenged or motivated to be into it enough, when someone on a street corner of the subway handed me a floppy disk of AOL 1.0. I took some money that I saved from working weekends as an on-foot pizza delivery boy in my neighborhood and bought a very clunky Macintosh desktop that weighed more than I did.
AIM instant messenger, away messages, colored letters on a screen, Microsoft paint, chat rooms, dial-up and constant pop-ups were fascinating to me. I couldn’t get enough, and I didn’t do much aside from opening windows and clicking things.
Shortly, Super Nintendo was introduced. I can’t explain the joy of hot chocolate sitting on the living room floor with my family and screaming at the top of my lungs whenever those dang turtles bit my foot as I held the A button down harder than normal to leap onto the green pipes that seemed to come out of the analog-screen sky.
Web TV, the first CD player, then came the portable USB drive with MP3, the digital watches, the clocks that showed images at night on my desk, my first radio that took ten batteries, an audio recorder the size of a microwave that came in terrible, televisions grew smaller, games got faster, screens increased in sharpness.
I can almost nostalgically select certain tech eras with my life, even the after high school Halo tournaments hopping around friends houses, computer games that encapsulated me more than romantic flings, my Google search history knew more about my soul than my pet cats.
Technology took a grip on my life interests early on and never let go.
