Haven't posted much in the last few years. Can't entirely say why. This place once meant a great deal to me. Now it seems like a town where I grew up, and still have fond (if complicated) memories about, but no longer wish to live in. Only occasionally pass through for a cup of coffee. And I mean no offense to anyone who does live here. I lived here for 17 years, made some life-long friends who feel like family. When I got married a few months ago, the officiant was someone I met here, someone who has become my literal best friend.
It meant a lot, once. But it changed and I changed. And that's okay.
I think it sharpened the writer that I was trying to be. I once got a job interview at Sports Illustrated because of this place. An editor liked the writing in my posts. I didn't get a job there, but it was quite the rush to have inexplicably message-board-posted my way into an interview at the place I dreamed, as a kid, of working. Even now it seems like an absurd sentence to type.
Journalism is hard. It's hard for people at every level, people who do work that is read by millions and people who do work read by small town communities. It was often fun to debate and share and discuss that stuff with people at every level. I mostly liked being here because there was a baseline assumption that most everyone could write well and was smart. I do think social media offered some other outlets for that, but a lot of people just got tired of having the same fights — or even the same jokes — most of which felt weighed down by 10 years of baggage.
I really do like message boards, despite their flaws. I like going back with the search function here, reading old posts I made in my 30s. Man I was earnest! And self righteous! It's almost like reading a diary of who you were, which is interesting, even when it's embarrassing. I was working on a big story this fall about an athlete and I knew a poster (who is no longer in journalism) had covered him years ago, so I messaged him on Facebook. We hopped on the phone and talked for an hour. We'd never spoken, but because of SJ we felt like we'd known each other for 20 years. This place never came up, but it was an unspoken wink between us. We'd clashed here over politics, we'd motherforked each other over various alliances, we'd called an eventual truce, we'd grown to be Internet friends, and we both knew we were some of the OGs of this joint, having being frequent posters in its infancy and, as Pearlman wrote, it really meant something. We talked about our kids and families and life in and out of journalism. It was great. It was a nice reminder that the years spent here had value, not just for the IRL friends we made, but because we would always be part of a shared, weird, wonderful internet family.
