Hello World, Again

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The first time I signed onto the internet, I knew I wanted to spend my life building things and expressing myself in this medium. So in 2001, before WordPress existed, an intrepid 16-year-old named Avi Flombaum built his own blog engine and launched Flombaum Dot Com to become internet famous, avoid the normal things high school kids should be doing, and connect with the web and himself through writing. I wrote it throughout high school at Ramaz in New York City and my years at UW Madison, until I dropped out. It was where I lived online, with a vibrant, sometimes funny, always loving community of commenters keeping me in check.

The engine ran on Classic ASP and Microsoft Access and handled comments, registration, and voting. I filled the site with 292 Daily Dose entries, plus essays, fiction, the Kansas O'Rogers Chronicles, Sweeter than the Rest (a series about a guy named Sasha), AOL Instant Messenger chats, and photos. There's even a Daily Dose entry dated January 29, 1984, the day I was born, that opens with "Hello World! Today, I am born." The meta description read "I am like a teddy bear, once you get to know me, you have to love me," and the tagline was "Again I Go Unnoticed," but the numbers say otherwise: 40 hits a day in August 2002 and 85 a day by June 2003, which was incredible traffic that early on the web. A lot of it came from people I didn't know and friends I made online.

The site was sitting on an old backup drive, in a 2.6 MB Access database called avinew.mdb, so I exported it with mdbtools and put the site back together. Every post, comment, and photo is here exactly as it was first posted, including a lot of typos.

That means you get all of high school me. He was a lot more unhinged than I am now. He swears in his titles, he keeps up a running brag about having sex with many beautiful women (high school hormones and puberty, am I right?), he starts blog feuds, like the one in The Death of Uber, and he makes girls apply to be his prom date. I didn't clean any of that up, including the posts I wrote while I was dealing with depression and going to therapy. We are who we are, and sharing our raw, unfiltered selves brings us closer together. We are not so different.

In March 2001 I ended an essay called A Raising Dilema with a note: "They should let me run schools...ill show them then". Eleven years later, I co-founded Flatiron School. The whole site is back up at archive.avi.nyc.

The top 30

Most people who land here have never heard of me, so here are the thirty posts I'd send you to first, in order.

  1. Fake Daily Dose (June 2002). It starts as a tired, jokey update and then cuts itself off: "Stop. Forget everything I said." Then my Wisconsin acceptance letter sets off a panic attack, and I write my way out of it.
  2. A Raising Dilema (March 2001). A very serious proposal to replace raising your hand in class with buzzers, citing body odor, elbow concussions, and a class on "the existentialist interpretation of Lazy Boy recliner chairs."
  3. College Essays and AH SHIT. (April 2002). I posted my entire college application, including 13-year-old me taping my brother's school photo to the mirror so I could copy his haircut.
  4. Off My Back (November 2002). A letter to MTV, built like a startup pitch, asking them to let me host the VMAs. One commenter asked "what is a blog?"
  5. Do I Hide Myself? (October 2002). An elevator flirtation with a girl named Julie, a clever line about Kafka, and then a note in pink ink lands on my desk. It's one of my favorite stories about myself, it's totally true, and you should read it for what the note says.
  6. The Result of Hours of Free Time, a DSL Line, and No Cigarettes (March 2002). A step-by-step log of one Passover break night lost to the 2002 internet, ending on a site that asks whether a randomly generated image is God. My readers voted for it more than anything else I ever posted.
  7. Traffic (August 2002). Half a rant about those 40 hits a day, half an explainer on depression and therapy written so my brother would get it: you "just have a weakness, like kryptonite, to sadness."
  8. Mission Statement (February 2003). A freshman comp assignment asks for a place where I feel natural, and my answer is the internet, with Pump Up the Volume as proof that everyone gets a pirate radio station now.
  9. Emails (April 2003). An email to my TA about starting my first web company, Big Belly Media, posted word for word, where I also admit "I feel very phony." Underneath it, 28 comments of two friends flaming each other.
  10. I'm Learning (February 2003). A Seinfeld pickup line actually works (What a Weekend! is the setup), and then I spiral about her imaginary boyfriend Dan and his truck full of friends with three-letter names. Apparently I'm a middleweight and she's a heavyweight.
  11. Clara (November 2002). I wrote it the day my father's mother died, and it's my dad's whole story in a few paragraphs, from a hardware store in Buenos Aires to Beersheba, where he met my mom.
  12. Ambition and Love (August 2002). A 7am, post-all-nighter tour of my childhood obsessions, including Magic cards confiscated in 7th grade and placing 4th regionally in aggressive rollerblading at 14.
  13. Gathering Dust (February 2002). It starts with comment registration and a glowing review of my new Rio SP90 MP3 CD player, and then it turns into me trying to protect my little sister from parents who encouraged work instead of happiness. Even I notice: "(this turned out to be a pretty personal post)."
  14. Brilliant Title (October 2002). Pea coat, red Converse, Belle and Sebastian, and a slip on the gravel in Madison. Before that, I lay out my life plan: "I want to do something really brilliant with my life. Any ideas? Fuck. I'm gonna shower."
  15. Star Gazing. (March 2002). Two seniors, a boy and a girl, cut school in the rain. She opens his college rejection in the kitchen, and they lie under glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars, naming them after the people in their lives. "You didn't get into Washington." "Their loss."
  16. Joe Strummer is THE FUCKING MAN (April 2002). Erika and I talk our way into a sold-out Joe Strummer show at St. Ann's Warehouse, and I'm absolutely sure he waves at me because I'm the youngest one there. He died eight months later.
  17. Spur of the Moment (March 2002). A numbered list of the nine things I was juggling, including co-directing Casablanca and writing a novel. Number nine is schoolwork, which I "ocassionaly" tried.
  18. Find me a Prom Date. (March 2002). I built a web app where girls could apply to be my prom date and readers could vote on them. Almost nobody applied, and Gross. wrote the review in the comments: "ive never seen such desparation exhibited in such a novel way."
  19. Commitment (November 2002). Two paragraphs about not being able to commit to one scarf, which might be about scarves. Then 20 comments from my brother, my sister, and Gross., who knits scarves and has opinions.
  20. Take Me And Dry The Rain (February 2003). An ode to AIM away messages, where a friend thanks me for putting him in mine and I never tell him his name was just a %n. My sister heckles in the comments.
  21. A Day in the Life of Kansas o'Rogers. (February 2002). My alter ego Kansas cooks for his two dads and runs his life off a Kinko's laminated poster of index cards, sticky notes, and arrows with Velcro on the back. Some days he watches TV as a project. "He calls that research."
  22. No More Daily Doses. (September 2003). I shut down the Daily Dose for a redesign that never brought it back. It's also about a hard summer, and a goodbye night at my favorite Irish pub where, "not to be late, no one came before 11:30."
  23. What's the Point of Excuses? (December 2002). Depression in 11th grade, a B- average, and a life full of valid excuses, in a post that somehow ends on "we are the sum of all the actions we do in life."
  24. I Know Very Little About Life (March 2003). Freshman philosophy with Boethius, Kant, and death. A reader named Kyle W. says people keep reading for its "adorably endearing qualities."
  25. I know, I know (May 2002). I defend writing your own content management system and trash Blogger as a tool for people who "got a guide to CSS for christmas."
  26. The Death of Uber (April 2002). My favorite website gets handed to three high school girls, and I lose my mind in all caps. The person I'm yelling at shows up in the comments, and I apologize the next day. Fifteen years later, I wrote a thank-you to Ben Brown and Uber for showing a lonely kid that a creative community online was possible.
  27. Ramble On (April 2002). Cartwheels on the closed Great Lawn, then an admission that I felt numb. I stopped mid-sentence for a phone call and finished the next morning, and you can see the seam.
  28. Some Of The Best Days Of My Life (March 2003). I threw a 20-person party in my Madison apartment, and "the Mooney fucking Suzuki, who has videos on MTV, plays with the Strokes... was at my door."
  29. How to Rock Out (October 2002). My Badger Herald column on concert etiquette, which explains that wearing the band's shirt to their show "is about as cool as a boner in sweatpants." My brother called it one for the highlight reel.
  30. Script Kiddies (February 2003). How to get kicked out of your dorm and live alone at 19, with a tuna recipe and advice to steal dining hall silverware. Midway through I stop to ask, "can you guys even read this?"