Secret handshakes and weird symbols.

The whole gifted thing set me apart early. I learned about being an outcast in that way very much at the beginning of my life. My mind was forever racing ahead, and my impatience at being expected to slow down and explain myself to peers or teachers who seemed forever several steps behind me was just incalculable. I’m still a deeply impatient person, and it’s only on rare occasions when I find myself surrounded by folks who think at the same speed as me that I feel like I can relax. This is not a good habit, nor excusable, but I explain it so that it’s understandable.

Once you’re on the outside, it’s not hard to just drift further out. I got into metal and punk and goth and hardcore music because it met me where I was. When you’re on the outside, the normal signals don’t have the same kind of reach or pull. It’s hard to relate to pop music about middle-of-the-road sentimentality when you’re getting the shit kicked out of you just for existing. My age group came up in a time when jocks would just as soon beat us as look at us and they did it often. You’re on the outside, there’s no real help coming, and you can’t trust the adults in charge because their advice is to just change who you are…what are you going to do? You look for more like you and you band together because there is strength in numbers.

This is why I’ve spent so much of my life in search of community.

Forgive the old man shit I’m about to stroll into here, but back in my day there was a lot less blurring of the lines between who was an outsider and who was not. I don’t know that this was really a good thing, but it was an obvious thing and it made things easier for a particular brand of weirdo at the time. Punks looked like punks and jocks looked like jocks and you didn’t see random gym rats covered in tattoos and you couldn’t buy Dead Kennedys t-shirts at the mall. Again, none of this was better, really, but it took out a lot of the guesswork and while you could still definitely be surprised by someone you at least had a decent baseline at a quick glance. Army surplus coats with hand-scrawled art and combat boots used to be a pretty clear-cut indicator that this person was one of us, but now it’s just as likely to be a punk rock kid or some QAnon nutcase on their way to shoot up a pizza place because they decoded a secret message by playing “Weekend At Bernie’s” in reverse.

You couldn’t just pull up Black Tape for a Blue Girl or Integrity or Swamp Zombies on Spotify…you had to stumble across them in a mix tape from a better-traveled friend and then mail well-concealed cash to a P.O. Box for an album that may or may not show up. The amount of awkward effort needed to find this stuff made it arcane and mysterious and amazing and when Sean Mahan loaned me a copy of Plastic Surgery Disasters on cassette in the 9th grade there was a weight to that, a magic. Enough so that I still remember that moment and think about it, 33 years later.

It was this exact edition, this exact cover. Bizarre photograph; stark, utilitarian text, iconic pink spot color. What an amazing album and wonderful memory. Photo courtesy an expired Etsy listing.

And because everything was complicated and difficult to access, we developed a language and rules around it, we had our rites and our rituals and it was all very exclusive and snobby but it was done, at least at the start, as a way to protect ourselves. Because the moment we stepped out of these places we were fair game. I remember seeing L7 play at the Milk Bar, having an amazing night, and after the show we were outside of the venue for all of 5 minutes before a carload of jocks drove around the corner in a Jeep, two of them standing up in the back and pissing at us as they drove by. Our safety radius was barely an arms length around us out in the real world but in our places of power we could look and be however we wanted and not have to defend it.

As I got older and found yoyos, I joined yet another hidden subculture that I could wrap around myself. We spoke about bearing sizes and string composition and trick names that only made sense to us. I remember getting hired to act as an announcer for a yoyo contest that was aired on television once and making up names for tricks on the spot because as players these were things we simply did, and we didn’t need names for them. We weathered the global yoyo craze in the late 90s by forming tiny boutique brands and producing our own small batch yoyos, something we still do to this day. Sure, you can find decent yoyos cheap on Amazon all day long but only the players in the know can find that one guy who only sells direct through Facebook marketplace, has no company to speak of, and releases maybe 100 yoyos every 2 or 3 months. My friend Mark designs and sells high-end boutique yoyo string and when asked about it he talks about the characteristics of each different blend like they’re wine or coffee. The company I manage has been making small batch boutique yoyos since 2006, and we only distribute to specialty yoyo retailers or the occasional independent clothing store.

The Wish, a bi-metal yoyo by CLYW

Secret languages, hidden doors, and layers we build between us and the world. We form insulated hives of similar people around ourselves and hide away to protect our insecurity and our self-doubt from the random people who would just as soon tear us down as look at us. It’s not the same as jocks literally pissing on us, but a brief glance at the YouTube comments on any yoyo video that’s gone viral in recent years nets plenty of shade from people who insist on upholding that long-standing tradition of shitting on anything outside of the usual, the average, the obvious. Maybe it is the same.

And to my string of niche communities I now add web3, a community that is the most conflicted I’ve ever been part of. A community that really isn’t, because it’s many different communities all speaking the same strange language but all at odds with each other, with different goals and values. Community is talked about a lot in web3 but when most people there say it what they actually mean is “customer base” or “my personal exit liquidity”. My relationship to money and commerce is very cynical and suspicious, so I learned very quickly how to find genuine, interesting communities in web3…how to look for the right flavor of armor, the right kind of defenses, the correct level of optimism tinged with weariness that would indicate that yes, here they are, here are my people. Bring me your salty, your wounded, your battle-scarred optimists hoping for a quiet week!

Admittedly, I am in WAY the hell too many Discord servers.

It’s difficult to do anything in web3 yet because the technology is young and not super great or stable or safe. Because it’s so complicated this automatically adds a wide buffer between those who are in and those who are out, and for the first time in my life I’m in a position where I would rather do away with that buffer and find a way to bring more people in. I’ve found Myself Now at odds with Myself Then, and spend my days actively trying to figure out how to make things in web3 safer and easier and less difficult so that everyone can more easily….create new communities and take advantage of the tooling. So maybe I’m not as much at odds with myself as I thought. Now instead of trying to build community to protect myself from the world I’m trying to build architecture so that others can do the same. And in yoyoing I’ve transitioned to a similar role…I’m not creating the tricks anymore, I’m creating the contests, the websites, the equipment for others to use to protect and find themselves.

I’m grateful for all the community that I’ve found and that has kept me safe for so much of my life. I’m grateful for the walls of people who stood between me and those who wished me harm so that I had space and time and support to become who I am. I’m in great debt to everyone who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me and I’m glad I have the opportunities and resources now to create those safe spaces for those coming behind me.

My friends look out for me like family.