Digging through detritus will get you funny stuff. Consider, for instance, this Microsoft Word file, containing a book proposal for An Idiosyncratic History of Text Files. This dates back several years. It was written by my friend Mogel/Mike Greenspan and myself, and edited, picked through, and purposefully dumbed down by that illustrious character and sometimes author Sam Tregar.

All three of us had come up BBSing in the early 90s. Computing and communication technology had made huge gains but the World Wide Web had yet to be invented, so people were using HIGH-TECH 486s to interact in the same way they that had used Apple IIs and Commodore 64s. The three of us got on the boat just as it begun sinking, which I think accounts for the nostalgia that a project like this required. And each of us was young at the time, too. Probably 13 or 14?

In those days, most file trading was either shareware or game related, but there was also the development (in the late 70s/early 80s) of these things called textfiles, the only purpose of which was communication. A pretty reasonable guess would be that these files first served as documentation accompanying software and then some genius had the idea that the format could be used to write about anything. From there, it isn’t a far leap to writing about nothing. And since a preponderance of the people trading these files were adolescents, the content was by-and-large utterly idiotic. They were kind of the digital equivalent of the then-flourishing (and still active, but diminishing) paper zine scene.

Textfiles.com is the obvious site to visit if you want to suffer through the files. Our proposal was written  as a response to the ambitions of that site– if you read anything explaining its imagined purpose, you get the sense that someone feels they’re rescuing papyrus from a burning Library at Alexandria. Which is one way to look at. We thought that our book could serve as a counterpoint.

I believed, then, that if the files had any virtue, it was to be found in the intense purity of their stupidity. It’s kind of a Jackass thing– either you enjoy the exultancy of that heavy and unbelievably masculine inability to connect with the greater world, and the goofy humor it produces, or you don’t. Our idea was to showcase the stupidity, contextualize it, soften its edges, and make it, basically, fun and try to capture what it meant to be 13 or 15 or 19 or 20 and still be titillated by the words shit and fuck.

Another goal was to show how this open medium of expression helped to humanize the kids and move them closer to adulthood. Because no matter how embarrassing much, if not all, of the material is (and in this regard I exude a maximum mea culpa to the high high heavens), I believe that the more you write and put yourself through the intellectual and emotional processes which writing requires, the better a person you become.

Sam gave the proposal to the publisher of his Perl book. I think we had a better than decent response which then fizzled. I’d forgotten about the project until right now, when I found the Word file on an old hard drive.

At the time that we were writing this proposal, it felt important to try and re-interpret and make accessible the language and vocabulary of the medium. Because, years afterwards, and on the web, some of the files are incredibly offensive– and not immediately comprehensible.

In the days way before MySpace, if you were using a modem to call a BBS, chances are that you were, in some not insignificant way, ostracized from your larger community. If you were a 16 year old kid in, say, Texas, and writing textfiles, chances are that you were one of the Nerds or Freaks or Fags. There was a literal siege mentality to this kind of late-80s/90s identity politics that, with hindsight, I barely recognize. But there it was.

The files were an early form of geek-empowerment, and that siege mentality saw an adoption of an rhetorical association with genuinely dispossessed members of society– African-Americans, homosexuals, Jews and pretty much any other minority group that you could name. But this association was processed through the mentality of the same kinds of kids who would later be wearing Marilyn Manson t-shirts to BLOW THE MINDS of their classmates; so it was crude and ultimately questionable, but not entirely unjustifiable. I think we wanted the book to try and explain this, rather than just have a mass of material out there that could be construed as Racist or Sexist or Homophobic or whatever. (Not that some of the more dubious stuff wasn’t.)

The language, in particular, could be quite offensive, superbly racially explicit and unbelievably obscene: textfiles had a very punk-rock DIY aesthetic, with an inherited patois of just plain ol’ street cussing, hip-hop influenced slang, crude depictions of sex by people who hadn’t had much of it, and god knows what else. Here I’ll cop to being one of (if not the) worst offenders in the entire scene– my problem, at least towards the end, was that I was attempting what I would have considered a Whitmanesque, Kathy Acker by way of Burroughs-influenced overview of American life, employing that patois, and also interjecting quotations and samplings from other sources, including, perhaps most oddly, James Joyce and GWAR. Often in the same piece.

This later period coincided, broadly, with the only time of my life which, upon reflection, I was almost certainly insane. I’m not sure what it was that had pushed me over the edge–  maybe moving to New York too young and too immature– but I can remember thoughts and decisions from this era which I now consider those of a mad man. Much of this was reflected in the files, which were roughly my only outlet during that bleak, bleak time.

My approach included the frequent inclusion of my real name within the files– making me an almost unique oddity in the textfiles world, where anonymity was prized. Most authors used pseudonyms or handles– my two major ones were equally embarrassing, for different reasons. At first I was Squinky. Then I was AIDS. A legitimate issue, from a reader’s point of view, is the potential of seeing my files as expressions of the first person, as genuine documents of self. Which some of the material was, but both “Squinky” and “AIDS” were in my mind as much a character as “Jarett Kobek,” three fictional entities that appeared within the writing.

Most of the material was plagiarized from literary sources, unspeakably obscene lyrics of the post-punk and Wu-Tang, and long defunct racist Neo-Nazi Internet websites. There are one or two passages that I truly wish I had not included, or had, in some way, made more obviously not my own. These methods were, in my mind, employed as a response to what literally seemed a world coming apart around; both personally and otherwise. All of the files were written while living in Rudy Giuliani’s New York. Black men were being shot forty-one times in the streets by the cops. There was always a sense that it would all end somehow and many of these files are attempts at reconciling that end.

But, in the end, I was a nineteen year old kid who believe himself invulnerable and impervious and the best writer who had ever lived; which means that the files are horrible crap, utterly embarrassing and miserable to imagine being read by others. None of them, upon a re-read, strike me as being on The Wrong Side of any issue, but rather prime examples of ambition far outpacing ability.

Allow me to state for the record: I disavow it all and apologize in advance for any given offense.

In truth, the most annoying thing about these files is that they exist in the world without any context, able to be read by people for whatever purpose they might like, and mirrored on websites that I can not control. Legally, I own the copyrights, but who has the money?

In any event, rather than hide from them, I’ve decided to host a healthy selection of files from my past in this post– these include both Early and Later works, spanning from 1992 through 1999. Some of these are group authored files, some are not. In the earliest, I’m like 13 years old– in the oldest, I think 20. Stupidity and lack of wisdom was endemic. Please do be kind in your judgments.

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