There is apparently a correct way to blog. I know this because Gabe and Max taught me. According to their extremely comprehensive internet training program, blogs allow you to share your thoughts with up to ten people through something called the online blogopolis, where you can talk about the most important issues of the day that you know about, like the guy on the bus who you saw, funny things that your cats or cats do, birthday gifts, and up to five more. Strictly cats or cats. I don’t make the rules.

This seems as good an editorial policy as any for the second installment of Random Date Archaeology, the game where I pick a completely random date from the enormous digital landfill of my life and see what version of me is still buried there. The first round landed on July 13, 2001 and somehow turned a busted transmission into Bible smugglers, my mom driving to Woodburn at one in the morning, and the discovery that I have apparently enjoyed being invisible since I was five years old. The second spin gave me Monday, September 29, 2014. So, in accordance with the Gabe and Max 430-part total system that I need for the 430 parts of how to do it, I present the most important issues of September 29, 2014 that I know about. There will be no more than five. Probably.

Important Issue #1: I Apparently Used Ello

At 9:01 that morning, I tweeted somebody asking for their Ello handle and gave them mine: ello.co/wygle. I have absolutely no memory of Ello. None. I looked for the page in the Wayback Machine and found nothing. It appears to have vanished into the same pit where most experimental social networks eventually go to die. What makes this particularly funny is that I had opinions about Ello. Twenty-five minutes later I was already critiquing the product, saying that I hadn’t figured out what need it filled, or even whether it filled one, but that I liked “the simplicity and ease for creating longer posts” and that its bare interface made it easier to read than Facebook. That sounds extremely familiar. The website does not. Ello Adam was real. I have no idea who that guy was.

Important Issue #2: Autumn Had Fallen

Five minutes after tweeting about Ello, I announced: “Autumn has fallen!” That one I understand. I’ve always preferred cold weather. Apparently this goes back to before I could even form an opinion about weather; my mom has told me that when I was a baby and it got hot outside, I would become completely miserable, and one of the reliable ways to calm me down was to put me in a cold bath. Cold baby. Happy baby. Thirty-four years later Seattle started cooling down and I celebrated on Twitter.

Later that morning I shared Lee LeFever’s “Ready for Rain”, an essay about that very Northwestern moment when summer finally gives way and people in Seattle can stop pretending they want to be outside. Then I added my own rigorous statistical analysis: “in my scientific* study, 98.3464% of my Seattleite friends shared that story, too. (*no science was used)” Peer reviewed.

Important Issue #3: Matt and Rebecca Probably Did Not Steal Tsuro

That afternoon somebody mentioned Tsuro, a board game I still remember liking. I replied, “Tsuro is a great game. We had Tsuro of the Seas for a little while before we lost it. I bet Matt & Rebecca stole it.” For the historical record, I do not believe Matt and Rebecca stole our board game. I’m pretty sure this was a running joke. They were close family friends, and for several years we would go down to Vancouver, Washington together for GameStorm, a giant tabletop gaming convention that basically swallowed the ground floor of the hotel. Every conference room became something: LARPing, role-playing games, miniature games, massive tabletop setups. I distinctly remember one enormous homemade-looking game that used My Little Pony figures as pieces. The main ballrooms were just tables and tables and tables of people playing games, and there was a huge library where you could check something out, wander around until you found an open table, and give it a shot.

The easy version of that memory would be that I loved GameStorm because I loved board games, but that isn’t quite right. The games could be overwhelming as hell. Complicated rules are hard for me to digest from a book, especially when everyone around me seems to have understood them immediately and is waiting for me to catch up. If Matt, or somebody else who was good at explaining instructions, was around, great. Otherwise Heidi and I tended to gravitate toward games we already knew or games whose rules looked mercifully simple. We even tried LARPing once, and I went in without understanding the most basic premise: I was supposed to be a character. Everyone else entered whatever fictional universe had been created for us while I apparently entered a separate game called How Do I Leave This Room Without Fucking Up Everybody Else’s Game? I vaguely remember that putting your thumb on your forehead, or something like that, meant you were speaking out of character. That is basically the entire surviving memory.

The truth is that GameStorm wasn’t my natural habitat. The crowds could be overwhelming. The rules could be confusing. I felt a little out of place most of the time. But Heidi and I got a weekend away from the kids, who would usually stay with my parents, and we got to spend concentrated time with Matt and Rebecca. Once a year I got to go somewhere slightly outside my comfort zone and poke around inside it. That was probably the part I loved most. And apparently I occasionally blamed our friends for theft.

Important Issue #4: I Apparently Used Talko

At 2:28 PM I tweeted at a company called Talko: “I seem to have lost all my convos from last week. Help?” I do not remember Talko. At all. After finding the tweet, I searched my email and discovered that I apparently invited my dad and my friend Dustin to use it, and there were signs that I had conversations with other people there too. Nothing. No interface memory, no recollection of what made me sign up, no emotional spark whatsoever. This is now the second extinct internet product from a single Monday that I apparently cared enough about to recruit other human beings into and then completely erased from my brain. Ello. Talko. Two digital civilizations rose and fell inside my life without leaving so much as a pottery shard in my memory.

Important Issue #5: Hey Bing Bong, You Got Your Emails

At 5:46 PM I tweeted my friend Matt Berlew: “fax me your email address.” Eleven minutes later: “hey bing bong”, followed by a YouTube link. I knew this one immediately. Gabe & Max’s Internet Thing. This stupid video lives rent free in my brain.

It is a fake late-night infomercial promising to teach you how to achieve “the dream life of your dreams using the internet.” It explains sophisticated technological concepts including emails, blogs, MySpaces, screensavers, Napster, computer desks, Mars and millions of colors. It also contains one of the most perfect pieces of meaningless explanatory language ever written: “What if I told you that our 430 part system was the total system that you need for the 430 parts of how to do it?” I think of that sentence constantly. I rarely quote it correctly. Apparently I never did.

One of the delightful things about having an archive this stupidly large is that we could actually test that. In February 2009 I tweeted my own version: “it’s the 430 part system is the total system that you need for the 430 parts of how do read it.” Dwayne responded in Google Chat: “wait was your tweet supposed to be nonsensical?” I sent him the Gabe & Max video. Seventeen years later, I still remember the same line by remembering approximately how the nonsense works. Other pieces became permanent vocabulary too: “I used to think the internet was an old wives’ tale.” “Fax me your email address.” And, of course, “Hey Bing Bong, you got your emails.”

Once we had the transcript and the original YouTube URL, we went digging, and this is where Random Date Archaeology did what I’m beginning to realize it does best: September 29, 2014 opened a tunnel backward. The earliest surviving footprint we found was from October 2007, right around the time the video first appeared online. An old Twitter message preserved inside my Google Chat archive includes somebody I followed writing “hey bing bong you got your emails.” By January 2008, I was infected. I tweeted the phrase myself. I sent the video to my dad. In a surviving chat, Dad quotes the “first three emails free” bit back at me; I reply with the guy on the bus and “your cats or cats.” He says he likes the blog section. I tell him my favorite part is the email notification. The next day I casually use “blogopolis” in an unrelated conversation. A couple weeks later my sister asks me to send her a link to “the hey bing bong video.” I tell her to Google it.

Soon I’m telling Dustin “bing bong, you got your email” whenever I send him something. Friends start saying it back to me. Dwayne shares the video and asks if I’ve seen it, and my answer is essentially, Of course I’ve seen it. The joke had escaped the video and become part of the language of my little social world. Seven years later, on this random Monday in September 2014, there I am again telling Matt Berlew to fax me his email address and greeting him with “hey bing bong.”

That is what survived. Not Ello. Not Talko. Not the exact rules of the LARP. I don’t even know where our copy of Tsuro of the Seas went. But Hey Bing Bong survived. Almost nineteen years after the video first entered my orbit, I still occasionally think that the internet may be an old wives’ tale. I still want people to fax me their email addresses. The phrase “430-part system” still surfaces spontaneously whenever somebody explains something in a sufficiently circular way. The internet products that were trying very hard to become permanent parts of my life disappeared. The stupid joke didn’t.

Maybe that is how memory works. Important things disappear. Unimportant things become load-bearing structural elements of your personality. Whole social networks collapse into nothing while a man saying “Hey Bing Bong, you got your emails” remains available for immediate retrieval decades later.

I used to think memory was an old wives’ tale. It’s not. Thanks, Gabe and Max. And thanks for reading my online blogopolis, where I can share my thoughts with up to ten people. Next time perhaps we’ll discuss funny things that my cats or cats do. But only cats or cats. We have standards.