The rules of Random Date Archaeology are simple: pick a date somewhere inside the surviving archive, don’t reroll because it looks boring, search only deeply enough to see what survives, and then let the artifacts interrogate my memory.

This time the date dropped us onto Saturday, March 14, 2015.

At first, it looked like we had found three dumb tweets.

The night before, apparently, I had spent five hours shooting the pilot for something called #AShow. The next morning I tweeted about it. There were jokes about the show, jokes about hamburgers, and the general digital residue of a thing I had clearly been excited about approximately eleven years ago and had subsequently allowed to fall almost completely out of my brain.

I vaguely remembered the show once I saw the evidence. There was a basement. Ben Andrews was involved. David Hogan was involved. I had an impression that it was some kind of talk show or variety show that we tried to get off the ground through Bootstrapper Studios.

That was about it.

So we started digging.

And instead of learning much more about the show, I accidentally rediscovered an entire relationship.

The earliest surviving piece is from May 1, 2014. Cindy Lemos sent an email introducing me to Ben Andrews and Tabitha Bastien for a video shoot involving Ted Leonhardt. Five days later, Ben and I appear to have met in person at Victory Studios. I was working behind the scenes. Ben was acting.

I can picture all of them.

Maurice Morales and Adam Baggett are easy because I worked beside them constantly. Cindy, Tabitha and Ben are easy for an entirely different reason: I edited their faces.

If you have never edited interviews for a living, this is a strange category of intimacy. You can spend hours staring at somebody’s face while they repeat the same words dozens of times. You learn every blink, every pause, every tiny shift before a sentence. Years later, the project itself may be gone from your memory but the person’s face is still sitting there somewhere in storage.

That is basically what has happened with Ben.

I know his face immediately.

I barely remember knowing him.

My inbox, however, strongly disagrees.

Two days after that first shoot, Ben was already emailing that it had been “AWESOME” working with us and trying to arrange drinks or lunch. Within weeks the correspondence had moved comfortably into “homie,” “brutha,” “Brosephine,” jokes, referrals and casual declarations of love.

There are 149 surviving Gmail messages in which Ben’s address appears.

Reading them now feels a little like reading somebody else’s email.

Apparently Ben became a kind of unofficial evangelist for Bootstrapper. He kept introducing people to us. He sent potential work our direction. He pulled us into projects. We pulled him into ours. At one point I actually described him as a “Bootstrapper evangelist.”

I do not remember saying that.

It sounds right.

This is where digital archaeology gets weird.

Normally I think of memory as the thing that gives context to an artifact. You find an old photograph or an email and suddenly your brain fills in everything around it.

Here, the process is inverted.

The artifacts contain the context.

My brain is the missing piece.

And the emails kept getting stranger.

Barely a month after meeting Ben, we were already having conversations about creating original television content together. There is a June 2014 email thread simply called “TV Content.” It turns into weeks of attempted meetings involving Ben, Baggett, me, and Marissa Fujimoto. There is even a calendar event from June 5 called “Collaboration Meeting for Show.”

At one point I told Ben we were on the same wavelength and that what we needed was our “gateway drug.”

Apparently 2014 Adam wanted Bootstrapper to find some piece of original content that could get us through the door.

That sounds very much like me.

I just don’t remember doing it.

There are other pieces scattered everywhere. Ted’s short film. Production proposals. Referrals. Shoots. BBQ invitations. Ben introducing us to clients. Us talking about money and favors and television and production.

Then the trail shifts.

On January 27, 2015, there is a meeting with the spectacularly ominous title “Bootstrapper and Evil Slave Meeting.”

Evil Slave was Ben’s company.

I know this because it is written approximately nine billion times in his email signature.

What was Evil Slave actually?

No clue.

That meeting included Ben, Adam Baggett, our producer Alecia Kleiner, actor/producer David Hogan, and me. Afterward David emailed the group:

“I look forward talking to you all more about this talk show idea.”

And suddenly the artifacts start marching toward the thing I found on March 14.

February 2: Variety Show Meeting / Studio Tour.

February 20: HOLD: Variety Show Shoot.

February 25: Variety Show Creative Call.

March 13: Talk Show Shoot, scheduled from 5:00 to 10:00 PM.

Then, the next day, my tweets.

Alecia even left behind a contemporary Facebook post:

“When starting a new talk show the most important thing to do is find the perfect guests and have fun! Check and check!”

That is probably as close as I am going to get to remembering what the room felt like.

Because I cannot reconstruct the shoot.

I have vague flashes of a basement. I remember something with Ben and Ted. I know Alecia would have been making things happen because that is what Alecia did around Bootstrapper. She was one of our producers and had a gift for turning everybody else’s half-formed ideas into actual calendar entries involving actual humans standing in actual rooms.

But if you ask me where the cameras were, what the set looked like, what Ben said, what David did, what everybody laughed at, or how I felt when we wrapped?

Nothing.

It’s fuzzy.

That is fascinating to me because the archive describes something that, at the time, was clearly not fuzz at all.

These people were talking constantly. Meetings were being scheduled and rescheduled. Projects were being pitched. Introductions were being made. There was creative momentum. There were private jokes. There was enough affection between Ben and me that our professional correspondence reads more like two friends trying to invent excuses to keep making things together.

And eleven years later I can tell you exactly what Ben’s face looks like and almost nothing about being his friend.

I don’t think that means the friendship was unimportant.

I think this is just what time does.

We tend to imagine that our autobiographical memory is storing our lives according to importance. Surely the important people stay. Surely the meaningful projects remain clearer than the ordinary ones.

But apparently that is not how the filing system works.

Sometimes your brain keeps the face because you color-corrected it for twelve hours and throws away the months of lunches, emails and ridiculous creative schemes that surrounded it.

Fortunately, Gmail is a hoarder.

As for #AShow itself, I think I know why there wasn’t an episode two.

We couldn’t get funding to properly produce the pilot, and Bootstrapper was a real business with real clients who were actually paying us. Original programming was exciting, but excitement didn’t cover payroll. I could spend time chasing a talk show or I could spend that time doing paid production work.

And whatever #AShow was, apparently none of us loved it quite enough to keep dragging it uphill for free.

It was a labor of love.

There just wasn’t enough love to labor for it.