One of the strange things about digging through Adam At Last this way, one random date at a time, is that sometimes you land on a day that looks like almost nothing until you start pulling on one little thread and then suddenly half your twenties come spilling out of the wall. January 22, 2001 was one of those days. I posted four times that day, which was very normal for me then because apparently I had both opinions and bandwidth, and most of the posts are exactly the kind of small internet debris you would expect to find twenty-five years later: some photos, some HTML noodling, benefits enrollment, whatever. But in the middle of it was something called “dear so and so,” and when I read it again I knew that this wasn’t just another old post. It was one of my little stories. One of the things that would eventually become Pop Stories. It reads like a confession, there’s drinking and regret and a woman far away and a photograph in a wallet and mutual friends having a baby and Damien Jurado sitting there in the middle of it all, doing what Damien Jurado does. But none of it happened. None of it. I wasn’t confessing anything. I was twenty years old and making shit up, and apparently I was pretty good at making it feel like I wasn’t.

That is one of the things I keep having to relearn about my old writing because I wrote close to myself even when I wasn’t writing about myself. I used pieces that were lying around. Music I loved. Places I knew. Kinds of people I understood. Emotional shapes that felt true even when the events were fiction. In “dear lu.” I wrote about a father and daughter who couldn’t figure out how to talk to each other anymore, and the father had been a musician and played guitar, which made me wonder for about five seconds whether I had secretly written my own dad into it, except no, I hadn’t. My dad played guitar, but he wasn’t that father. Music was simply the language I knew. In “the perfect hideout,” I used two girls named Tiffany and Kim who really had chased me around when I was a kid, but the adult narrator who helps a little boy escape them never existed. I was the little boy. I borrowed the names and the chase and invented everything else. “Childhood” was actually autobiographical. “Unfold Inside Me” was mostly fantasy with hooks in reality. “Dear So and So” was all fiction. Pop Stories was never one clean category. It was memory and fiction and fantasy and old blog posts dragged into a new container, all sitting next to each other, because apparently twenty-year-old me did not see any reason to build a customs checkpoint between them.

The funny part is that Pop Stories wasn’t really the beginning of any of this. I had been writing little things for years. At Ecola I had a typewriter, which in retrospect is such an aggressively eighteen-year-old object to carry into a common room that I’m surprised I didn’t also have a black turtleneck and a fake cigarette holder (because a real cigarette would get me in big trouble), and I would sit there in the main hall with everybody hanging around on couches and write little bits of poetry and prose and then read them out loud like I was some kind of discount beat poet on the Oregon coast. Elton especially loved them. He had that contagious laugh where if he really got going everybody else started laughing because he was laughing, which is a very good audience to have when you are young and trying things in public. I don’t remember the stories. Something about monkeys survives somewhere in the fog, which is not enough information to solve anything, so the monkeys remain missing. But the form was already there. Short things. A scene. A voice. Something funny or melancholy or both. Make it, read it, see if it lands. The computer did not invent that impulse. The internet just eventually gave it a much bigger couch.

Music was part of the machinery too, and I found a piece of evidence from late 2000 that made me laugh because twenty-year-old me had already documented almost exactly what forty-five-year-old me was trying to explain. I wrote that I had been listening to Pedro the Lion and that I had tried reading one of the songs “as a letter,” not in poem form, deliberately trying to get away from the meter because once you know the song your brain wants to keep singing it even when you are just looking at the words. That is exactly what I was doing in these stories. I would start with a song, but the story did not have to be about the song. The song was the soundtrack my characters were listening to. It gave me the emotional weather. Then I would just write. Sometimes the whole thing came out. Sometimes I would get a line or two and then leave it alone until another line showed up a day later. I almost never knew the ending because that isn’t how my brain works. I discover things by moving forward through them. I didn’t sit down knowing where “Dear So and So” was going. I put on the music, got inside whatever room the song opened, and started walking around.

Letters made sense to me because I was already living half my life that way. Josh was at Trinity Western in Canada and I was in the Portland area, so a lot of our friendship happened through long emails and IMs. We wrote about music and philosophy and church and girls and jokes and whatever else wandered into the same message because none of those things lived in separate folders in our heads. It all blurred. Writing to a person was natural. That is probably part of why I kept returning to letter-shaped stories. A letter lets you skip all kinds of exposition because the person on the other end is presumed to already know what you mean. The reader gets dropped into the middle and has to reconstruct the missing history. That is basically Pop Stories in miniature. I called them “visual shorts,” which sounds much more pretentious until I explain what I meant: you view the words with your eyes and the stories with your mind. That was it. No illustrations. No secret manifesto. I wanted to give you just enough language that the rest of the movie happened somewhere behind your forehead.

I also wanted somebody to notice them. This part matters because I have spent years saying I never wanted to be a writer, and I still think that is true. I did not want the career. I did not have a novel in a drawer. I did not dream of sitting in a cabin with a typewriter and a bottle of whiskey talking about my process. I liked making these little stories and I wanted them to count a little. I wanted somebody cool to read them and say, yeah, there is something here. Twenty-year-old me actually wrote, “i don’t think i’ll ever be a writer, my heart really isn’t there. i just want a small claim.” That is maybe the clearest thing I ever said about the whole project. I submitted some of the stories around. I know I sent things to TNI Books and the x3499 people because I was paying attention to Adam Voith and that whole little Seattle culture-making world. I know I sent Pop Stories to Nick Moceri, who was doing Sign Language Records and sl-r.com, although the submission email itself is gone because it would have lived in one of the old Juno or Hotmail accounts I can no longer get into. I think Nick told me to keep writing. I think he liked the stories. I don’t remember the exact words, which is probably better than pretending that I do.

Nick is where this whole thing gets very Wygle Wide Web, because I knew his name before I knew him. I was reading his writing at sl-r.com by August 2001. I bought records from Sign Language. I already had Short Hand Operation by Ninety Pound Wuss on CD and specifically bought the vinyl from the label because I wanted the record. I had It Goes Without Saying, the instrumental compilation Nick executive-produced, and when I looked at the track listing again all these years later there was Luke Abrams on it with a track called “Jessica.” Years later Luke and Jessica Abrams would be the people through whom I met Nick and Beth in real life at Mars Hill. I don’t know exactly when that first meeting happened. My memory from that period is good at sequences and awful at dates. I know Heidi and I were in Luke and Jessica’s community group, then Nick and Beth started their own group and we went with them. The email archive proves Nick and I already knew each other by September 2004, but I think we met earlier. I also know that by December 2004 the Moceris were running the Tuesday group we attended, and by March 2005 Heidi was literally describing herself in an email as attending “the Moceri’s home group.” Then in June, after Evelyn was born, Mars Hill was still treating the old Abrams crowd as a unit while we all tried to coordinate dedicating our babies together. The organizational chart had changed but the friendships hadn’t. Somewhere in all of that I met Nick, recognized his name, and asked him whether he remembered me or Pop Stories. He did. He asked me why I had stopped.

I laughed, I think. That is usually what I do when somebody says something nice to me that lands unexpectedly. I have never had a very satisfying answer to Nick’s question. For years the answer has basically been, I don’t know, I just ran out of short stories to tell. And that is probably partly true. The stories stopped arriving in that particular shape. I kept writing everywhere else. Emails, blogs, messages, all the endless little textual exhaust trails I am now spending my forties excavating like a man who has discovered the ruins of an ancient civilization and is annoyed to learn that the civilization was him. But Pop Stories itself never really rematerialized. The funny thing is, now that I can actually line up the dates, there is a much more physical answer sitting there too.

The last surviving Pop Stories post is September 6, 2001. It is “thursday, may twenty-fifth, two-thousand,” an older autobiographical piece I had already published on Adam At Last and was now moving into the Pop Stories collection. The site archive has weeks beginning August 5, August 19, and September 2, and then nothing after that. On the exact same day as that last Pop Stories post, over on Adam At Last, I wrote that I had three days of work left and five days at home. Saturday would be my last day at work. Monday would be my last day home. Then I was getting in the car. Five days later, on September 11, I was sitting in a Chapters bookstore in Canada waiting for Josh, using paid internet access because the Starbucks next door was closed and writing an Adam At Last post as the minutes ticked away. I ended the post by saying my two Canadian dollars had bought me twenty minutes and I had forty seconds left. And there it is. Pop Stories did not end with a farewell. I did not announce that I had finished the project. The site just stops at the exact moment I leave home and lose regular access to a computer.

I love that because it is both less dramatic and more interesting than the story I would have invented for myself. There was no great rejection. Nobody told me I was bad at it. I did not decide I was done with fiction. The little machine that made these stories had a bunch of conditions around it that I probably didn’t understand at the time: a computer I could use whenever I wanted, music within reach, long empty stretches where my mind could wander, people to write to, a blog to throw things onto, enough stability to sit still and follow an idea until it became a page. Then I left. The machine came apart. Other machines got built later. Video. Photography. Blogs. Bootstrapper. A church job. Kids. A million other ways to make something and put it in front of people. But that exact combination never came back, so Pop Stories didn’t either.

Which brings me back to Nick remembering them. I had sent those stories to somebody whose taste I respected because I wanted some tiny acknowledgment that what I was making belonged in the same world as the records and writing and weird little Seattle creative institutions I was watching from down south. Years later I actually moved into that world, met him through an entirely different door, and when I mentioned Pop Stories he remembered them well enough to ask why I had stopped. That might be the funniest part of the whole thing. Twenty-year-old me was looking for some formal piece of evidence that the stories mattered, some publication or acceptance or little badge I could pin to them, and then a few years later the evidence showed up as a guy remembering the name of the thing I had made and wondering where the rest of it went. Apparently I got what I was asking for. Not a writing career. Not literary immortality. Just a small claim.