At the very least it also means I have a bizarre, tangible record of my youth that I’ll be able to laugh at one day when I’m old and wizened.īy summer 2004, we had started filming on Mini-DV, which opened up a whole new world of editing possibilities. Looking back, the whole endeavour was entirely aimless, but aside from coming away with mild head injuries from time to time it was an innocuous way to spend my childhood. You either try to fight it and get destroyed, or embrace it and try to cash in. Having not watched any of it in well over a decade, I can safely say that the content contained within those tapes is unequivocally shit.Īll of a sudden you're everywhere and it's out of your control. I still have a box full of VHS-C tapes kicking around somewhere, which can only be viewed on one of those absolutely insane VHS adapters. Inspired by the likes of Jackass and Bam Margera’s CKY movies, our impressionable young selves set about ignoring all relevant safety warnings, hurling ourselves out of trees, riding scooters into curbs, and racing tyres down hills on skateboards.Īt the age of 14 or so, I had envisaged cutting the footage into a chaotic feature-length video of “stunts.” I’d probably have soundtracked it with music from the Tony Hawk games, alongside countless other homemade skate videos people made circa 2003 that probably featured a mix of Ace of Spades or Guerilla Radio. It began in mid-2003, when myself and a group of friends would have been in our early teens. Having spent the best part of my school years filming stupid skits with mates instead of studying, there was something semi-appealing about the prospect of being able to put videos online to share with friends. To understand why, it’s useful to remember that the internet in 2007 was, for better or worse, a very different place. In recent years I’ve come to appreciate and even enjoy its bizarre status as an enduring piece of internet history, but my relationship with the clip in the decade that followed its inexorable rise hasn’t always been easy. Who was the guy who got punched? Why did he get punched? Who punched him? What was he thinking? Why did he react that way? Why did he leave YouTube? I try to live my life based on things that are important to me, which is sometimes pizza and sometimes talking about abortions.It’s been nearly 14 years since I uploaded the original video and to this day it still prompts questions. I make sure that my jokes have purpose and a reason to be told before I tell them. I feel like the book is about what’s important to me, and that’s something that I think about a lot. I don’t journal, but I do verbally … I ruminate out loud. I feel like if there’s a story that I really love or really stuck with me, I keep repeating it until it goes somewhere useful. Do you journal? Are there personal archives of yours that you mined? A I’m a repeat storyteller. Q A lot of your own stories reach back years. Q And then little things do impact you so much, like a single facial hair or what you ate when your first boyfriend broke up with you.Ī It does feel like Armageddon, when you find that one chin hair. I just think commenters and people who spend their day getting angry on Twitter matter so little. Are you concerned at all about similar reactions to the book?Ī Men don’t read, do they? (laughs) I think anytime you do anything that makes you more visible, you’re going to get more problem people popping up. Q You’ve written about the reactions you get online to some of your writing, particularly in regards to sex. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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