i am the rog

There are a lot of really great things about the modern internet: instant access, discussion, cat photos, and a lot of really bad things about the internet: lack of disclosure of native advertising, anonymous harassment, and that one guy from your High School who thinks Trump “has some really good ideas.” Despite all of this, there is only one pernicious thing that really trips me up in this Web 2.0 era: bad corporate hashtags. Everyone has seen them, but who uses them? The answer, it would seem, is very few people most of the time.

Sure, so maybe tons of people used the #MambaDay hashtag, with it’s adorable little Kobe-themed Nike hashtag, maybe TV shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and @Midnight end up with nationally or worldwide trending hashtags like #SpringRaps and #Siblingsin5Words, but these are the exception, not the rule.  Just this weekend, as I was taping a test episode of a new potato chip themed podcast because I am that person, my podcast partner brought a bag of chips from the Wise Food Truck Favorites line. They were bad, but that is completely contrary to the story here. On the back of the bag, there was a call-to-action for “fans” to post their favorite food trucks on Instagram, along with the #WiseFoodTruck hashtag. Select food trucks would be featured in future Food Truck Favorites selections! Wowee! Excited to see some hot hot food truck action, I pulled out my phone and went straight to Instagram. There was one post on the #WiseFoodTruck hashtag. One post — not even from Wise, although their CM, who is doing the Lord’s work, really, did chime in with “Awesome You've got your Food Truck Friday in a bag!! How did you like them?” During the GRAMMYs, Progressive ran a series of ads featuring the #Dizzcounts, a hastily thrown together boyband including N’Sync’s Joey Fatone. I think pretty much anything with Joey Fatone is funny so I went to Twitter to add my two cents. I was only the 4th person to use the #Dizzcounts hashtag (once again... not even Progressive had used it up to that point). I had forgotten about it until recently, Chris Titone, who I have to assume is one of the actors in the spot, went through and “liked” all of the posts on the #Dizzcounts hashtag, replying to some thanking “fans” for their support. This happened almost 2 full months after the campaign launched. 

Here’s what this all comes down to. If you’re going to spend hours if not weeks dreaming up that KILLER HASHTAG for your new campaign, MAKE SURE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO USE IT. Even if it means having the account team and production crew seed the hashtag (with proper #Ad or #Client disclosure, of course), get that hashtag out there! Don’t let a consumer be the first person to use it! Hashtags are supposed to be for siloing and sorting specific sorts of information, they’re not just a way to say a thing with a pound sign in front of it. 

The real-world marketing logical hierarchy works this way:

Earlier this year, my band, Yale, Massachusetts, released a 4 song EP called “Pizzeria Regina George.” I’m almost insanely proud of it, but because I moved to NYC, we haven’t been able to play any shows or do any sort of promo for it. The songs are really good, in the “I would listen to this if I hadn’t played on it” sort of way and honestly it bums me out that more people haven’t had the chance to hear it. 

A post on Deadspin reminded me of a recurring dream I used to have during my “touring days.” 

So we’re on our way to a show (it never matters which band it is and the city is never named) and we’re running a little early. We decide to head to the venue to see what’s up. 

We show up and it’s a disaster. Five people are arguing about how to set up the p.a. and the other bands are all talking about how they thought there was going to be a backline (available gear for all the bands to share.) Sheepishly they walk up to us and within a few minutes every piece of our gear is on stage. 

The promoter walks up to us, he’s in a real bind... this OTHER touring package REALLY needed to get a show in that town on that night so he figured it would be okay if they just hopped on, raising the number of bands from 6 to 9. Oh and is there any way we could play last? He knows that he had promised we would be “somewhere in the middle” but he’s really in a bind, and this other touring package has never played here before, so...

Because we don’t want to look difficult (and honestly what else can we do... if we don’t play the show we don’t have anywhere to stay that night), we say it’s fine. 

We sit for hours, what feels like days, as an endless slog of bands plays to absolutely no one. Time passes, and time does not pass.

I woke up before we got to “play.” Every. Single Time. I had this dream almost monthly for at least 6 years. 

Sometimes I think about how the craziest thing about it, about how everything in my life has happened up until now, is that I feel like I fell ass backwards into it. 

I thought, for absolute certain, that I was going to pursue a career in film or TV. Some sort of abstract writing position I never really figured out because I never felt like I was good enough at it to show anyone else. I went to LA. 

I hated LA. Oh lord how I hated LA. With a vague blanket veil of a hatred I despised many of the minutes I spent there. The weather was great, but really, what even is that city?

I returned to Boston, clueless. I joined a band. I don’t know why, when I really think about it. I joined a band the week after I graduated from college and I told them that I knew how to play an instrument that I did not really know how to play.

Over the next 9 years I would have experiences that would shape who I would become, who I still want to be now. I’m very lucky, despite the fact that I’m poor. I am quite poor. Most of the months that I spent on tour during those were “negative income” periods, meaning I would need to frantically work 3 or 4 jobs in the intervening months just to make ends meet. 

Now I find myself staring down the vast chasm of whatever it is that I’m going to be. Do I miss piling into a van to drive across the country? Of course I do. Do I feel like spending my 20s doing an undefinable amount of work with very little to show for it may have disadvantaged me on my leap into “adulthood?” Sorta, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

I got to do a lot of really awesome stuff. I toured Europe. Twice! And lots of weird places in the US. I’ve been to cities that no one has ever heard of and I’ve played shows for people who might never see a band play outside of a gigantic amphitheater. I’ve slept in Wal-Mart parking lots and I’ve played art galleries in Madrid. 

It’s not an emptiness, it’s more of of hollowness. You are very aware of what’s missing from you, that part of you that you know works just fine on most people you know but just isn’t there. This feels like it is never going to end. There is nothing in the world that can possibly convince you that it will. 

It’s not that you don’t want to wake up in the morning, it’s that you see no reason that anything you could do in this particular day is going to make this stop. Even worse, many aspects of the day ahead of you could only serve to deepen the hole. 

You feel detached from the world. Sometimes you feel as if you are simply floating from appointment to appointment, interacting with people as best you can. You wake up, you eat (sometimes,) you go to bed. You weren’t there. 

You feel like you’re letting everyone down. You ignore your friends because you don’t want to bum them out with your problems. You think you’re a burden. You feel like you must be doing everything wrong because you’re not enjoying anything you’re doing. 

You cry, all the time. For no reason. It just kind of happens. It makes you feel stupid because you don’t know how to control your emotions. You don’t tell anyone how much you cry because you think no one wants to be bothered with your problems.

You want to die, for real. Not in an abstract “oh my gosh wish I were dead” way. You think about being dead and how you would want to die and how people around you will find out that you’ve died. Maybe you never make actual plans to die, but you probably do. 

You know that other people feel the same way you do, but it doesn’t help. Why does anyone have to be broken? You feel terrible. All the time. You’re not. 

That’s the thing. At the end of the day, you’re not broken. You’re not a burden to anyone. Eventually you’ll start to feel alright. The problem is: there’s nothing you can do to make yourself start to feel alright. It just happens. It happens slowly and it happens at a different pace every time. 

You come out of it. Every time, no matter how bad you felt, you come out of it, because you stuck it out. There are people who need you, even if you don’t feel like they do. It’s hard to remember that when it’s at its worst. They love you and they need you. 

Maybe things aren’t perfect but every day that you’re around is a day that you can spend with the ones you love.