My Haunted House is a Hard Drive

Nostalgia is painful. I’m not talking about “Hey, remember Game You Beat in High School? Now you can beat it all over again with better graphics for just $80!” nostalgia. I’m talking about the pure, uncut, bittersweet longing for what’s gone kind of nostalgia. I had that feeling when I decided to venture deep into the bowels of my dusty hard drive.

I got a very nice email a few weeks ago from Sam Weiner, an Onion writer who now runs Regular Books. They’re a new publisher where folks can buy digital comedy zines on their website for $9. I’ll spoil the ending of the story a little by saying you can now pickup two of my goofiest zines through Regular Books: Double Fisting, a page-for-page parody of the Double Dragon game manual, and Wizards of Cockblock Forest, a playable D&D parody game about competitive dating. This story isn’t about the destination really. It’s more of a Feelings Quest.

Sam was recommended to me by a mutual friend, a very talented comics writer named Alex Firer (Rick & Morty). He was looking to fill out his burgeoning online zine shop and was curious if I had anything to submit. I was a good person to ask. My wife Amanda and I ran a humor press for eight years called The Devastator and we published dozens of comedy zines, including one by Alex. The zines we published were pretty much what Sam was looking for. Essentially, comedy sketches in zine form. When we ended our press, the rights to all those zines reverted back to their authors. However, I wrote a few of them, so I looked through my Devastator bookshelf to jog my memory of what I wrote. This was over a decade ago. I chose Double Fisting and Wizards of Cockblock Forest to send to Sam. Wizards was a minor bestseller for us. Double Fisting was not, lol, but I think it’s still funny and this was a good opportunity to defend my back catalogue.

Honestly, I was a little nervous to send them. The zines were written many years ago and I am squeamish about my past work. My tendency is to just move forward. “Okay, that project’s done. What’s the next one?” There’s always a concern that something I made in the past will be unfunny, poorly written, culturally dated, or all three – The Ultimate Hat-Trick! But none of those were My Big Worry. The other day, Alex texted me the cover for a sketch we wrote together several years ago and I literally texted back, “Oh fuck.” As if I had seen a ghost! It wasn’t that I thought the sketch would be a Hat-Trick. My Big Worry was being exposed to painful nostalgia, like seeing a picture of your ex on your feed. In this analogy, my ex is the comedy industry, which is way sadder than if I was talking about an actual human ex-girlfriend.

Speaking of ghosts, why didn’t I just ghost Sam? Or tell him I don’t have anything? I felt a burning desire to pay it forward. The Devastator began as a comedy magazine. Every issue was a collection of articles and comics. To get contributors with bigger followings, whose names we wanted to put on the cover to attract readers, we politely asked begged them to give us pieces from their trunk to publish. Many complied. I’m not famous at all, so my name won’t help Sam much, but I know what it’s like to try and build a comedy institution from the ground up. Every trunk piece helps. So I pushed past my squeamishness and pushed “Send” on the email with two PDF attachments.

I was relieved when Sam quickly replied saying the zines were hilarious and he’d be thrilled to publish both of them. His contract for authors was lovely. (I might steal it, actually. Shh.) There was another nice thing baked into his business model. Sam said Regular Books can include a surprise bonus, like when you buy a comic at a convention and the author quietly tucks a sticker into your copy. You get home and notice the little Sonic Peeing Like Calvin sticker and it’s a fun surprise! I love fun surprises like that, so I wanted to find a digital something to include with each zine. And that threw me for a total loop.

To find the two zines, I just had to look through my physical IRL bookshelf. To find good bonus materials, I needed to spelunk through my old hard drive. I mounted the dust-covered drive in the shelf by my desk. As I explored the old folders, I remembered the way I organized things on my last computer. It was very Devastator forward. Almost none of my Devastator stuff is on my current drive. I relegated it to my digital attic, along with so many other projects. I saw scripts for unfinished screenplays. Mortifying. I found an old stage play I wrote for a class that no one who read it liked. Terrifying. I read old sketches I wrote in college obviously inspired by Mr. Show. Cringeworthy. Painful. Nostalgia. It felt like walking through a graveyard at night. No, an abandoned manor haunted by my old ambitions. This hard drive represented a conception of my self as a professional comedy writer that I happily buried in favor of professional game developer. But here were the skeletons of that dream dancing in front of me.

I wrote Sam back saying the bonus was tripping me up. I didn’t want to share any of the forgotten writing I uncovered. He said a short voice memo thanking the reader would be ideal. I agreed. So after a few too many days mulling over what to say, I went to the dining room table, and with the physical zines in my hand, I just said whatever came to mind. Since Double Fisting is a Double Dragon parody, I talked about the infamous scene in The Wizard where Fred Savage exclaims, “He got 50,000 in Double Dragon.” The sort of easy, comforting, pop culture nostalgia I revel in every day. For Wizards of Cockblock Forest, I talked about the most dated aspect of the game, which is that the dating wizards in the settings don’t use apps. I wrote the game before swiping and subsequent swiping burnout. I suggested that it was a good game for folks who wanted to pretend they were in their 20s in the early 2000s. Again, easy nostalgia. I turned everything in to Sam. A day later, the zines were online.

I escaped the haunted house. The sun came up. Everything was going to be okay… until the inevitable sequel. Every horror movie has a sequel, right?

Scouring my old files made me so uncomfortable. Why? What freaked me out so much? I couldn’t have become the writer I am today without my digital mausoleum of failed pitches and manuscripts. The projects I build today, the ones I’m proud of, would not be possible without the projects I’ve long since buried. I know that. But it was hard to be confronted with the ghosts of my failures all over again, all at once. I felt true nostalgia for the days when I dreamed of conquering the world of comedy. Those days are gone, but I realize literally as I write this that I never actually mourned them. One day, I just said to myself “games only from now on.” I moved on to the next project without really acknowledging that comedy was what I wanted to do since high school. I have a hard drive to prove it. Did I lose a piece of myself when I switched career tracks? Do I need to mourn a loss? How do you mourn a dead dream?

Oh man!

This is supposed to be the main promo for two comedy zines and I’m on here writing about mourning dead dreams?!? Maybe a good way for me to move on is to toast the next generation of dreamers. So, here’s to Sam and Regular Books. 🥂 I hope his humor publishing house exceeds his wildest expectations. I’m honored to support him, in a small way, with two of the silliest things I’ve ever written. Maybe I should’ve warned him those zine come from a haunted house. They might be slightly cursed.

🎲 Your Turn: So, uh, have you ever mourned a dead dream? Howdidjadoit? Do you have a spooky hard drive? What’s on yours? Are you a zine reader? What are your favorite zines? What are you currently nostalgic about? Any kind of nostalgia is fine. Painful or sedative. I’d love to hear from you! You can reply directly to this email or hit the orange button below to leave a comment.

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