Towel Day – ~ajroach42.com – I'm Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This is my blog.

[This is a thing I wrote back in May. It's sad, and deeply personal, and not at all about computers. Content Warnings for 9/11, cancer, death, eating disorders, economic strife, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.]

If I seem unreasonably skinny, it’s because I was. I weighed 120 lbs in this picture, and I was at least 5’11”. I was eating one meal a day, because a cocktail of depression and anxiety had left me with an eating disorder that I didn’t realize I had. This is the lighthearted part of the story.

As I’m writing this, it is Friday, May 24th, 2018. That means tomorrow is Towel Day, the ad-hoc holiday fans arranged back in 2001 to memorialize Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s not a date that was of particular significance to Adams, it just happened to be the earliest day fans were able to organize for a memorial. Organizing, of course, on newsgroups and mailing lists and message boards, and the other various (decentralized, federated, ad-hoc) platforms people used to self organize in the heady days of the early consumer internet.

The reasons for this are varied and obscure, but they start with the fact that Adams made a throwaway joke about “Knowing where your towel is” being intergalactic slang for having life figured out, having a plan, being prepared (because he so frequently misplaced his own, while spending time at a pool or beach.)

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