RIP, @DHM
Dan McQuade was the best of the internet — and the best of us.
I met him in the comments.
I met a lot of guys (and a few women) in the comments that year. You didn’t know anyone’s name, at first, unless their name was in their handle. Most weren’t, because most didn’t want their comments to be googleable. Some of the comments were pretty foul. Some people had gotten fired after their commenter names became public.
I was @carig, because I wasn’t very anonymous — I was one of a handful of rotating lady columnists who posted on Friday, the only women who wrote for the site then. Nothing I wrote was particularly revelatory or interesting, but it was fun, and the commenters made it more fun. He was @dhm. Then, eventually, Dan.
It was 2008. Over the next year or two, most of us moved over to Twitter, and the comments weren’t quite ever the same. But in 2008, we were all there, most of us every night, posting in Deadspin Up All Night, better known as DUAN.
Some of us really were up all night. Some of us #drunj, some of us procrastinating schoolwork, some on the West Coast where it was still early, some of us too scared of the metaphorical dark to shut down the computer and go to bed. I was sometimes the first, sometimes the last, sometimes both. I was there almost every night. Some nights, I stayed awake because it felt like the only way I could keep myself from not waking up the next morning. I had a lot of pills that would have been all too easy to swallow.
There were a few trolls, but most of us were there to be funny, to complain, to share about our lives with complete strangers on the internet. It was the first time I had done that, just being open and honest and sad with people I didn’t know. Being semi-anonymous made it easier, I guess. But the longer I stayed, the less anonymous everyone became. We added each other on Facebook, seeing each other’s real names and real faces. We made plans to meet up IRL. We went from random handles to actual friends. A few of us ended up dating. A couple of folks ended up married.
I was not one of the ones who dated anyone in the comments. All of those relationships were platonic. Even the guys who slid in my DMs were only asking questions about whatever I was posting about, or maybe making jokes. I didn’t even meet up with anyone IRL for a couple of years — I was down south, and most everyone else was in the Northeast or Chicago.
After I moved to Mississippi in 2009, work took over my life, and my DUAN attendance slowly faded. The segment I wrote was canceled, editors and writers came and went, and I stopped keeping up with sports the way I had. But I stayed friends with that original circle, and I became closer to a handful of folks, the way it tends to happen.
Dan McQuade was one of the people who was always there. Dan stayed, online, in my comments and DMs and emails and sometimes texts, for all these years. I’m not sure exactly why we stayed closer and other friendships fell by the wayside. Maybe it’s because we had similar career paths — Ivies to low-paying journalism jobs, blogging for alt-weeklies, layoffs. We were both interested in fashion, and we both coincidentally became owners of grey cats. And we both struggled with alcohol, although Dan wisely quit drinking long before I did.
I wish we hadn’t had cancer diagnoses in common, though. I so, so deeply wish we had remission in common, but the universe is shitty like that. For no reason at all, I’m still here, and Dan is dead at 43. Dead way too young from a stupid, rare cancer, just like one of his fashion icons, Virgil Abloh.
Dan, who was smarter than me and definitely nicer than me and a better writer than me, is gone. And I’m really fucking sad.
In my memory, I was in Atlanta when all of this started. As I wrote two years ago about that year:
You start writing occasional posts for a popular sports blog. People start leaving comments, and you start replying to them. It doesn’t take long before you are sucked into the online community of commenters: witty, profane, some lonely just like you. People who will comment all day long. All night long. If you can just stay in the threads, you’re not alone. You don’t know anyone’s real name or where they are or what they look like, but these avatars are there for you.
It’s not much, but it’s enough.
After Dan died this week, I searched my email to find out when I was added as a commenter.1 I was wrong — it wasn’t that summer. I gained commenting privileges in October 2008, a few days before I moved everything I owned into an OTP storage unit and moved myself home to Chattanooga. In my memory, the DUAN community got me through those nights alone in my Atlanta loft, nights when I just wanted to not exist because the loneliness was too much. But apparently I was elsewhere.
Apparently, the next three months were such a blur of depression that I literally do not remember them, other than that historic Election Night. Apparently, I applied to several grad schools and a lot of jobs that did not hire me. (Peak recession, lol.) Apparently, I blogged, “Is it any wonder I want to slit my wrists?” and then said I was joking. I’m not sure that I was.
I guess I’ve blocked all that out for good reasons. But the DUAN nights I remember. I’m not going to go all fake nostalgic and say the comments were always good then, because they weren’t. But the DUAN community was a real community, and I still interact with a lot of those people on a daily or weekly basis — some of them even subscribe to this newsletter. (Dan was one of them.)
It’d be a great story if I could point to something that Dan said, something that changed my life, that saved me during that time. But I don’t remember any of his specific posts. Just that he was there. He was funny and nice, and that was enough.
Yet I do think that Dan did change my life, just by knowing him. I could be wrong, but I imagine that everyone who knew him even a tiny bit feels this way — Dan’s presence, whether IRL or online, improved your world. He was the best of the internet, the best of Philadelphia, and one of the best people I ever had the pleasure of knowing.
Most journalists, I think, have a bit of a mean streak. If you’re not a little cynical and a little mean, how else are you going to question authority and write stories that sometimes have the power to destroy lives?
But Dan didn’t have that meanness. Sure, he had cynicism (does anyone alive not in these times?), but he also had a sense of wonder and joy that I think most journalists lose around puberty. Dan had this incalculable curiosity about everything, which often led him to ask questions that led to powerful, hilarious investigative journalism, like how a man accidentally bought 10,400 Greg Briley rookie cards and what happened to the mannequin in Mannequin and “how the heck did Princess Di get an Eagles jacket?”
No one else wrote like Dan did. Any new piece of his was a delight. Pete Rose died? Let’s remember how he smelled. Why does this Ed Harris quote at the Garden State Parkway’s Jon Bon Jovi rest stop make no sense? Let’s ask and find out (that it was made up). And what did happen to that planned Toni Morrison rest stop? (YES, A TONI MORRISON REST STOP.)
I wish my brain worked like his did, finding stories literally everywhere — in New Jersey boardwalk t-shirts, in old anti-drug promotional cassette tapes, in the training montage in Rocky II, in vintage Denver Nuggets trading cards. I wish I could link to everything Dan wrote — it’s impossible, but it’s all worth reading.
That’s been an unexpected gift of his passing, reading all these pieces again and laughing and remembering Dan and then crying some more. Last night I was reminded of Cinema Varitek, Dan’s occasional sports movie reviews for the late, lamented niche baseball blog, Walkoff Walk. I reread his analysis of Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch, and I could not stop giggling:
Perhaps the worst genre of film ever conceived is children’s sports movie.[sic] The plot is almost always aped from Bad News Bears: Team of losers gets together and wins (or loses) the big game, while the bullies learn valuable lessons in the process. Of course, our children who watch these films also learn the valuable lesson of cheating.
The good guys invariably cheat to win in every kids’ sports movie. Ladybugs? Dressing up the kid from Neverending Story II as a girl to reach the finals. Mighty Ducks 2? Lassoing an opposing player, at the Junior Olympics no less. Little Giants? Using flatulence as a weapon. Angels in the Outfield? Using angels as a weapon. The Big Green? Don’t kid me, nobody’s ever seen that movie. In Racing Stripes, a whole team of characters (pigs, goats, cartoon flies voiced by David Spade) conspires and cheats to help a zebra win the Kentucky Derby.
Maybe the worst offender, though, is the Air Bud series, which teaches children if you aren’t good enough to win, you should find a dog to play for your team.
Everything about this is funny, and everything about this is true, and I never would have thought to put it together like this in a million years. That was Dan.
Dan’s Instagram was a delight, too. He was always posting funny and weird signs that he would see while walking around Philadelphia. There were frequent updates on whether his cat, Detective John Munch, was in her yurt, and what the neighborhood cats were doing, and the newest, funniest bootleg t-shirts, and, of course, Philly sports happenings.
Unlike some of us, Dan was just as witty and nice offline as he was in his writing and on social — he was such a good human. Generous with his knowledge, his time, his laughter. Generous with his praise. Dan was always there with a funny comment about my dog or a supportive remark about something I wrote.
Dan sent me stickers when Defector launched, so I now have a sticker of Detective on my laptop.2 A picture of me with that laptop, with that sticker, is one of my professional headshots. It’s on my LinkedIn profile. It was the subject of the last exchange Dan and I had, about the following picture of my mom’s dog, Rizzo:
I have that same sticker on my water bottle. I looked up during yoga yesterday and saw it and started crying again. I put that sticker on my water bottle when I bought it, which was the week before I went to rehab. I’m not sure if a water bottle was on the suggested packing list or if it just seemed like a good idea to have one during the summer. But I bought a new Nalgene, and I put that sticker on it so I’d know it was mine.
I chose that sticker specifically because it was Dan’s cat, and Dan had gotten sober, so maybe I could, too. I’m not sure if I ever told him that or not.
I hate that I am writing in the past tense. I hate it so much. Dan should be alive and writing and making us laugh for decades more. He should be getting to watch his son grow up. His son should get to grow up with such a kind and funny and generous and smart father in his home. I lost my dad to cancer in his 40s, and it fucking sucked, but I at least got a few years of memories. I don’t know what a two-year-old will remember. I hope it’s as much as humanly possible, because Dan loved being a dad.3
The past few days, I’ve wondered if I should keep writing this, because there are so many other people who were closer to Dan, so many of them also writers, and I don’t know what I can add that others haven’t already said. I only hung out with Dan a few lovely times in person, and I’m not going to pretend like we were closer than we were. I know my sadness can’t compare to that of his family, his wife, his truly close friends, and I am trying to be respectful of that.
But we were friends, for almost two decades. And I am going to miss the hell out of him.
It’s strange to me that after three decades of the omnipresent internet, there are still people who look askance when you talk about having online friends you’ve never met IRL or only met a handful of times — as if those relationships are somehow fake or meaningless. Sure, you’ll always be closer to people you see daily or weekly, people you can pull in for a hug when you’re laughing or crying or just because you love them. But the commenters who stay in your DMs for two decades with heart-eyes for only your dog4 are your friends, too. And losing them doesn’t hurt less.
I know this essay/remembrance is a mess. Grief-stricken writing is definitely an occasion when an editor would come in handy. There’s something more coherent to be written (probably not by me) about the impact of the extended Gawker Media comment sections on so many lives.5 There are definitely better things to be written (and that already have been written) about Dan, and I will enjoy reading every single one of them.
As I was writing this piece, I reread Dan’s piece about the cats he’s loved and lost, which is also about Garfield TV specials, and it’s just as funny and unexpectedly emotional and perfect as anything Dan ever wrote.
“[D]eveloping a relationship with an animal with a relatively short lifespan has its limitations, and will just by its nature end sooner than you’d like,” he wrote, after the passing of a neighborhood stray and shortly before the birth of his son.
I read those lines and started sobbing. I cried through the rest of the essay. Dan wasn’t writing about himself, of course, but we also don’t get the nine lives cats do. Then, out of habit, I read the comments. They are full of other people crying. Readers who loved Dan, too.
That’s his greatest legacy, I think — not the Bill Cosby stuff, as the Times highlighted, but his huge, amazing heart. What a gift to have experienced it all these years. What a gift he’s left us with so many of his words. What a gift he was to everyone.
The internet won’t be the same without @dhm, and neither will I. I’m so glad he stuck around in the comments.
In those days, you needed approval to comment. (I would probably never have been approved without a byline, because I was not all that funny.) There are still, to this day, people bitter over not getting commenting privileges — I recently stumbled across a Reddit thread full of them!
I also hope some more tech-savvy-than-I friends of Dan come up with some way to preserve offline the best of his of writing, so Simon can read it all when he grows up.
It’s not just Dan who has heart-eyes for Stagger Lee. There are several people. And who can blame them?! He’s a pretty great dog. (And that’s as romantic as my DMs ever get.)
But if you want to hire me to write an oral history of the comments and all the relationships that happened, I would love to do so.
Beautifully done, Cari!
I was sorry to read of his passing, and I’m so sorry for the loss it’s delivered to you. I tend to think of the mid to late aughts as the best version of the social side internet - it was mature enough to be smart and fun, but hadn’t fully turned dark and shitty yet. The Gawker sites and some of their close cousins had a lot to do with that. I made some really great IRL friends that started online too, and even some of the friendships that stayed online have left indelible marks. This is a lovely tribute to a time and a kind of friendship I wish we had more of these days.