modestjesseOG 2004

If forward motion were a personality trait, Jesse Papocchia would have it tattooed somewhere visible. The guy joined eZabel in February 2004 and immediately posted like a man on a deadline — 1,284 comments in his first year alone, 57 forum threads started, opinions on everything from Brodeur's shutout records to the proper use of "Oh Snap" in written form. He was freshly divorced, recently reinstated, living in his parents' basement in Piscataway while saving money for a solo move to Hawaii, and he processed all of it out loud, in real time, with a mix of emotional candor and dry self-awareness that made him one of the most readable voices on the site. "I was a stupid 18 year old, what did you expect? I had a fast sports car and I did donuts ALL THE TIME!" he wrote about his younger self with the tone of a man who had genuinely learned something from every mistake and was not above laughing at the wreckage.

Jesse was a creature of deep enthusiasms, and none ran deeper than the Smashing Pumpkins. This was not casual fandom — this was a man who owned the Aeroplane Rides High box set, Siamese Dream and Adore on sealed vinyl, a 1979 single on LP, a VHS of Viewphoria, Iha's solo album, and still had the newspaper clipping of the band's breakup announcement pinned to his work bulletin board four years later. He saw them at Lollapalooza in '94, scored tickets to one of only three pre-Mellon Collie shows by happening to be near Vintage Vinyl when they went on sale, and watched Corgan rip a thrown shirt off his guitar arm mid-solo at the Academy in NYC without missing a note. "Mayonaise is arguably my favorite song ever," he wrote, and then explained exactly why — the chord textures, the chemistry between Corgan and Chamberlain, the way the music could "rock your soul and soothe your heart." Luna was his wedding song. His music taste spiraled outward from there — Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, the Cure, the Dresden Dolls, Iron and Wine, Tori Amos, Kiss, Neil Diamond, Glenn Miller — and he hosted mix CDs on his personal site at modestjesse.com for anyone who wanted to download them. When he finally saw Death Cab at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 2006, with Mates of State joining for "Transatlanticism," he called it "phenomenal" and one of the best shows of recent memory.

Sports ran a close second. Jesse was a Devils and Yankees fan with the particular intensity of someone who remembered when both teams were terrible. He cried when the Devils won the Cup in '95 — and started the "Let's Go Devils" chant from on top of a park truck at the victory parade. He cried again when the Yankees won in '96. His proudest moment as a hockey fan was getting the Devils chant going inside Madison Square Garden during a Rangers game, then walking out still screaming it while his friends begged him to stop before someone killed them. He once sat down and compared Brodeur's stats against Patrick Roy's in every category, and when challenged in the Sports forum, he delivered the breakdown with the confidence of a man who had done his homework: "You can't rag on Brodeur, he's one of the best to play that position." He played ice hockey at midnight pickup games on Fridays, loved paintball at Top Gun in Jackson, shot a 116 at golf and was thrilled about it because of one perfect 8-iron on a par 3, and joined a softball league where he went 3-for-5 with a ground-rule double and remembered he loved baseball.

Underneath all the enthusiasms was a man working through genuinely hard things with unusual honesty. His father died when he was four. He was baptized at twelve, removed at eighteen, spent five years away from the truth, came back after attending the assembly where his sister-in-law was baptized, and quit smoking that same day — "one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life." He married young, for what he later admitted were selfish reasons, saw warning signs he chose to ignore, and paid for it with a divorce that gutted him. He wrote about it openly: the controlling behavior he mistook for affection, the way little annoyances snowballed into major issues, the nights balling his eyes out in prayer because he honestly didn't think he could take it anymore. When his younger brother ok4now was removed, Jesse wrote him a poem the night before the announcement and posted it in his journal — not polished, not trying to be clever, just a big brother laying his heart out: "I fell, you were there, you saw the pain I caused / Or did you? Were you sleeping, did you put your life on pause?" That willingness to be publicly vulnerable, without ever tipping into self-pity, was the thing that set Jesse apart.

He was also genuinely funny, often in the driest possible way. When a thread about body odor came around, he contributed a note about his sensitive skin and his unironic love of the smell of Tide. He once posted the complete lyrics to "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid in a music thread, unprompted. He described his job managing two help desks at a telemarketing company — "I work for Satan" — with weary precision, detailing every grievance from broken promotion promises to the abysmal 401k, then adding that the money was good so he'd stay until September when he would leave for Hawaii, even if it meant pumping gas when he got there. He was a tech guy at heart, self-teaching Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver, writing detailed breakdowns of video card bandwidth constraints in Geek Chat, maintaining strong opinions about Palm OS versus Pocket PC, and writing a 600-word iPod review that doubled as a window into his personality — he found a $250 portable DVD player by hunting deals, used it on five legs of his Hawaii trip, and came home glowing. His closest friendships on the site were with socalgal, to whom he turned for advice on everything from women to baseball with a running joke about her being the queen of counsel, and perrin and fivezero, who shared his appetite for sports arguments and gaming deep-dives.

Jesse made it to Hawaii. He spotted Evangeline Lilly twice, Dominic Monaghan once, and Hurley in person ("he's a BIG guy, not just fat, he's pretty tall"). He bought a Specialized Hardrock Pro and got a flat on his second ride. He went to concerts, bought music from iTunes instead of pirating it, returned a Sidekick III because it teased capabilities it didn't deliver, and slowly posted less and less — down to a handful of comments in 2006 before going quiet entirely. It was a fitting departure for someone who had spent his entire eZabel tenure planning his next move, executing it, and then finding the next one after that. The "modest" in his username was always a little bit of a joke — this was a man who regularly declared himself cooler than whoever he was talking to, then winked at you so you knew he knew. But it wasn't entirely wrong either. Jesse's grandest gestures were always in service of something earnest: a poem for his brother, a mix CD for a stranger, a prayer when nothing else was working.

eZabel Personality Type: ISFP — "The Restless Romantic." Intensely feeling, spontaneously generous, and constitutionally incapable of standing still, Jesse processed life through music, memory, and forward motion — and left the basement, the job, and the state entirely rather than let standing still become a habit.