alexOG 2001

The Kelly household in Hackettstown was already well-represented on eZabel -- brother thefunkyfresh ran the place like a social hub, sister raerae was part of the local crew -- but when Alex Kelly finally showed up to post in 2006, he arrived swinging. Not with charm or diplomacy, but with the rhetorical equivalent of a blindside tackle on a punt return. Over the course of 1,010 comments, Alex established himself as the site's most relentless debater, its most passionate football evangelist, and the one guy who could turn a thread about ice cream flavors into a manifesto on the superiority of Edy's mint chocolate chip with Hershey's chocolate syrup -- and then tell you that Cliff's in Ledgewood was "the best Ice Cream joint in the world!!!"

The great football-versus-baseball war of 2007 was Alex's magnum opus. What started as a Giants thread devolved into an epic, weeks-long cage match with brotherman that consumed dozens of posts and dragged in ESPN rankings, physics arguments, and increasingly personal insults. Alex's position was simple and unwavering: football was harder, more athletic, and more exciting than baseball in every conceivable way. "Give me 100 times to hit a baseball thrown by a professional pitcher, and i bet i will eventually hit one," he wrote, "and i'm not even a professional athlete." He compared baseball's difficulty to hitting a ball with a stick, mocked the sport's pace by noting that "nothing truly incredible ever really happens," and finally clinched the whole thing by pulling up an ESPN difficulty ranking that placed football above baseball -- at which point he posted in all caps: "HAHAHAHAAAA!!!! yessssss!!!" followed by "I RULE BABY!!!" The argument ended with neither side conceding a single inch, which was exactly how Alex liked it. As theremin observed, debating Alex was like trying to teach a born-again Christian -- the conversation would go in circles forever and never make any progress.

His other great crusade was against Fall Out Boy, whom he loathed with a passion that bordered on performance art. "If they were a type of donut at Dunkin Donuts, and i had to buy a dozen donuts, i wouldn't buy one of them," he explained. He described their music as "over produced," their fans as "12 year old emo kids who wear really tight clothes, paint their finger nails black, don't bathe, and who are as ugly as the bottom of a shoe," and compared their success to Paris Hilton tricking people into thinking she was pretty. His actual taste ran deep into punk's family tree -- Pennywise's Straight Ahead was the album that got him into punk, the Beastie Boys opened him up to other genres, and he could rattle off a top-sixteen list that spanned Millencolin, Bad Religion, Strung Out, and Thrice without blinking. He played drums in a band with flomojopoanode, posted videos of their shows -- including a cover of "American Idiot" and an Alkaline Trio track where he was "way in the back playing the most beat ghetto drumset ever" -- and defended the principle that artists should make music for themselves, not for fans who wanted the same album on repeat. "Writing music just to appeal to a certain group of retards is called selling out," he told brotherman, who had committed the unforgivable sin of wanting Duran Duran to stay in their lane.

Off the music and sports forums, Alex was surprisingly multidimensional. He was a graphic designer who studied photography in college, asking juicymango for help understanding aperture and depth of field. He read Dan Brown novels in rapid succession and dove into The Count of Monte Cristo despite being intimidated by its length. He wrote original poetry and rap that was genuinely raw -- a piece about addiction that opened with "got my mind on the fotie that i just chugged, got my hand on my gut where i just got plugged" and built into something dark and searching: "searchin for a sign but there's none to find, s'like someone just emptied my mind." He invented a restaurant concept called "Kung Fu'd" where egg rolls were delivered via nunchucks, sushi rolls were punted from thirty inches, and asparagus spears were fired by horse-mounted archers. He tore his ACL playing football in October 2007, sharing ACL recovery advice with others on the site with surprising medical literacy -- explaining that the ligament would never heal on its own but that you could compensate by strengthening your quads and hamstrings. He was a New Jersey loyalist who insisted that "once you're out of New Jersey, the states just progressively get more and more lame" and that you couldn't get a decent bagel or pizza slice anywhere else.

His relationships on eZabel were loud and combative but rooted in genuine affection. His crew -- rocksupastar, fivezero, socalgal, iwz -- knew that Alex's trash talk was just how he showed up. He challenged superhero on Dark Knight opinions, sparred with jamiephaser over Eagles predictions, and told brotherman he should change his name to "sisterman" for counting carbs. But he also gave thoughtful writing advice to a friend's journal entry, telling her to trust her readers more: "i think in writing it's the details you leave out that are the most important ones sometimes." He was self-aware about his own combativeness, admitting that pride was "just part of who i am as a person" and that it had caused people to think he was an idiot -- though he maintained it also made him the guy who would always stand up for a friend getting talked about behind their back. In his final stretch on eZabel, he looked back fondly on the site's golden era: brotherman babbling about Star Wars, rocksupastar and web-toedchloe constantly arguing about something stupid, and "me being a jerk, lol." That self-assessment was accurate, affectionate, and perfectly Alex.

eZabel Personality Type: ESTP -- "The Challenger." Competitive to his core across Sports, Music Talk, and Musings, physically driven whether lifting heavy at the gym or dreaming about tackling brotherman in the snow, and constitutionally incapable of letting a bad take go unchallenged. He was the youngest Kelly sibling on the site but argued like the oldest person in every room, backing up swagger with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Giants' defensive line, punk rock history from the Ramones to Strung Out, and the exact fat percentage that makes a perfect burger ("85% lean -- the higher fat content makes it more tender, and juicy"). An OG member since 2001 who didn't find his voice until 2006, then spent five years making sure everyone heard it -- loudly, unapologetically, and usually while telling someone they were wrong.