ekuluOG 2002

There was something almost literary about Adam Mims from the moment he appeared on eZabel in May 2002 — a kid from South Central Los Angeles who stumbled onto a website full of New Jersey teenagers and immediately started introducing himself to everyone with the earnest charm of someone who genuinely believed the internet could make you friends. From the start he was introducing himself to everyone — punkprincess, ilikebirds, tesoro, thefunkyfresh, jay79, and half the site's roster — like a one-man welcoming committee who happened to be the newcomer. He liked long walks on the beach and sunsets — wait, that was too much info.

What set ekulu apart was his mind. He was a voracious reader — Octavio Paz, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Crichton, 1984, A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World — and he wore his intellectualism openly, sometimes to his own detriment. His journal "Those Were the Days" was a raw, beautiful meditation on being the smart kid in school who chose faith over academia, turning down college letters and abandoning the crown of intelligence for something he found more meaningful. When thefunkyfresh and web-toedchloe pushed back, suggesting he was flaunting his writing abilities, he responded with a wounded sincerity that was impossible to fake. He was also a genuine fiction writer — his "Munchkin Wars: The Odyssey" was a wild sci-fi fantasy about a warrior named Eko chasing a shapeshifting bird woman into a world of armed munchkins, and the excerpt from his unnamed novel about an exile longing for a crystal-sapphire homeworld called Tiran showed real literary ambition. When he eventually threw away all his unfinished manuscripts in late 2003, he wrote about it with the gravity of someone performing a necessary surgery on his own past: "It's part of who I was more than who I am."

ekulu was the site's West Coast correspondent, reporting from a world that felt genuinely foreign to the Jersey crowd. He lived down the street from actual clowns and found it weird seeing them do everyday things. He survived a shooting in Watts as a teenager — a gunman fired at him twice from close range and somehow missed both times. He described South Central LA with unflinching honesty: "a fortress," "a war zone," "completely opposite of Beverly Hills." When the California wildfires of 2003 turned the sky bronze-orange and rained ash on his neighborhood during field service, he wrote about it with the eye of a poet: "the wind kicked up, and what must've been hundreds of birds landed on the telephone wires above us." He was the guy who made ice cream and waffle sandwiches when it got too hot, who attended a party where everyone danced like gorillas to a Mexican song, and who confessed that coffee in the morning actually made him sleepy — a fact he found deeply soothing rather than problematic.

His social world on eZabel revolved around skaorsk8, thatdarngirl, forrestina, malibu, and ilikebirds, with whom he debated everything from the king of the North prophecy to whether Timeline was a good book (it was, and he would die on that hill). He had a tender streak a mile wide — comforting friends through loss, quoting scripture with genuine warmth, apologizing publicly when he called people "jerks" in frustration. His sister screamingmonkey (Erica) joined the site too, and he referenced her with brotherly affection, noting she had reclaimed the family glory of ramming into poles from some kid named Travis. He wore size 15 shoes, loved the number 3, dreamed of naming a son Maximilian, and created an event called "Come To L.A." that doubled as a standing invitation for any eZabel member brave enough to visit. His last comment, in January 2006, was a playful "Ian, I wish I knew how to quit you!" — a Brokeback Mountain reference aimed at iwz that perfectly captured his gift for being funny and affectionate in the same breath.

eZabel Personality Type: INFP — "The Mediator." Beneath the humor and the poetry, there was always a current of searching. He wrote about wanting adventure in a life that felt static, about becoming a "social paralytic" around crowds, about the tension between holding on and letting go. He wondered openly whether he should stay single or marry, whether he should go to school or trust that the right job would find him. He was named a ministerial servant in late 2004, a milestone he announced alongside the devastating news of a friend's death — good news and bad news, always tangled together. Adam was someone who felt everything deeply and wrote about it with unguarded honesty, which made him both the most vulnerable and one of the most compelling voices on the site.