ok4nowOG 2002

There was a particular kind of eZabel member who could post 630 comments in a single day, maintain four separate accounts over four years, write original poetry and short fiction, debug your C++ code, teach you HTML on the side, explain credit card debt consolidation in exhaustive detail, find security vulnerabilities in the site's code, and still describe himself as just some guy from Jersey who blew through straws out of habit. Brian Papocchia was that member. Across his four accounts — sux2beme, mrenticon, bwp, and ok4now — he racked up over 4,000 comments, making him one of the most prolific contributors in eZabel history, and one of the most consistently interesting.

Brian was the site's resident polymath-in-disguise. He could pivot from a deeply felt piece of original writing — his short story "I Understand," about a boy named Timmy who never truly listens to the world around him, was genuine literary fiction posted as a journal entry — to a meticulously formatted breakdown of how bubble sort works in C++, to a joke about silicon implants in paradise, all in the same afternoon. His journal about battling Comcast at midnight, desperately trying to get online to finish a college essay, is a masterpiece of escalating frustration comedy. He was studying at DeVry, learning Oracle and web design, transitioning from outdoor construction work to desktop support, and building websites on the side with domains like way2hot.net. He was the kind of guy who would beta-test VoIP equipment for Gemini Voice Solutions and then casually mention it in a forum thread about phone service, or who would message iwz to report that the comment deletion URL could be executed by non-logged-in users — essentially doing free penetration testing on the site because he couldn't help himself.

His taste was eclectic and unapologetic. A BMG order in a single purchase included Trace Adkins, Sean Paul, Good Charlotte, Daft Punk, Diana Krall, and Aimee Mann — the kind of list that dares you to find the common thread (the thread was Brian just liking what he liked). He championed Dune with the fervor of a true believer, defended Avril Lavigne by quoting Newsweek, loved Van Morrison and Nick Drake before the Volkswagen commercial made "Pink Moon" mainstream, and once posted the complete lyrics to a Blake Shelton song about drinking your way across the Americas. He was old enough to have owned a Commodore 64 and young enough to obsess over his new Xbox, which he bought at Costco with the original controllers because he had opinions about controller size. His romantic movie list included Some Kind of Wonderful, Better Off Dead, and Mr. Holland's Opus — and he posted it without a shred of self-consciousness.

Socially, Brian orbited the core New Jersey crew from a slightly different angle. Based in central Jersey — Edison, Metuchen, Fords, Piscataway — he was close with forrestina and skaorsk8 (his top two interaction partners), traded tech knowledge with ilikebirds, and had warm friendships with malibu, thatdarngirl, and punkprincess, whom he had known from his old congregation in North Edison. His brother modestjesse was also on the site. He attended 35 events — LAN parties, manhunts, bonfires, concerts, go-karting, Six Flags, apple picking — basically everything. He described his background as a proud mutt: part Czech, part French (by way of Louisiana by way of Canada, with the French revolutionary Jean Valjean allegedly in his family line), part Italian, part Spanish, part Puerto Rican, all Jersey. His dad died when he was nine; his mom had raised him and his brothers largely on her own. He paid for his mom and brothers to go to Disney World. He once left a twenty-dollar tip for a waitress at South of the Border because he saw how upset she was after a group stiffed her.

What made Brian distinctive was the way his humor always had a warm center. He would describe crushing his childhood hamster Barnabus with a plastic golf club and then hiding the evidence from his mother — and somehow make it endearing. He told the story of walking out of his apartment at age four without pants, getting rejected by the neighbor kid, and running home to hide under the bed with a timing that would work on any stage. His "Blonde Cookbook" journal, his "Stupid People Tricks" year-end roundup, his journal about why he still blows through straws twenty years after the paper-wrapping incident — they all share the same quality: a guy who finds the absurdity in ordinary life and can't help pointing it out, but never meanly. Even his running bit about magnum labeling his comments "stupid" while other people's identical jokes got a pass had no real edge to it. He was too busy being amused by the injustice to be actually mad.

eZabel Personality Type: INTP — "The Architect." Brian's activity peaked explosively in 2003, with his ok4now account alone producing 2,770 comments that year, before a long silence through all of 2004 and most of 2005. He resurfaced briefly in late 2005, posting about King Kong and Dune, picking up right where he left off as if the two-year gap hadn't happened. His final comment, in January 2006, was a wry observation that Angelina Jolie's baby was generating as much speculation as the identity of the King of the North — a joke that perfectly bridged his two worlds of pop culture junkie and devoted student of biblical prophecy. He was a writer, a coder, a self-taught tech guy, a poet who signed his verses "bwp," and a man who once said he used to think he was the Catcher in the Rye — and maybe still did.