screamingmonkeyOG 2002

Arriving on eZabel in the summer of 2002, Erica Mims — a.k.a. the self-proclaimed "only a screamingmonkey on weekends, vacations, and special occasions" — was a twelve-year-old from Los Angeles who joined because her brother ekulu was already part of the furniture. She wasted no time whatsoever. Within days of signing up, Erica had fired off introductions to seemingly every member on the site, each one a cheerful "Hi, I'm Erica" followed by some disarmingly earnest question. She introduced herself to rocksupastar, punkprincess, malibu, delliott101, vanessa12, and even iwz himself, telling Ian she loved the site he created and his picture. The California kid clearly had places to be and people to meet, and she was going to do it all in one summer.

Her actual posting style was pure twelve-year-old energy — stream-of-consciousness journal entries about how the beach had sand ("it was really sandy with all that sand everywhere") and how the ocean had water, philosophically questioning why homework is called homework when you don't always do it at home, and chronicling the time she ran face-first into a pole during field service and got ribbed about it all day. She had a knack for absurdist humor that caught people off guard: her "random word association" comment — "volkswagen, medium hair, duplex, brunch, ham, Lele Sobeski, Dr. Pepper, mexican, HBO, cadillac" — left sugabluejennnie telling her she needed to go back to school and punkprincess declaring she'd lost brain cells reading the thread. Erica also floated the idea of a show called Examining The Brothers Daily as the sister counterpart to the brothers' antics, and dropped a flawless Good Burger reference on an unsuspecting softhands. Behind the goofiness, she was a genuinely warm presence — the kind of kid who told people it was nice chatting with them before signing off, and who got excited when she met someone from a state other than New Jersey ("finally, someone from a different place!").

eZabel Personality Type: ESFP — "The Welcome Wagon." Erica blazed through eZabel like a summer comet — bright, brief, and impossible to ignore while she was around. Thirty-five of her thirty-nine lifetime comments came in a single summer, with a couple of cameo appearances in 2003 and a final dispatch in 2006 where she and her friend Eursaleen (oompaloompa05) were apparently plotting to dig a secret tunnel. She attended fifteen events despite being on the opposite coast, read more journals and photos than most power users, and somewhere along the way quietly got baptized — a milestone she mentioned only in passing years later to rocksupastar, almost as an afterthought alongside "wow I haven't been here in decades." The screaming monkey grew up, but the spirit of that twelve-year-old introducing herself to strangers with zero hesitation lives on in every "Hi, I'm Erica" scattered across the site's earliest days.