I am bad at sticking to things, at least things that are not video games or movies. I paid for this space on the internet to make myself write, to clear my head of the disease that is our atomized digital world. Yet the last thing I posted was a pithy joke about MLB having to reckon with Pete Rose. That was months ago. The regular season ends tomorrow. I checked off two new ballparks on my personal travel list in August. I told myself I would write about my experience. I am still telling myself that I will.
Kaleb Horton was a better writer than I could ever hope to be. He stuck to writing and just got better and better at it. His ability to navigate our increasingly terrifying reality went unmatched. There is a disgusting irony that all of his extremely poignant writing on the 2016 election for MTV now exists solely on the Wayback Machine. Another sign of the accelerating entropy that envelops us all.
Kaleb died yesterday. Most people probably never heard of him. In a different era of our history he would be a name like Lester Bangs or Roger Angell. The popular writer who was also a brilliant writer. We now live in a world where sub-par young adult authors clamor for controversy on social media just to get eyes on their work. Another sign of everything collapsing inward. Nothing is getting better. It is all falling apart. It is easy to feel despair today. My friend I never actually met is dead.
I met Kaleb on a message board. As TikTok continues to fry the brains of everyone we know there is a lot of nostalgic pining for the days of yore. As mentioned on a recent episode of Batting Around, the computer should go back to being in a room. You logged on to the message board after school or in furtive moments at your boring desk job. The connections you made there felt real, and a lot of people at the time would scoff at you for even hinting at this sentiment. It was uncharted territory. Sure, pen pals existed in decades prior, but you could post back and forth to your internet friends for hours at a time. You could react together to whatever terrible or funny or banal news hit the world any given day.
Social media modeled itself on this concept, but instead of a tight-knit community the pool of commentators became the entire globe. Needless to say, this development has not been the best for society. Yet we all went along with it, myself and Kaleb included. Our correspondence moved off the message board and on to Facebook. From there, it went to Twitter. In more recent days, BlueSky. One thing never changed though: he always made me laugh on any platform.
I was going to finally shake his hand in August when I went to Los Angeles. We planned to have lunch at Philippe’s. He made me laugh over text pretending to not know what Dante’s Inferno was. The day before the lunch date, while I was at Dodger Stadium for the first time, he texted to say he was dealing with a lot of grief, and he could not make it. I sent my sympathies and told him not to worry, I was having a great time in LA and would be back at some point soon. We would get that handshake in next year or something.
That can never happen now. Kaleb died way too young. He was a couple years younger than me. I had the last birthday of my thirties a week ago. Mortality keeps coming up in my thoughts. Half of my life may be over. Or, as the news about Kaleb today reminds me, it could all end this evening.
I am writing this as the Mets play a crucial game 161. A loss today probably ends their chances at the playoffs. Their season will, well, die. Baseball feels pointless on a day like today. I am forever grateful to the guy who helped me so dearly when I first moved to New York. I attended Columbia, surrounded by the types of rich people who will never have an actual problem in their lives. People who can never understand what hardship really is. Kaleb was going to Pepperdine at this time. In the evening we would commiserate together over this alienating experience on Facebook Messenger. That ability to make me laugh helped a lot back then. An avatar and some text on the screen soothed my anxieties, as any friendship should. This was a new sort of relationship, one native to the 21st century. I am sure there are books about this phenomenon. I will never read any of them.
Kaleb Horton was a phenomenal writer. He was an exceptional photographer as well. He was funny. I will never get to have that handshake, and the world will never get to celebrate his incredible gift while he was here to reap the benefits. This is a cruel world, and we need more people like Kaleb to make any sense of it.
Read this amazing piece of his.
Look at some of his incredible photos.
I lost my message board buddy. People nearer and dearer to him lost a lot more. My condolences to those people. I cannot begin to imagine what you are feeling right now. Someday I will feel what you are feeling. That terrifies me. Or maybe I will die tonight. Then I won’t have to worry about anything. (Hope you would laugh at that, internet friend.)