Bit By Bit

Bit by bit. 

On march 17th, 2020, I moved to Boise Idaho. I moved in with my dad who had moved there in August of 2019. Passing through for a week in august of 2019 on my way to my freshman year of university was the only time I’d been in boise. I’d hardly seen any of the city beyond my dad’s neighborhood and a couple of neighboring neighborhoods. But in March of 2020, I found myself suddenly living in the capital city of the Idaho Capital of North America. That summer was brutal. Incredibly hot, without any friends in the city, and unable to make any friends in the area, I was largely alone. Except for a tenacious, raunchy group of folks on twitter. HFT, in its heyday, was so much more than frisbee players and frisbee-adjacent people being horny on twitter. It was a community of people getting through the pandemic bit by bit. Weird, absurdist, gen Z humor, compressed into the weirdest goddamn bits I’d ever taken part in. 

But HFT fell apart, bit by bit. Real life drama, the slow release of covid protections that allowed people to return to a slightly more normal life, and a goddamn shanty changed the ways HFT interacted internally and externally. There’s more to it than that, but that’s what I saw. In all honesty, I don’t think the shanty did much to contribute to HFTs downfall. I think it was just a blip on the radar of frisbee twitter in general. Nothing worth remembering, nothing worth forgetting. Indeed as life became more normal and HFT dissolved, bit by bit, I felt alone. 

By March of 2021, I still didn’t have any friends in Boise. It wasn’t until April or May that I first started to consider some of my teammates friends. They were the first people I’d met in Idaho, and the first that I socialized with in a more normal way in a long while. I went back to Madison for much of the summer of 2021, and I became less reliant on twitter, bit by bit. Fall 2021 into winter and spring of 2022, I became happier and happier. Bit by bit. It didn’t come all at once, but for once, for every bad day, there were several more good days. I missed my friends in Canada, but was able to visit them over my spring break and reconnect with them. It was great to hang out with them again, it was a wonder and made me remember why they were my friends when I was there. I got to reconnect with them, bit by bit. 

And now, on the precipice of the summer of 2022, I push forwards in life, bit by bit. Today I visited a potato hotel. I referenced a bit that’s almost 2 years old because I remember how it got me through those times. And if I could keep anything from the horrid years of the pandemic that continues to plague us, I’d keep those bits. I’d take the bits that kept me afloat, that put a smile on my face, and that I still can look back fondly to. 

It’s a tough life, in a tough world, but I know I can get through it with my friends, bit by bit.