sappy (and hello)

Hey Again,

Thanks so much for signing up for my emails. I figured, before I got started, I could let you know a little bit more about what it is I'm hoping to do with your time and these essays.  Also— you might get this twice. I started on TinyLetter but converted to Substack because I have commitment issues. I also don’t know what I’m doing.

a dog with his head out the window was a phrase I got stuck on a few weeks back when visiting home. I watched with a strange envy as my 11-pound dog, Otto, stood on his hind legs in my dad's car and braced himself against the wind of oncoming traffic. He stood triumphant, eyes closed, mouth open, hungry for it all, ready to eat the world, and I wondered what was stopping me from doing the same. 

A few weeks later, while watching Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives in an Urgent Care, fate stepped in.

I don't know if you've ever gone viral before, but it's one of the most psychologically assaulting experiences I've ever dealt with. Every time you open an app, you're inundated with berry-red notifications that are meant to remind your caveman brain of fruit your ancestors once foraged for in the wild. This releases dopamine, which makes you crave more (at least this is what I learned from Twitter). Sometimes the berries are actually sweet: funny comments and kind messages and Instagram followers who don't message you obscene things at 8am. But a good handful of the berries are always poisonous: a random 11-year-old saying some crazy shit about your face or a 31-year-old gay man accusing you of "grooming" for a joke you made about your brother-in-law. But the poison doesn't kill you, to wash it down you just need more fruit.

I was in Urgent Care, foraging for fruit, waiting over an hour to see a doctor (?) because I convinced myself, like I always do, that I had strep throat. It was one of the nicest days of the year, and I was home on Long Island again to swim and sit in the sun and eat food I wasn't paying for, and my phone battery had finally died. 

I looked up at Guy Fieri's body contorted over a pulled pork sandwich and tried to forget about TikTok for a second. Guy has always been a figurehead of my life, father figure, in a way. There he was, laughing on a boat with his cameramen, when he did something I knew would change my life forever. He tossed his platinum peaks of hair in the wind, looked to the camera and said "like a dog with his head out the window." 

Also, transparently, I'm using this opportunity as an engine to write my first book. 

Below is my first essay. I wrote it before I realized I would send it out, but I think it covers the bases quite well. Thank you so much for adding your email address to this list.

Joe. 

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sappy - july 28th, 2022

In college, I had a three year streak on Timehop, the app that collects your old photos and videos from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and your gallery and distributes them in their own chronological newsfeed every day. Timehop was more valuable to me than the news- which was alarming considering my journalism major (don't choose a career path based on Rory Gilmore). 

Every morning, after I finished brushing the rotting Au Bon Pain mac and cheese remnants out of my teeth and squeezing my stomach in the mirror to see what i would like like if I was born skinny, I scrolled through a decade of a day in my life in 60 seconds flat.

july 28th, 2020 - smiles on my fingernails and an apple watch on my wrist

july 28th, 2019 - a frown, a sunburn, a seat across from a boy i never let know me

july 28th, 2012 - a temporary tattoo of pascal from tangled, my favorite movie at the time

I watched myself grow up like some people watch war footage or political speeches or Busy Philipps' Instagram story. I watched my dads hair turn gray and my moms eyes go blue and the family dog die. I watched my room fade from blue to orange to blue again like I watched the friends around me come and go and come back again. Sometimes in the photos I was at a beach or on a roller coaster or trying out a mattress at a Sleepy's, but most of the time I was alone in my room. 

When I was in middle school, after a storm flooded our basement, my dad scanned 200 old photos and put them on a hard drive for safe keeping. 

my mother, patti dapolito, sent to my dad overseas in the army. c. early 1980s.

my father, les hegyes. c. early 1980s.

my sister, amanda, and me in our playroom, c. 1998

My mom with a valentine she made for my dad, my dad with a mustache he shaved for my mom, my sister with a tea set she gave to me. The memories were passed down and smoothed out like stones in a river I found myself drowning in every night. I fixated on the details: the red nail polish my mom used to make her sign, probably tossed in a drawer and thrown away a few months later. The face my dad still makes when he's in the middle of talking and doesn't want to be interrupted. My sister in her Spice Girls t-shirt and me pouring her tea and my mom behind the camera. I hear her thoughts: the moment will pass, the children will grow up, the tea will go cold.

The first album I uploaded to Facebook was called "Old Pictures." The second album I uploaded to Facebook was called "More Old Pictures." 

me, c. 1998.

In high school, when my friends came over, I dragged a dining room chair up to the computer in my playroom and sat them down in front of it. I perched myself next to them in my rolling computer chair and began the slideshow of my life in moving image. For some reason, they watched enthusiastically (to my knowledge) as I tore through family vacations and Webkinz photoshoots and videos of my cousin touching an electric fence upstate on a dare. This is how I played pretend.

december 25th, 2007

I have 125,747 photos on my phone currently. My walls are covered in old posters. All of my yearbooks are under my bed. I spend every Wednesday night talking as fast as I can about my childhood in front of a microphone. Then I spend three days editing that conversation into what is my podcast; Good Children. I dig through hundreds of hours of old videos and thousands of photos to find the perfect memories to accompany a story. The rest of the week is devoted to posting about it, reading responses, and planning the next one. 

I grew up in retrospect. Obsessively looking over my shoulder at the child I was the day before. I measured myself in the books I had read and the journals I kept empty. I counted growth in the notches on the kitchen doorframe and in the extra holes in my belt my dad made with his drill. My parents planted a tree in our backyard when I was a kid. It stood as tall as me when we got it. They cut it down because it was dying. Last week i counted the rings on its stump: 25.

february 9th, 2017

 Suddenly, I missed the tree deeply. I wished I put my palm up to it's sappy trunk more, even though it's hard to scrub sap off your hands. I wish I appreciated the shade it gave me every hot summer day that I spent flipping rocks to find spiders and screaming when I did. I never noticed the tree when it was there, but now that it's gone I can't stop paying attention to its absence.

The backyard has new flowers now. And a new pool. And a new family of opossums being hunted by our new dog. But there's nothing to fill the space between the shed and the deck. And maybe nothing could.

I turn 26 next week and close out another chapter of the digital archive of my life. 25 was big ideas and big mistakes and watching guided meditation videos on YouTube to calm myself down from 4pm anxiety attacks. It was sunset photos and heartbreak. It was the year I found out how scary it is to truly love something and how freeing it is to tell strangers personal things. I cried at tv shows every day for a week. I quit three jobs. I paid my taxes- unfortunately.

When I was a teenager, I felt a responsibility to my future self to document even the most mundane aspects of my life. The cupholder on my desk filled with broken SD cards and snapped Sillybandz. The afternoon light caught in a plume of steam from the boiling pasta my mom strained in the kitchen sink. The stop sign on my corner that someone drunk drove into in the middle of the night one summer as I stayed up late googling "is Lady Gaga in the Illuminati?"

I imagined an older version of myself thumbing through these photos like ancient artifacts. I saw him in my head: taller and thinner, with veins on his forearms and a full beard. He'd been places besides my bedroom. I needed to prove to him that I was there.

And I was seventeen and dressed in the coolest clothes I could afford at Urban Outfitters. I popped the lenses out of 3D glasses and broke the spines on books I never read but saw on Tumblr. I was alone in my room, like I was on that day the year before and the year before that.

I looked down the barrel of my camera and saw my own gaze looking back at me. 

march 22nd, 2014

I was 11 when my parents gave me a digital camera that took AA batteries. I brought it everywhere, I pointed it at everything. The world was coming at me fast and I couldn't get enough. I wanted to swallow it whole, like a dog with his head out the window.

I just wish I took more pictures of the tree. 

Joe