Around the same time, I began to post my work on the Internet, and that’s when crazy things started to happen. Several of my recordings went viral, eventually becoming bona fide memes. The text of “When I Was A Kid” has been posted and forwarded (alas, often without my name attached) around the Internet thousands of times. In fact, I just Googled the first line of that poem in quotes and it returned nearly one million hits! My suggestion about using Airwolf as an adjective is now an entry in the Urban Dictionary. And my most popular slam poem, “Dance Monkeys Dance,” has been translated into over thirty languages and adapted into a viral video with millions of views on YouTube.

The high point of my new Internet pseudo-fame came when geek icon Wil Wheaton discovered my slam recordings and posted a link to them on the popular website Fark, which helped me sell hundreds of books and CDs. A few years later, Cory Doctorow did the same thing when he posted a link to “Nerd Porn Auteur” on the immensely popular geek website Boing Boing. In fact, those are the reasons why I would later make Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton the President and VP of the future Internet in my novel Ready Player One. It was my way of saying thank you to both of them for sharing my stuff.

Although it has now been over a decade since these poems were first written and performed, I’m still proud of them. I think most of them still hold up pretty well, and serve as great time capsule for who I was —as a person and a writer—during that time in my life. If you dig reading them on the page, feel free to pop over to ernestcline.com, where you can download recordings of many of these pieces for free.

Thank you for reading, and for being so Airwolf.

MTFBWYA,

Ernie Cline
Austin, TX
July 2013

WHEN I WAS A KID

When I was a kid

adults used to bore me to tears

with their tedious diatribes about how hard things used to be

when they were growing up,

what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning,

uphill, both ways, through year-round blizzards,

carrying their younger siblings on their back

to their one-room schoolhouse

where they maintained a straight-A average,

despite their full-time after-school job

at the local textile mill

where they worked for .35 cents an hour

just to help keep their family from starving to death.

And I remember promising myself that, when I grew up,

there was no way in hell

I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids

about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it.

But now that I’ve reached the ripe old age of 28…

I can’t help but look around and notice

that the youth of today—

You’ve got it so fucking easy!

I mean, compared to my childhood,