It’s not a burner. It’s not a spam filter. It’s an email address I made as a teenager because I was obsessed with Dawson’s Creek.
“creektime.”
It’s still my catch-all address. Twenty-plus years later. No irony. No nostalgia cosplay. Just follow-through.
I keep it because it’s a fossil from a very specific era of the internet. Back when being online meant making something, not just optimizing something. Back when fandom wasn’t “content” and community wasn’t a “feature.”
When I heard that James Van Der Beek died this week at 48, it hit harder than expected. I usually scroll past the celebrity death posts. This one stuck. Not because I knew him, obviously, but because he was threaded into the origin story of how I learned to build.
Before portfolios, before startups, before “creator economy” became a phrase that could be monetized, my first website was a fan site called Creektime.
It wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t impressive. It was obsessive.
I learned HTML because I wanted to put something online. I learned how to organize content because the site was getting messy. I learned moderation because other people showed up and wanted to talk.
Nobody called that “skills acquisition.” It was just necessity. You wanted the thing to exist, so you figured it out. That was the deal.
And the reason I wanted to build anything at all was a teen drama about a kid who loved movies too much.
Van Der Beek played Dawson with zero irony. Painfully earnest. Constantly overthinking. Crying without looking cool. Dreaming out loud. He didn’t play detached or clever or self-aware in the way we reward now. He played sincere to the point of discomfort.
That mattered.
For a lot of people my age, that level of earnestness gave permission. Permission to care too much. Permission to analyze feelings instead of hiding behind sarcasm. Permission to try making something even if it was a little embarrassing.
There’s a straight line from that kind of emotional permission to the willingness to open a blank page and start building badly.
But what makes Van Der Beek’s story truly great isn’t just the earnestness – it’s the pivot.
When the internet took his most vulnerable acting moments and turned them into a meme, he didn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. He didn’t fight the joke. He leaned into it. He played vain, ridiculous versions of “James Van Der Beek” in Don’t Trust the B—- and showed a rare kind of creative maturity.
He proved you can take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously.
That lesson lands harder the longer you stay in any creative field.
We talk endlessly about “content” now. About formats, hooks, attention spans, and three-second loops. But the things that shaped how I think, write, and build were long, melodramatic, sometimes ridiculous hour-long stories that demanded patience.
They didn’t optimize for retention. They optimized for immersion.
And immersion changes you. It teaches you to sit with complexity. To live inside a narrative long enough that you want to respond, not just react. To make something of your own because consuming isn’t enough anymore.
If a show, a game, a book, or a song makes you open a blank page and start building, it’s doing real cultural work. Even if it looks corny in hindsight. Even if it becomes a meme later.
Some inspirations fade. Some turn into habits. Some quietly hard-code themselves into your life.
Sometimes they even become your email address.
Thanks for that one, James.
