adam akins

“You-you’re a f****** illuminated gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn’t be hypertext if you tried.”

– Technical in “American Gods,” by Neil Gaiman

For a long time, I wanted to be hypertext. I wanted to be shiny and brand new and to snidely look back at the past.

In the pursuit of hypertext, I was controlled by an urge to compete and dominate, leaving the old behind. For a lot of my life, I have been deeply driven by a need for control. In everything I competed in, I needed to be No.1, even if the title was imaginary, arbitrary or unattainable — like my fixation with winning casual small talk, an impossible mission.

But my last two years at The Octagon have taught me the power of the black-letter manuscript and the sense of purpose, pride and devotion that comes with it. I want to take that with me wherever I go.

The quote at the start of this article comes from one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman.

His work has driven me to write frequently and helped me find the passion for storytelling that led me to join The Octagon in the first place.

Gaiman makes me think that if I were to pull hard enough at any mysterious locked door or try to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I would fall head-first into his world.

The process of saying goodbye to the intense structure and near-constant involvement that has been my experience at Country Day has left me contemplating the questions Gaiman poses.

Maybe, outside of the cheery world of Camp Country Day, there’s another world you couldn’t believe. I got a taste of this when I visited my new university.

I was immediately inundated with a strange energy. There were drumlines, protestors and a constant miasma of pot.

The place hummed with activity, populated by a cadre of vegan leather-wearing, septum-pierced warriors and well-dressed mysterious men. I was entirely out of my element, and it was wildly exciting.

I was overloaded by how much was unknown. The easiest way to make sense of it all has been to look through the distorted yet comforting lens of fantasy.

Gaiman’s worlds compel you to examine your own world, looking for all the truth you could find.

It’s a feeling deep inside — a close cousin to discomfort — that pulls you in and demands that you hold onto it, so it can’t escape your grasp and slip into your reality.

Joining The Octagon opened up a similarly foreign reality to that of my new school. I was suddenly in a world where I could create garbage and another student would tell me immediately that it was, yes, a piece of trash. But despite that unfortunate fact, the team was going to move heaven and earth to make it publishable.

The ego and pride that went hand in hand with my journey towards hypertext could not exist in The Octagon. If I continued to compete with myself instead of take the time to learn, improve and shut-up, I could not attain success in the newsroom.

When I had too many errors for my editors to catch and my story went online with a couple of comma splices, Ms. Bauman AirPlayed my subpar sports beat to my whole English class and spent time picking out all of the errors. It was a bizarre world — it wasn’t a constant slug of analytical essays; there were stakes, and those stakes made it so rewarding to try and tell a story well.

It wasn’t about competing. It was accountability, constant feedback and constant interface.

I was fascinated, and still am, by trying to tell the story correctly. Completing a story that you have crafted feels amazing.

It isn’t that classic sense of victory; the gross kind that came from a deep need to win. It was earned catharsis. A gratification that was achieved through the labor of using that illuminated gothic black-letter manuscript.