One of my friends moved out to San Francisco right after she graduated college in 2000 and back in the provinces I would get e-mails about her life here, and all the cool things she was seeing or doing. 64% of these e-mails involved seeing ex-Real World people. "Ohmygod, Montana from RW Boston lives on the next block from me, I saw her picture on the wall of my dry cleaners and I followed her to the bus stop the other day!" this would be followed several weeks later by, "I saw Irene the crazy chick with Lyme disease from RW Seattle when I was at a coffee shop the other day" and the next winter, "Jamie from RW New Orleans was driving behind us the entire way back from Tahoe last weekend" and "my friend hooked up with that guy 'Yes' from Road Rules semester at sea." At this point, I was less than enthused. I wanted to shout, "yo those people are not real celebrities, and even if they were, they suck." But my friendship was hanging by a thread at this point so I indulged her. It was kind of fun to make fun of these people, how desperately they tried to exploit and cling to their ephemeral recognition. Eric Nies, bitches. The worst stories my friend related to me were the ones about Judd. Judd Winick, the whiny, overly-sensitive cartoonist from RW San Francisco was fucking everywhere. I would get reports of Judd sightings all over town. "Judd was at Blondie's on Valencia, drinking a martini right out there in those seats by the sidewalk." I'll bet he was. Judd was on Haight street trying on shirts at Kweejibo. Judd was rollerblading in the park with Pam. I got so sick of hearing about Judd. Argghhhh!

Judd was always my least favorite Real Worlder. His interactions with Puck just annoyed the crap out of me, he was just so damn sensitive and politically correct and he couldn't see that Puck was just a dick who was trying to get a rise out of him. Trying, and pretty much always succeeding. Judd just oozed that early nineties Eggersian eager-to-prove-generation-x-isn't-lazy-and-heartless vibe, plus that using-my-overt-and-affected-sensitivity-to-get-with-chicks thing that so many high school losers pull once they arrive at their freshman dorms. Hey, I know that schtick well, and it just pained me to see Judd do it over and over and over in front of a national audience. Was he going to sleep with Cory the insecure/chubby future fag-hag, or would he talk his way into the sultry doe-eyed Latina Republican's bunkbed? The guy was so visibly desperate I don't think he cared which, which is so funny because he ended up marrying Pam, the cute, freckled med student who just kind of floated on a cloud of her own ambition above the heads of the rest of the contestants. I'm sure she saw the truth: Judd was generally a good, earnest, decent guy. But I hope in the years since Pam has scraped away some of that icky straight white male, put-me-through-a-crucifixion-goddamnit-liberal guilt and forced Judd to take himself a little less seriously. I doubt it. I remember being in a bookstore a few years ago and seeing a graphic novel Judd wrote about Pedro. It was titled something hopelessly banal like "Pedro and Me" and contained some of the most insipid, pull-off-my-fingernails-rather-than-force-me-to-read-this-shit dialogue I have ever encountered. I didn't trust Pedro. I just never trust characters who pronounce anglicized Spanish words with unecessarily-excessive Spanish accents when they generally speak English without an accent. Pedro would be talking English without much of an accent and suddenly he would pronounce "San Francisco" or "burrito" like he had just pulled Rachel up from a tango dip with a rose between her teeth in a Havana nightclub. I know, I know, that may be how these things are said in Miami, but a burrito is a burrito. You don't have to roll them Rs. It always stops conversation, makes me uncomfortable. Generally I have no problem with native Spanish speakers doing it, it's the middle-class white folks who spend a semester in Seville or Costa Rica who do it that bug me out the most. Pedro was a smart motherfucker. He was politically savvy and he educated a lot of people. But I still found him kind of annoying (though maybe that was partly due to the seedy glow of Judd's incessant P.C. pandering). Pedro used MTV and the Real World platform to promote his important and timely message almost as well as Judd has used his friendship with Pedro to promote himself and his work over the past decade. Oh well, everybody's got to earn a living. . . Frisco rents aren't cheap.

[note: I realize these are real people. but as seminal figures of reality television, they put themselves in a unique position to be criticized by the likes of me. they volunteered for that shit, they benefited from it, and I'm sure they're thick-skinned as hell after fifteen years of dealing with people who found the way they were portrayed by MTV's editors annoying. I don't pretend to know anything about Judd other than how he portrayed himself for the camera.]

As I see it, Judd is an icon, an archetype. Yes, a stereotype too. Judd himself has been a visible man-about-town and in one season's worth of edited footage he represented in a way the mentality of a lot of the young men who move to Frisco after college and find themselves navigating the social and political waters of this very unique city. Sensitive, liberal, self-deprecating. Eager to please, desperate for true love but frightened of growing old or responsible, filled with vaguely-artistic dying ambitions. The key to Juddness is how ordinary it is out here. Anywhere else in the country they might be extraordinary. Anywhere else they might be interesting. But here they are the default template of emasculated heterosexuality. They have given up life as big fish back in the burbs to dart through our streets like schools of minnows. Frisco has no real working class population; instead we have Judd drones and their female counterparts, working in the financial district, going out in the Mission on the weekends, listening to trendy music on their trendy iPods and watching indie films and e-mailing in coffee shops with WIFI. Many of them came out here for dotcom and stayed. And they're getting old and kind of sad.

One of the reasons I disparage them is because all Judds believe that that Frisco is the greatest city on earth, coupled with complete disdain for the rest of America (except Manhattan), notwithstanding the fact that they all come from that other America. I just have this thing against people who hate where they come from and fail to see that even the bad or annoying things about where they come from helped form and shape their identity, in a way that should reasonably lead towards some level of ambivalence about where they come from. I get uncomfortable around people who talk endless shit about their parents. All of this is a form of self-hatred that I find particularly loathsome, even though I occasionally find myself in its trap.

So I am constantly fighting off my own inner Judd. Even Judds grow up. I recently read that Judd W. and Pam had a baby boy in May. I am sure that one day soon, I will run into him on a sidewalk in Laurel Heights, and we will face each other, black baby bjorn to black baby bjorn. And I will hang my head and walk past him, and think, this is what it comes to. I should just accept it. This is who I am now. We could have coffee. We could talk about the inevitable move to the suburbs. There is no escaping him. To steal a line from Yeats: Judd haunts me. He is always just round the next corner. But goddamnit I need to try to fight him.