If you emailed mjp@smog.net any time during the past 27 or so years, your message would wind up in my inbox. That was my email address for so long that it was just part of me, like my feet toes or earlobe hairs. I lived in Los Angeles, so…smog.net. Because I have a flair for the obvious. I received the first email I ever got from Ayin shortly after the address was created, which turned out to be momentous indeed.

But I’m not mjp anymore. I haven’t been since December 4, 2020, when San Bernardino Superior Court judge John W. Burdick stamped his stamp on my name change to Hannah. So I changed my smog.net email username to hannah@, but left mjp@ as an alias so I could still see the mail sent there. Which made sense at the time. As much as anything did.

But we’ve been here in the desert for over five years, so smog.net no longer fits. I’d tell you my new email address, but we don’t know each other like that. Behave!

Speaking of things that don’t fit anymore, I also recently changed my phone number so I’d have a local Joshua Tree area code. I’d had the old 310 number almost as long as the smog.net domain, so the weird sense of abandonment that went along with changing my email address also applied to the phone number.

But changing my phone number with a hundred (or more?) companies and online accounts and doctors and lord knows who else has been miserable—just as miserable (or more?) as changing my name everywhere. I don’t recommend it. Keep your old phone number. It’s too late for me, but you can save yourself!

Blah, blah, blah, right? I’m only writing this because I finally laid the mjp@smog.net email address to rest today. Along with the 1,500 related spam messages that found their way to my spam box every month. I painstakingly hacked my way through the impenetrable Kudzu that is the Google Workspace account admin, and now those emails bounce. Good night, sweet prince!

Email addresses and telephone numbers don’t really matter in the scheme of things. But you find yourself saying them a lot, and at some point, I just didn’t want to say “smog” anymore (it’s not a good thing) when asked for my email or “310” (go back to L.A.!) when asked for my phone number.

Ayin thinks abandoning my 310 number is blasphemy. But they’re a Los Angeles native, so I understand their impassioned, protective stance. I spent most of my life in Los Angeles, and I truly love it because it’s the greatest city in the world.

I can’t say I miss it, though, in anything other than a nostalgic sense. It’s no longer the Los Angeles I made my way to forty years ago, and honestly, that’s kind of sad. But as Sam Cooke warned, It may be a long time coming, but a change is gonna come. 

So, smog.net email addresses are history, but I’ll keep the domain (unless a wealthy international smog conglomerate wants to buy it, in which case, call me on my new phone number, and we’ll talk). If you go to the smog.net website today, you can read a little obituary for the site that used to live there and the early web in general, which was a magical place.

Like Joshua Tree still is.

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN