The Dark Half

From the murky depths of the midnight hour, a bleary-eyed voice rang me up, fingered my brain, and told me I needed to eradicate my existence on the web.

It seems that in person I come across as very sociable, likable, and altogether shiny. But my blog had become increasingly dark, and the thoughts on Random Press were nothing like I was in person. I went home, backed up and deleted my old blog content, grabbed a pseudonym, and started from scratch.

In essence, this distended voice on the other end of the phone pulled my strings and prognosticated what a good idea it would be to erase the web presence I’d spent the last two years building.

It seems there was a job in the works, possibly, and with my true name attached to all this … darkness, The Voice couldn’t in good conscience recommend me to the uppy ups. There were a few elements that allowed me to destroy my Google presence without feeling like I was destroying my life.

First, I was averaging only about 15 to 20 hits per day. Considering Stuff White People Like had 9 million hits in their first month, my two year average wasn’t entirely a sad thing to lose. Besides, my site is still live, I now write under a fake name and can therefore write whatever the fuck I want. (More on that later.)

Second, my affiliate links weren’t exactly bringing in the cash flow. There are several reasons for this, the most obvious being that people are skeptical about second-party links. There was no proof, even if I had a Verisign signature on the bottom, and all the links were from legitimate sources, that they were anything but spam links to phish your credit cards and blood. This sucks for me, but whatever, nobody was clicking on them anyway.

Third, I’ve always wanted to write under a pseudonym, but felt that using my real name would give me some panache on the web, and because I was so incredibly brilliant as a writer, very important interested parties would be fiending to hire me as soon as possible. As it is, Tyler Fleece is now the name I write under for this blog. I was going for Justin Valentine, but he happened to be some Latino kid with about seven different sites dedicated to him. I couldn’t figure out if he was dead and the sites were eulogies, or it was some school project, or his mom had figured out simple HTML. I also didn’t really care. Tyler Fleece resulted, at least on the first page of hits, in no one of that name. There was Tyler school, with fleece jackets for sale, but no actual person goes by that name … at least on a preliminary, very uneducated search parameter.

So there you go: my justifications for destroying my digital self in anticipation of a big maybe.

Let me know what you think of Tyler Fleece as a name, and how you feel about me compromising my integrity. The last time I compromised my vision, my old laptop literally blew up. We’ll see what happens this time.