Meanwhile, I was finishing the manuscript of ATTA, and I knew that it was the first significant writing that I’d done, and I further knew that its completion would necessitate getting in touch with professionals in the publishing industry.
I also knew that the first thing that professionals in the publishing industry would do, if they were considering the manuscript, was search for my name on Google.
The results would be the fake Jarett Kobek perving out on videos of children and hundreds of comments about my pedophilia.
And the job of any competent publishing-industry professional is finding an excuse to say no.
By this point, I’d wasted about two or three years on the bullshit of writing.
I didn’t need anyone else’s help fucking up my life.
It was too late to go back now.
Something had to be done.
At the time, I was poor as fuck.
But class in America is a weird thing.
Half of it is money.
Half of it is social access.
I had no money, but I did have social access.
I ended up talking to a friend of a friend, who was a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
They passed on the name of a law firm in San Francisco that routinely dealt with this shit.
“What would you do?” I asked the friend of a friend.
“Sue the fucker,” said the friend of the friend.
So I did.
I sued the fucker.
My attorneys were Ridder, Costa & Johnstone of San Francisco.
And here’s another way that I was poor but not poor.
I paid the attorneys with money that I got from my family.
If you ever want to sound like an insane person, cold call some attorneys and tell them that you’re being impersonated on the Internet by someone who is libeling you as a rapist and a pedophile.
Imagine that conversation!
As I’d spent some time discussing the situation with friends, I knew the first question that the attorneys would ask.
“Do you have any idea who’s doing this?”
“No,” I said.
In that initial phone call, the lawyers said that in their experience almost all of these cases derived from romantic entanglement.
An ex-boyfriend, an ex-girlfriend, or the ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend’s new partner.
When men were targeted, it was always the same: rapist, pedophile, homosexual.
With women, it was: slut, whore, skank.
Often accompanied by boudoir media taken in a haze of coercion or deluded innocence.
Remember: this happened back in 2010 AD.
A more innocent time!
What made the actions of my stalker so egregious were their relative rarity.
Hardly anyone was dealing with this shit.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, which roughly corresponded to 2017 AD, 1438 AH, and 5777 AM, about 40 per cent of online political and social discourse was indistinguishable from the treatment I’d received at the hands of Oyster the Clown.
Seven years after my misery, and everyone was being smeared as a rapist and a pedophile!
One of the common points in the literature available to victims of stalking is the idea that the victim will go through a period of self-recrimination. They will hunt down their every ill deed and wonder which one was the cause of their current misfortune.
The literature is uniform in its rejection of the victim bearing any responsibility for their misfortune.
It’s not your fault, says the literature.
But, in my case, I find this to be bullshit.
I went through my period of self-recrimination, and my only conclusion was that the whole thing was my fault.
I had put myself out there.
No one had asked me to write a blog.
No one had asked me to be a writer.
I had done this to myself.
This was another instance in which my situation had anticipated the political and social tactics of the Year of the Froward Worm.
People who made the mistake of putting themselves out there, with the delusion that they should have a voice in the public sphere, were sifted through a purity test in which every public utterance that they’d ever made was given ruthless scrutiny.
If you were delusional enough to be an artist or a writer, you had to anticipate that the only possible reaction your work could receive was unfathomable amounts of hatred.
Let’s say that Donald J. Trump, the President, decides that he’s going to ban all Muslims from entering America.
Let’s say that he effects this ban by issuing an Executive Order, which was a way for the President to do whatever the fuck he wanted under the pretext of the law without having Congressional approval.
Now let’s imagine some slightly clueless person with a Twitter account.
This person is enraged by Donald J. Trump’s Muslim ban.
This isn’t his America!
His America doesn’t ban Muslims!
His America just murders them by dropping bombs on peasant villages!
This person decides that they want to criticize Donald J. Trump’s Muslim ban.
The way by which this slightly clueless person enacts his criticism is with a stupid little cartoon.
He draws big fat Donald J. Trump riding a beleaguered elephant, which is the go-to caricatured symbol of the Republican party. The elephant is trampling an America flag.
A dialogue balloon comes out of big fat cartoon Donald Trump’s mouth and it says, “I’m protecting America.”
At the bottom of the cartoon, another dialogue balloon comes out of the elephant’s mouth.
It says, “Plus he hates Ragheads. He’s not crazy about Spics either.”
Whose life will be ruined for at least several years?
Will it be the person who banned Muslims and ripped apart families and is literally killing people in the Middle East while ensuring that Palestinians live in misery?
Or will it be the person who attempted to criticize the person who bans Muslims, and in doing so used exaggerated rhetoric in an admittedly awkward attempt to strike at the truth?
Who will suffer?
Who will be haunted until their end of days?
The rich person or the poor person?
You’ll never guess what happens.
When I wrote the first draft of this chapter, I decided that it was only sporting to give my readers an opportunity to contribute to my eventual destruction, which is now the unavoidable fate of anyone who has ever been a writer.
What I had put in this very spot, reader, were some cheap misdeeds from my past.
The unstated joke about these cheap misdeeds was that none were particularly damning.
In the end, I’m just a shy, bookish person.
Happily, between the writing of that first draft and the publication of this book, I’ve committed a far greater sin than anything I could have confessed from my past.
In that window of time, I wrote and published a short book in defense of XXXTentacion.
XXXTentacion was a young musician who was shot to death at the age of twenty.
He was murdered after he’d been arrested and accused of beating the living daylights out of his pregnant girlfriend.
And the shooting occurred after he’d bragged, in an interview, about a homophobia-inspired beating of a fellow inmate in Florida juvenile detention.
These two incidents had caused much morality written on deadline.
He was the person who unified everyone across the political spectrum in their disgust.
He was the new O.J. Simpson.
And I defended him.
Without ambiguity, without shame.
I had sympathy for the devil.
Without repentance, without prejudice.