• slap a stranger

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That was the most liked comment on my last video, so slap a stranger it is.

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I move to the front room, click my camera on and sit on my throne.

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“Alright guys, I’ve done some weird crap this year. For those of you who have been with me since the beginning—first of all, thank you, I love you. Second of all, assaulting someone in public is a lot different than making farting noises in church or peeing off an office building. You have truly outdone yourselves. I really shouldn’t do this, but here I am. Your whore. Your whore until I hit the golden quarter million subscribers folks. Here we go.”

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I stand up, stop recording, and return to my desk. I open YouTube Creator Studio on my MacBook. 83,445 subscribers. If I’m gonna hit 250,000 by the end of the year, I need some virality. Now’s not the time to bow out.

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So, that afternoon, I did it.

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I drove downtown, heart pounding, picked a fight with some college meatheads returning from a football game, hit record, slapped one of them, and ran like the dickens. I edited the video and added my signature sign off later at home.

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“You know what to do folks, comment below what I should do next and whatever the highest voted thing is, I’ll do it. Oh, and share this video. PLEASE!”

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I felt bad for slapping that guy. A little bit anyway. That feeling faded away completely about six hours later when the video hit half a million views and bumped me to 114,885 subscribers. God, fame really is a drug.

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I let the video marinate for another day before checking the comments.

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The butterflies started fluttering as I typed youtube.com into Safari the next morning. The top comment by a long shot said something that I figured was inevitable.

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• kill someone

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Then the follow-up comments:

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• theres no way he’ll actually do that bro

• dude you’re an accomplice if he does it

• yo this man has done EVERYTHING we have asked him to

• PLEASE DONT KILL SOMEONE ITS NOT WORTH THE “FAME”

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There were over 1,200 comments in response.

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A sane person would walk away at this point. Of course, I’m not sane by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t know that a life sentence is worth hitting the golden quarter mil. It was an arbitrary goal to begin with. If I start not doing what my fans tell me to, they’ll abandon me. I know they will.

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But still. Murder?

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I laid in bed thinking through a script for my response video. They’ll have to understand that I can’t just kill someone for a few meaningless internet points. I drifted to sleep.

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Shortly thereafter, I heard a window shatter downstairs. Heavy footsteps entered the house and started clunking around. An intruder.

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An intruder…

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I steady my breathing, grab the Victory .22 from under my bed, and carefully dismount my camera from the tripod.