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Anything For a Little Internet Fame

  • slap a stranger

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

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

“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.”

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.

So, that afternoon, I did it.

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.

“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!”

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.

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

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.

  • kill someone

Then the follow-up comments:

  • 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”

There were over 1,200 comments in response.

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.

But still. Murder?

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.

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

An intruder…

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

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