At least once a week since we went on tour with the first album, I’ve been going online and putting on the headset and playing Urban Warrior or Lonely Vortex or something like that, and it’s amazing, because like, here I am, and I’m talking to people from all over the world, and I’m playing with them, and nobody knows who I am. Like, it’s actually, legitimately, the only time in my life when I get to interact with normal people in a way that doesn’t feel, like, hypercharged and inauthentic. And sometimes, back in the day, I would even tell people who I was. Like, someone would say that my voice sounded really familiar, or like, they’d start talking shit about one of my songs, and if I liked the person, like, if we were having a good time and I thought they were a good player, I’d be like: Yeah, well, actually … But ninety-nine percent of the time they didn’t believe me. The one time this guy did believe me, he ended up posting my gamer tag online, and eventually I had to change it because like, it turned the video game world right back into the real world. All of a sudden, I’d try to join a match, and the second people would see my gamer tag pop up, they’d freak out and ask me to say stuff and like, yell shit at me or put me on speakerphone with their friends or call me a faggot and tell me to kill myself, and it got so bad that like, eventually, I just muted my headphones and turned off my mic and I tried to play the matches without any sound. But that kind of ruined it for me, you know, because the thing I really liked about it was the social aspect—like, just being part of a team, being one of the crew. When people knew who I was, all of a sudden the matches would come to a standstill because everybody would just want to crowd around my character and like, touch me with their guns and shit and take screenshots with the in-game camera, and I’d be running around trying to actually complete the objectives, you know, and everybody else—like, it didn’t matter if they were on my team or on the other team—would just be following me around trying to get close to me. And when I’d kill someone, they’d be like: AWESOME! I can’t believe it! And it was like: No! This is a GAME! You know? You’ve gotta actually PLAY! But, that’s how crazy the world is. LOL. All these gamer kids turned into, like, the virtual paparazzi. My publicist even told me that there were websites willing to pay people a couple thousand bucks for pictures of my CHARACTER in Urban Warrior. Like, not even pictures of ME: pictures of my AVATAR, a bunch of fucking pixels that looked exactly the same as everybody else’s fucking pixels. And it’s like, yeah, okay, I guess I could see how it would be interesting to people to see how I customized my character or like, see what skins I wore or what guns I used, but like, at the end of the day, it’s not like my guy looked THAT different from anybody else’s.