There aren’t THAT many options in Urban Warrior. But still, all these videos would be posted of me playing, and then all these gaming commentators would be like: Yo! He sucks at this game! And it was like: Nobody else was even PLAYING, you know? How could anyone possibly be able to tell whether I sucked or not based on these bullshit matches? I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s funny now, but it actually kind of felt like a betrayal when that guy posted my gamer tag. We had been playing together for a while and like, we actually really LIKED each other, you know? We weren’t FRIENDS or anything, but we had been placed in a few matches together, and there’s this option in Urban Warrior where you can put certain players into your “preferred” category, and so we both put each other in that category, and for like, a couple months, we were playing together a lot. And while we’d be waiting for the map to load, we’d, like, chat about other games we liked to play, or like, talk about our favorite maps, or our favorite weapons, or where we were from, and then it was like, the SECOND I told him who I was, like, the second I opened up to him, he just turned into a fucking alien. He was like: WHAT?? I could literally feel through my headset how I had stopped being a person to him. We had been talking for months—I mean, literally MONTHS—about all kinds of shit, and then it was just like, the moment he found out who I was, all of that dropped away, and he couldn’t even find the words. He was just like: AHHHHGHEKGHAEHGAHG!

And at first, I really didn’t wanna change my gamer tag after he posted it, because I liked the name a lot, and like, it had all my stats and all my weapons and upgrades and shit, and in Urban Warrior, you can’t change your name without creating a whole new profile, so I was really hesitant to do that because like, it takes a lot of time to build up all your skills and attributes again, but after a while, it just became too depressing to keep joining these games where I ended up having to yell at people to leave me the fuck alone, and so I created a new profile and started from Level One. And I won’t tell you what my new gamer tag is, but it’s super-fucking-normal. LOL. When I’m on the headset now, I’ll kind of mask my voice a little bit so that no one can recognize me. Not too intensely, but like, I’ll sometimes put on a Southern accent or like, an English accent or something, and so people will either think I’m this other person entirely, or they’ll just assume I’m some random kid fucking around.

It’s also worth mentioning that, like, before I started playing video games—like, before I started joking around with people on the headset—I had no idea that I was funny. LOL. Or I mean, I could never TRUST that I was funny, because in the real world, like, when I’m hanging out with a normal person—someone who works at a radio station or like, someone who works in my manager’s office—everything I say to them is just hilarious, you know? If they even SENSE that I’m trying to make a joke, they’ve gotta LOL, because in their head, like, all that’s going on is: Oh my god I’m talking to him oh my god I’m talking to him. Actually, the way most normal people talk to me is a lot like the way I used to talk to black people when I first moved out to L.A. LOL. I was meeting some of the first black people I had ever met—because like, St. James isn’t exactly known for its diversity—and every time I was talking to one of them, all that would be going through my mind is just: Oh my god, I’m talking to a black person, oh my god, I’m talking to a black person.