[Note: This post was originally written about three months ago. I put it up briefly, only to take it down at the request of my agent, who wanted me to submit it somewhere for publication. But because I’ve been so incredibly busy—not to mention lazy—square those two adjectives if you dare—I never got around to it. So I’m putting it back up. Some of the facts contained herein are now out of date. Rather than revise the entire essay, I’ve decided to leave the original text intact, inserting interpretative comments as needed. Consider everything in brackets my version of Rashi.]
The other day I got an e-mail from myself that I hadn’t written.
“Jesse Kellerman has sent you a message.”
It came via Facebook. For those of you over 35—or those of you who aren’t, but happen to live on Venus—Facebook is a social networking website. Its purpose, like MySpace, Friendster, and all other social networking websites, is to help people waste staggeringly large amounts of time.
[Commentary: This is no longer true. I have discovered that Facebook is actually extremely useful for doing one extremely important thing: playing Scrabble. Or as they would have it, Scrabulous.
I’m not totally sure what connection the creators of Scrabulous have to the real version of Scrabble. I would hope that, at the very least, they’ve gotten permission from Hasbro—although if that’s the case, it’s not obviously noted anywhere on the interface. I find this worrying, because I like Scrabulous and—setting aside the ethics of copyright infringement—I would hate to see this spectacular source of fun fall prey to a lawsuit.
Such a catastrophe would certainly disrupt my life, as I am currently playing ten simultaneous games on Facebook, and I’m ahead in at least seven or eight of them. I’ve been practicing a lot. Actually, you can see my official National Scrabble Association stats here. But really, all this is just self-inflation, and honestly, it’s neither here nor there.]
Until recently, membership in Facebook was limited to students at certain schools. But as of September 2006, the site opened its doors to anyone who wanted to join. I presume that the purpose of the change was to draw in more members and, correspondingly, more business.
I don’t know if this strategy worked for them. All I can say is that the effect on my world has beenremarkable. Since September I have been pelted with “friend requests,” people from my past and present who've discovered my Facebook profile and wanted to reconnect—or at least give the impression of reconnecting. And although I have never, to my recollection, actively “friended” another person, I have somehow ended up with a social web 50-something strong. A far cry from my sister or my brother-in-law, who each have nine billion friends. But not too shabby for a general misanthrope such as myself.
[Commentary: Again, no longer true. I now have 184 friends, many of whom I actively sought. Although lest I get too high on myself, let the record show that my sister now has 490 friends and my brother-in-law has 704—so many, in fact, that for a while Facebook refused to allow him to add any more. To put this number in context, the National Baskteball Association only has about 460 active players.]
Now, why I even have a Facebook profile, I have no idea. I have forgotten what spurred me to create one. Frankly, I dislike the whole idea of social networking websites.
[Commentary: Still do, except for Scrabulous.]
About the only thing I’ve ever actually done with Facebook is use it to play an epic game of computerized rock-paper-scissors against my friend Dani. He’s winning—for now.
[Commentary: Dani ended up beating me pretty badly, several times in a row. I got my revenge, though, pummeling him at Scrabulous not once but twice.]
I was therefore somewhat puzzled to receive a message from myself.
“Jesse Kellerman has sent you a message.”
I had? When did I do that? I may be a raging narcissist, but if I wanted to send an e-mail to myself, why would I have done it through Facebook? Why wouldn’t I just open up my e-mail program and writeDear Jesse, You’re the mack daddy and your tenor is crystalline. Love, Jesse like I usually do?
Intrigued, I logged onto Facebook to retrieve this so-called message. Here’s what it said:
hey
That doesn’t sound like me at all I thought. I am a hell of a lot more verbose than that. Give me a sentence and I’ll crap you out a paragraph.
And that’s when I realized that the photo accompanying the message—the little picture that shows who’s communicating with you—was not mine. It was of a teenage boy. A teenage boy skinnier than me; with hair lighter than mine; wearing a gray shirt that I do not own. It was most definitely not me.
Doubly intrigued, I clicked on his picture. And to my great shock, I discovered that this person had a profile, a set of friends—and that his name was Jesse Kellerman, too.
I suppose that I shouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that someone out there has the same name as I do. If I were Chinese, after all, I would probably have to get comfortable with that idea pretty quickly, or else face a lifetime of misery.
In fact, I already knew that another Jesse Kellerman existed, because when, before I got published, inparoxysms of raging narcissism, I used to Google myself, about 35 hits would come up, and half of those weren’t about me, but about some kid in Oregon who played soccer.
So I should have realized that Jesse Kellerman II (as I like to think of him; he is, after all, ten years my junior) was out there, and that he was more than likely a member of Facebook.
Yet getting an e-mail from him was startling. In fact, at first I wondered if it was a joke being played on me by one of my friends. Dani the Rock-Paper-Scissors Expert, for example. He’s pretty darn crafty.
[Commentary: Except when it comes to Scrabulous. Sucka!]
I wrote back to JKII:
Hey there. Nice name.
To which he replied:
Thanks its pretty sweet i know
Now this was getting funny. The Facebook message board posts each reply below the previous one, and labels each with the name of the author. So what I eventually ended up with, after several days of communicating with JKII, was this:
(begin transcript)
Jesse Kellerman
hey
Jesse Kellerman
Hey there. Nice name.
Jesse Kellerman
Thanks its pretty sweet i know
Jesse Kellerman
You must be the person who always comes up when I Google myself. Did you play soccer, am I remembering that right?
Jesse Kellerman
Yeah that is true i played soccer thats funny
so you must be some writer or something because thats all i see when i type my name in
Jesse Kellerman
Yeah, that's me. You can see my website at www.jessekellerman.com
Jesse Kellerman
thats way tight, so you would be the song of Jonathan kellerman?
the son*
Jesse Kellerman
Correct. Do you ever get mistaken for a relative of mine?
Jesse Kellerman
Not really, but it's weird because my brothers name is Jonathan Kellerman. anyways what type of books do you write
Jesse Kellerman
Wait, his name is really Jonathan? That's ridiculous. I'm laughing my ass off. Both my Dad and I write mysteries, although of very different kinds. When I get in some copies of my new one I'd be happy to send you one...it'll be like you wrote a book without any effort.
Jesse Kellerman
That would way sweet cause i like mysteries all though i dont read much ha ha but yeah i would be cool but yeah my brothers name is jonathan
(end transcript)
Now, this is fantastic, for so many reasons. Aside from the exquisitely funny and painful fact that his brother’s name is Jonathan, I think this script provides an excellent example of how easily you can tell two people apart by the way they speak or write. Even though every single message is labelled Jesse Kellerman, it’s not too hard to pick out who’s JKI and who’s JKII. I find it especially interesting because I’m a student of the craft of dialogue.
It’s also amazing because it demonstrates the power of the Internet. Fifteen years ago, this guy might have eventually heard of me. I doubt I ever would have heard from him. But thanks to Google, and Facebook, we were both aware of each other (notice the little verbal dance at the beginning of the exchange: hey; Hey there. Nice name; Thanks its pretty sweet i know… Too hilarious).
Not only that, but he could track me down, send me a message, and get a reply. Plus a free book. (This offer does not apply to anyone else. Go buy your own.) The whole encounter is so improbable that it spins my head. It’s as though I threw a baseball into the air and it landed 5,000 miles away, smack in someone’s mitt.
[Commentary: I did, in fact, send him a book, which I inscribed, “To Jesse, Who is not me, Sincerely, Jesse.” I believe that I giggled maniacally while I did this.]
I haven’t heard from JKII in a while. I think that might be for the best. I mean, we both have our own lives, and given what I can tell, although he’s a really nice kid, nobody’s pretending that we’re all of a sudden going to be major presences in each other’s lives. I’m just glad to have met him, and to have wrung a post out of it.
[Commentary: Subsequent to receiving JKII’s initial message, but prior to sending him a book, I did in fact have a few more exchanges with him, two of which bear noting here.
The first is that apparently, through some bug in the Facebook software, every time I added a new friend—which, you can probably infer, I was doing at a furious clip in an effort not to seem like a loser to my wife—JKII got that person as a new friend, as well. I can only imagine how unsettling—and yet gratifying—this must have been to JKII. It’s vaguely Gogolian.
Eventually it stopped happening. Either that, or he stopped telling me about it. Suffice it to say we were both a little creeped out.
The second strange outgrowth of having a double is that sometimes I get messages clearly intended for JKII. Right now, in fact, I’m trying to decide whether to accept the offer of Facebook friendship from someone who I suspect is trying to reach him rather than me.
For the life of me I can’t remember who this proposed friend is. If it is in fact someone I know, then to turn him/her away would be a terrible Facebook faux pas. But if s/he is trying to reach JKII, and yet I accept the offer, then I’ve gone and done something that is itself terribly creepy. It’s all very head-spinning and socially precarious. Nobody said the Internet would be easy.]
Nevertheless, there is a small part of me that wonders what would happen if JKII and I ended up in the same room. Would we tear a hole in the space-time continuum? Would we repel, like two protons? Would we suddenly morph into one Super-Jesse, twelve feet tall and four hundred pounds, with four arms and four legs, roaring like some enraged Hindu deity?
Or would we just shake hands, chuckle, and go on our respective ways, content in the knowledge that, on some level, we’re never alone?
[Commentary: I think this conclusion holds up. JKII is still largely a mystery to me, and I still believe that this story has a lot to say about how crazily connected our world has become.
If you’ve read my posts, such those concerning the Gisele Ransom Saga (pt. 1 and pt. 2), you know that this theme is becoming something of an obsession of mine. I don’t know why this should be so. Perhaps it’s because I work alone so much of the time. It’s quite frankly terrifying to think that I’m actually as cut off from the rest of the world as I sometimes feel. Sitting in my office all day, talking to characters in my head, unable even to walk down to the corner market or pester the doormen like I used to do in New York—the current state of affairs probably ain’t great for my mental health. So I take comfort in believing that—however distantly—I am in contact with the rest of humanity. If a random dude with my name can make me feel less alone, who am I to question such a gift?]
