Don't F#ck with Zuck!

About a week ago, I was on Facebook playing around with the new avatar app. I thought nothing of it. I was inspired by everyone on my page doing the same, and it seemed to be all in good fun. But the first thing I noticed about my avatar was the scowl on his face. He stared at me from my phone like he wanted to hurt me. Everyone else’s avatar was smiling and waving. But mine flipped me off. I chalked it up to Facebook retaliating against me in response to a practical joke I pulled about a month before. I made a meme of Mark Zuckerberg as a Imperial Reptilian Overlord and I thought maybe they were getting back at me, at the direction of the highest level. Giving me a taste of my own medicine, as my grandma used to say.

The next morning I woke up and I was logged out of Facebook. I tried to put in my password, but it had been changed. I had to create a new page just to stalk myself. When I looked at my old page, I found that my profile picture had been changed. It was my avatar with wild hair, wielding an axe, looking even angrier. The joke had gone too far. I called the Facebook customer service number and a woman claimed to not know what I was talking about and encouraged me to consult a mental health professional. This made me mad. Not only were they messing with me, but they were rubbing my nose in it. They had the audacity to call me crazy! They locked me out of my own page, which they said belonged to them, even though they kept up the denial of ever doing so. However, she assured me she would let Mark Zuckerberg himself know.

My avatar looked like Jack Torrance from The Shining. He was supposed to look like me. I don’t look like Jack Torrance. I suppose there is a resemblance. I’ve been told there is a resemblance and I am a writer, so there is that. I couldn’t see any of his posts because he made the page private. All I could see was his angry digital face leering at me as though he wanted to put that axe in my forehead. I friend requested all my old friends on my new page and explained what happened. I had been hacked by my own avatar. No one believed me. They thought it was all a joke or that I was nuts. Then I sent a friend request to my avatar and he accepted. You are now friends with Adam Peacock, the notification read. He sent me an ominous message almost immediately. He told me, “You will never get your life back!”

I was discouraged. I tried to smile in my profile picture and make it happier than my old page. I made my wallpaper a picture of puppies in flowers. He changed my old wallpaper to a picture of rotting corpses. He added a bunch of prostitutes and strippers and he announced that he was in a relationship with fried cheese and bad decisions. I couldn’t believe it was happening. He admitted to all my secrets. Then he told a bevy of lies. He told everyone I picked my nose when no one was looking; I smelled my own farts; and I liked midget pornography. It was absurd! But he wasn’t done. He hadn’t even began! That night I heard a ruckus in my hallway where my laptop was on my writing desk. Something knocked over a coffee cup of pens and a lamp. Then I heard the pitter-patter of little feet. I heard a cackle. Bad sushi, I thought. So I went back to bed.

I woke up duck taped to my mattress. And standing over me was Adam, my avatar, leveling that axe to my nose like he was a miniature Paul Bunyan ready to chop down a pine tree. He was only about 18 inches tall. “Holy Jesus!” I screamed. Another baleful laugh. A sinister glower. He dug his heels into my chest. He didn’t hit me with the axe. He jumped off the bed and ran away. It’s too horrible to talk about what came next. But I will talk about it anyway. I was duck taped to that bed for seven days. In those seven days, this is what happened...what I would find out later.

My avatar went to work for me and got me fired by pissing in the breakroom coffee pot and sexually harassing my boss, Gloria. A good job at an accounting firm with talk of advancement and my own parking spot in five or six years. He wished my mother a happy birthday by posting “Happy Birthday, Slut!” on her timeline. He killed my pet mouse, Harry, by feeding it to a ball python he bought at the overpriced pet store with my credit card, which he maxed out on phone sex, premium cable, and Uber rides. He vandalized cars and graffitied a bridge by spray-painting a giant penis with a happy face on the head. He wrecked my car and screwed my girlfriend. They made videos which he posted on a website. Then he caught a felony for breaking into a Chinese restaurant, stealing 500 bucks, two boxes of fortune cookies, and doing something unnatural in the yum-yum sauce too despicable to detail. All as me! He sullied my reputation.

My girlfriend cried when she found out he wasn’t me. She was inconsolable. She was confused and said, despite being 18 inches tall, he looked so real. A true doppelgänger. My job wouldn’t hire me back because they never liked me anyway. The credit card company wouldn’t refund me because they said they have an “avatar authorized user policy” which was on page 174 of the original terms and conditions paperwork, which I signed in duplicate. The phone sex girl keeps sending me emails asking me to call back because she felt we had a “real connection,” and the ball python slithered away and is hiding somewhere in my house.

I told my probation officer that I had enough of Facebook. I had enough of Mark Zuckerberg, and fake news, and edited pictures that make faces look sandblasted, and conspiracy theories and theorists, and the liberal media, and neo-cons, and the alt-right, and phony compassion, and hashtags, and emojis, and pictures of people’s dinner and their goofy kids, and going live, and marketplace, and avatars. I was tired of everyone’s gawping. Everyone’s nibshitting into other people’s business and my own nibshitting into anything I could get my nose into. When did we become a society of nibshitters? When did I become a nibshitter? I don’t know. But I burned my Facebook citizenship by deleting my page. And when my new page was deleted, my old page disappeared, too.

“A man without a country,” my PO replied pensively, leaning back in her chair. I nodded, there was no longer a need for such ambagious expression. All prevarications and periphrastic speaking aside, I simply lost control of my life because of my own actions. I spent 10 hours a day on Facebook and it finally took over because Zuckerberg got me. My obsession with knowing and seeing everything there was to know and see manifested into a monstrous 18-inch psychotic version of myself, my bastard avatar. But the tale I tell is heard as nothing more than a fantastic canard, and no one believes me. They think it is a joke. They think it cannot happen to them. They think I did it all to myself. So I ate crow and I put my head down and I report to my PO once a week, and piss in a cup when she wants me to. But I got a new job with my own parking space, I dumped my unfaithful girlfriend, and got a pet mongoose, who found the snake and ate him.      

“How did you get off that bed? How did you finally escape your evil avatar?” my therapist asked me, smiling in disbelief. Wrinkles in the corner of her eyes, curiously like spider webs.

“There was no grand escape,” I admitted meekly. “No regaining my power by wiggling free and crushing evil Adam’s head with a baseball bat. It was after a night of heavy drinking with some Asian girls who work at the nail salon on Columbus Street called Handjobs of Hanoi, that he climbed up on my chest and pissed in my mouth, which is how he kept me hydrated for seven days. He told me to ‘take your medicine, you (expletive)!’ Then he got all philosophical like he did when he was drunk and he took out a butcher knife, but instead of cutting my throat, he cut me free. He said he was tired of being me. I bored him. Then he held the knife to my throat and said one last thing before climbing off the bed and hopping back into my laptop.”

“What was that?” she inquired.

“He said, ‘Don’t fu#k with Zuck!’ Then he disappeared. Like a fart in the wind.”