Calling Darren Johnston (or whatever his name was)!

Man, I wonder what ever happened to the guy on my fake ID. He was from Omaha and he was born in 72. Honestly, I can’t believe I remember even that much about him. I was him for a while and then my friend Farth became him once I turned 21. The guy didn’t really look anything like me. He was pale, five seven and, well, look, man. He didn’t look much like me. We were both sentient beings with faces and the same number of nostrils, and it worked on occasion. I used him to get cigarettes and beer at stores, and occasionally to get into bars, but that was kind of a joke, because I was WAY too chicken to go to any bars where I didn’t know anyone. And, of course, using the fake ID at the bar where your friend is the door man and your other friend is a bartender is sort of like telling your girlfriend that you’ve got a nine inch dick after she’s already you know, seen it and played around on it herself.
The result is something like “yeah, okay, whatever” followed by a smirk and an eye roll then followed up later with a conversation with their coworkers about how fucking deluded you are.
But anyway, there’s this guy out there somewhere and I was him for a second. That’s pretty cool, right? Identity theft. Pseudonyms, AKA [whatever that guy’s name was], aliases, that’s some KGB type stuff. And I was just a teenager. Take that civilization!
I know, we all had fake ID’s and a lot of them were way more illegal than the one I found in a grocery store parking lot. My ex girlfriend had a real ID that she got by using a fake birth certificate…that’s fucking serious, right? I also know that tons of people used their friend’s info to get duplicates with their own pictures or just went in and altered the numbers printed on the card. All good ideas, but this guy Ken that I went to highschool with freshman year had, by far, the greatest fake ID I’ve ever seen.
Ken was a true child of the corn, or the earth or the soil or whatever people are saying nowadays that’s a euphemism for being a hillbilly. He had those teeth that had spaces between each one, and a lot of them were kind of pointy. He had a flowbee haircut and some interesting (read:spooky) eyes. Ken and I took different trains to school, but always ended up at the train station waiting for the bus to school at the same time. He’s the guy who taught me to blow smoke rings, which was pretty cool. He was also the first person I remember knowing about with a fake ID.
It came up because he always had smokes, and I was impressed and told him so. He went on to tell me that he had beer back at his house and that he got it using a fake ID. He admitted it “wasn’t the best” but I was unprepared for how awesomely bad it actually turned out to be.
Ken, highschool sophomore in 1992, had a veterans ID that stated he was a decorated hero of the conflict in Viet Nam. The ID also said he was black. The ID also had a picture of a black veteran on it, but Ken had just scotch taped his own picture over that.
I mean, the balls on this kid!
I’m sure now that Ken’s in jail or working as a cashier in west Chicago, or maybe he’s some wealthy industrialist somewhere (not likely) but he’s got this connection with this old black guy that the old black guy doesn’t even know about. That’s amazing. Just like me and farth and the guy from Omaha. There are millions of bored people out there, staggering, dazed and open mouthed through the brutal hell on earth that is life, and the only thing that has ever made this intolerable death march bearable for even just a moment was assuming the identity or birthdate of someone else and somehow hopefully scoring enough cigarettes and wine coolers to come out on the other side with a handjob. That’s a beautiful thing, man.
I wonder if there are kids out there with my old ID’s. Nah…Impossible. I’ve never lost one. BUT I do have a friend who’s the kind of guy that can get pills from a hospital no matter what. He goes in and cleverly circumvents any behaviors that indicate that he’s “drug seeking” and lists the symptoms that he knows lead to getting prescribed opiates. Very clever…He apparently always uses my name when he does this. AND he’s been doing it since before we knew each other, which…flattering? I guess. I mean, it’s not like my name is Grundel Dingleballs or something. Brendan Kelly is pretty common actually. If you google it, the guy who invented one of those graphing calculators comes up first, and that actor comes up next and I don’t know, I’m in there somewhere…it’s cool. The only thing that really bums me out is brendankelly.com, which is some sort of god themed website, further proving to me that the theocratti are spying on me.
Anyway, I’m off topic again. It always goes back to how tech god people want to drag me down just because I think their whole lives are devoted to making other people miserable and therefore hate their dumb god. Sheesh.
Oh, I almost forgot. Second in my installment of ‘all the different people in the world’ coming right up.

Tech God people- These people love god. They use the internet to profess said love for god ignoring the obvious problems of cravenness that arise from forcing people to essentially pray to screens. BUT hey, some commandments are a real bitch to follow. It’s not like they’re researching cures for cancer using stem cells or killing people. They’re just making websites and damning people to hell via angelfire and dreamweaver.
People who are into god, as a rule, have THE WORST sense of aesthetic of any people on earth that aren’t specifically into renaissance fairs, and their websites betray this. Some, but not all of these internet god types research pornography tirelessly on the web. Sometimes up to three times a day. That’s the kind of bravery that keeps the world turning, people.
Okay, enough of that. I want you to go out there today and find that person who’s identity you adopted all those years ago (or are still adopting now) and thank them. Actually, don’t. They’ll probably freak out/whup your ass/call the cops. Never mind. Have a beer at lunch, then. That should do it.