Craigslist Chronicles: Final Chapter/Recap
Editor's note: According to an anonymous source, KB was spotted on the corner of 29th and 8th this morning (outside of La Gusto Pizza) picking up a fallen $100 bill from the sidewalk and handing it back to the elderly tourist who unknowingly dropped it.
I’ve been feverishly trying to work on new Neighborhood Watch Chronicles material (the “Part 2” I teased didn’t pass final inspection*), but it's proving to be a time-consuming process so, in the meantime, I’ll reminisce about my earliest days as an amateur blogger and internet troll. What else would I do? Blog about someone or something that doesn’t directly involve me? More importantly, I feel the need to dispel some nasty rumors I've been hearing about about myself and career choices. Since receiving a certain "badge of honor" on social media a couple weeks ago, an infantry of elite cyberbullies, seemingly unprovoked, have been treating my DMs as target practice for their most potent insults. Specifically, they've been taking shots at my job status and professional duties.
Fine. Maybe I am a 27-year old man who plays the role of a manic outcast in a struggling adult TikTok squad. Maybe one of my primary professional roles does involve attempting to insult and get cheap reactions from people on social media, many of whom just happen to be "younger adults" or "not adults at all." Maybe all of that is "pathetic."
But this isn't me "changing who I am" or "exploiting a vulnerable audience" or "stooping lower and lower." I've been doing the exact same stuff as a hobby since long before a salary or cool blue checkmark was even in the realm of possibilities. I've always been this pathetic. Let me dip into the vault and provide you with evidential artifacts, many of which are no longer available to view online due to the recent expiration of my personal blog site.
Exhibit A (June 2014):
Even as a 20-year-old lost soul who unironically used one-hundred emojis and measurements/phrases like "n shit," "low as shit," and "AF," I was already beginning to find my niche as a budding Craigslist troll. And as a college kid at a large public university with a 70% female enrollment, instead of spending my free time interacting with girls, I was spending my free time interacting with gay pedophiles from Craigslist by luring them into my otherwise arid iMessages with meticulously crafted "menus" for skills and services I didn't even have any experience in.
Exhibit B (February 2015):
Do you know how passionate you have to be about the art of trolling to painstakingly post the phone numbers of random strangers and non-random enemies under regionally-specific advertisements for "Free Nickelback Ticket Contests" on the Craigslist pages of each of the cities on the 2015 "No Fixed Address" North American Tour? I didn't get any "clout" or attention from doing that. It was strictly for the love of the game; I didn't even get to see the low-hanging fruits of my labor. Do you know how many Nickelback fans in the Cleveland/Akron metro area desperately texted the guy from my freshman dorm who sold me and my friends a bag of Flintstone vitamins for $100/gram? Neither do I. But his phone was almost surely flooded with at least 70-100 contrived sob stories about how "my terminally ill daughter's last dying wish is to see Chad Kroeger perform at Blossom Music Center" and the like. Nothing to show for it though. That's passion. That's pathetic. Your move, cyberbullies.
Exhibit C (June 2015):
In the summer of 2015, I made the executive decision to pass up on using a useless bachelor's degree to get a full-time job and, instead, exerted my energy on creating and running a free website that wasn't even remotely profitable. I was regularly using it to post oddly specific blogs about college/social media culture (if you can imagine that) and, although some of them read like the prologue of an incel’s manifesto, I promise I was just trying to casually make fun of people who were younger, happier, and more popular than me (if you can imagine that).
Exhibit D:
As a recent college graduate who just scored his first "big boy job" as a part-time "little girl" at Jimmy John's, I was finally ready to use my free time a little more wisely and maturely.
I was finally ready to use my Weebly website as a creative outlet for trolling and harassing innocent strangers in the form of text message conversations.
(I will try to only post examples that I haven't used yet in one of my former Craigslist blogs.)
The First One:
Get it? The punchline is that I pretended like I couldn't discern two completely different animal species. The joke is that I thought hamsters were cats. Bazinga. And I repeatedly used it until my victim was forced to relegate me to that of a fucking re-
relegate me to that of a fucking moron.
Apparently, that type of humor played in 2015 because it provided me with enough positive reinforcement and motivation to keep doing it. Over and over again. Mind you, this was during a time when Logan Paul and Logan Paul adjacents dressing up like a girl on Vine was the most popular form of "comedy" on social media. At least I wasn't resorting to doing gags as pathetic and corny as pretending to be a girl.
Except, I absolutely did exactly that. Aggressively.
horses
When I wasn't on the clock getting stiffed by podiatrists or transporting Totally Tunas with extra mayo to people who would tip me in the lingering odor of uric acid from their sweaty gout feet, I was using my BS in Speech Pathology to market my unmarketable business.
I remember obsessively checking the "stats" of my blog site and getting irrationally angry/happy when I had a really good (~page views) or bad (~0-0 views) day. I spammed the emails of The Chive writers with links to my material and created StumbleUpon burner accounts to submit my own website pages. That can't be any less pathetic than the TikTok thing.
(Not posting this one but use your imagination)
(I actually sold a grand total of $0.00 worth of items, the exact same amount of merch I've sold since starting at Barstool). Who "changed" again?
This was a vaguely-worded Craigslist ad for a jetski with a photo of an [attractive] middle-aged woman riding on it.