An Innocent Google Vanity Search Begets an Admittedly Irrational but Nevertheless Deep and Clinging Depression and a Sestina.

by Matt Hale

Okay. Go ahead. Google my name.

It's right up there, under the title: "Matt Hale."

Did you do it? Alright, that's not me!

The innumerable search results you

Find there—page after page of hate—sully my very identity.

Behold: the white-supremacist-fuck-who-stole-my-name.

Is there nothing I can do about the white-supremacist-fuck-who-stole-my-name?

I've thought about adding an initial or my whole middle name

To my byline, but why should I feel the need to alter my identity?

How profound to me personally is the sound: "Matt Hale!"

Think about that little flutter in the gut you

Get when you hear someone call your name. For me,

Though, it's suddenly tainted. My name does not mean "me."

But what, exactly, has the white-supremacist-fuck-who-stole-my-name

Truly taken? Maybe it's more that he's provoked this new sense of shame, you

Know? A ridiculous desire to add a "D." But "Matt D. Hale" is not my name.

It's Matt Hale.

He's taken an untroubled sense of identity.

There is pause, now. Trouble. An identity

That I could once sum up neatly with "Me:

Matt Hale"

Is gone because of a white-supremacist-fuck-who-stole-my-name.

There is power in a name.

In my head I say to him, "You

Should be the one to add a middle initial! You

Who has shaped hate and ignorance into a gruesome identity

All your own." Serial killers use a middle name.

That, at least, is considerate of them (not that I condone serial killing—me

Not being the white-supremacist-fuck-who-stole-my-name,

I find such behavior utterly abhorrent—I’m the nice Matt Hale!).

My fondest wish at present is to redeem the name, "Matt Hale."

To take it back. To push that other one deep into the “ooooo”s when you

Hit Google Search; to obliterate the white-supremacist-fuck-who-stole-my-name.

Not through acts of violence, for that is anathema to my identity,

But with my own worthwhile accomplishments. It is up to me

And me alone to rescue my name.

Maybe now that I have this crusade thing going (Save "Matt Hale"!), a new identity,

Forged through art, will rise up from within me. Soon, you will all think only of me

When you hear my name! Not that white-supremacist-fuck-who-stole-my-name.

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