Time:  2007

Place: The Internet

Tay Zonday sang about Chocolate Rain. A Miss Teen USA contestant had a word-salad meltdown about maps and Ouch! Charlie bit my finger.

Youtube was only two, and Facebook was on its way to killing Myspace. 

Endless AOL floppy disks arrived by snail mail, promising more free hours in a month than a month even contained, but broadband was taking over and the AOL training wheels were coming off.

Corporate barons had tamed much of the Wild Internet West, killing off enemies like Napster, but still they battled bittorent and the pirate kings. Soon, a certain religious org would attempt to suppress a certain celebrity’s unhinged soliloquy, pissing off some kids on 4-chan and giving birth to Anonymous,

The cake, it seems, was a lie.

The Worldwide Web had not yet quite become the corporate cesspool it is today, hopelessly mired in rigged search engines and hidden cookies, sponsored links and bot-driven virality.  The internet still held, to me at least, a sense of possibility, mystery, discovery. Even wonder.

The Web was made for ADHD brains like mine. Hyperlinks beckoned the hypercurious and rabbit holes into endless warrens of hidden connections littered the virtual landscape. 

The Web was also perfectly suited to the discovery and propagation of a conspiratorial worldview. The sheer volume of available information in this infinitely hyperlinked structure created an illusion that surfing the web was somehow akin to the painstaking work of journalism and scholarly research.  Correlation vs. causation, cognitive bias, cherry picking, echo chambers – concepts all drowned out by the rush of discovery and the drip drip drip of dopamine hits from constant Aha! moments. Yes!  I knew it! This proves what I have been saying all along!

I was a leftist, sure, and focused, as leftists tend to be, on the structural inequalities in our economy and society. But I was also still that weird kid who had asked for nothing but books on the paranormal for his 12th birthday. I was still a fan of the X-Files. I often found myself drawn to the idea of hidden controllers and secret histories. 

Around this time, I stumbled upon other online writers, some of them also leftists, or purportedly so, who skillfully weaved conspiracy threads into a darkly compelling narrative. Yes, capitalism, but also, secret occult societies, mind controlled assassins, ritually abused children, false-flag terrorist attacks and even UFOs all played a part in the elite’s never ending quest to control the masses. Somehow, it all made sense.

It all made sense to someone else as well, someone I had never met and would never meet. She wrote of it, sometimes obliquely, even breezily, in a blog I would not discover until after she died called Wit of the Staircase. Her name was Theresa Duncan, and on July 10, 2007, a Tuesday,  she had swallowed, we were told, a lethal cocktail of Tylenol and Benadryl. The following Tuesday, despite the nearly constant attention of his concerned friends, her longtime partner, Jeremy Blake, joined her in death by stripping off his clothes and swimming out to sea.

It was a tragic tale, first brought to my attention by a conspiracy writer I had come to trust for his keen insight and discernment. Something was very wrong with this story, he hinted. Surely there was some kind of foul play here.

Oh, but I saw something no one else did. I saw hints in her blog that there was a hidden message within. 

“We…detail our signs for those who know,” she wrote just six days before she died, “so that They might be guided toward Us by the varied light of our linguistic constellations.” 

And another post appeared on Halloween, months after she had died, about Sherlock Holmes and death and messages from the other side. She had confirmed my theory: she was not dead. It was all an artistic hoax, a very deep, sophisticated alternate reality game designed to call attention to some very dark truths. And I was the only one who could see it.

 I basically abandoned everything else I had been writing about as I became obsessed with Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. I was driven by this obsession and hubris and just plain stubbornness. I could not let it go. Even as I was mocked and ostracized by online communities that had once been important to me.  Even as Duncan and Blake failed to resurrect themselves. 

Even as my own world began to fall apart.

Part 2