The Horror Of Fame

I spent a pretty sleepless night last night, worrying if my new-found Google fame would prove to be the double-edged sword that it has for the likes of Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan.

Fame brings with it responsibilities and the sure knowledge that wherever you go, whatever you do, there is always someone with a telephoto lens swiped from the Hubble Space Telescope watching for you to accidentally dangle a baby from a second-floor balcony, drive at five times the posted speed limit while blind drunk with a pocket full of Bolivian Snuff or be caught flashing your private parts when, due to the pressures of fame, you simply forget to don underwear that day.

Once gained, fame, even the ethereal not-actually-acknowledged-by-anyone-real fame that Google listing brings, is also fleeting: an ephemeral thing addictive as the Bolivian Snuff you forget you have in your pocket just before clawing your way into your SUV for a nightcap and a drive, and oh-so volatile. Blink and it's gone, along with the life of privilege and adulation it brought. Even though those are entirely virtual in my case I simply cannot go back to life as it was before Google found me. I won't go back.

I regained my former sense of proportion once I had arrived at work and had chance to rigorously search the Wikipedia for the no-doubt by now defaced entry on The Occasional Stevie and it's proud author. What slanders and libels were being tossed around at my expense by the donut-scarfing spotty herberts that "moderate" the repository of all things "everyone knows"?

Turns out none at all.

The Occasional Stevie might well have become welcome in the pedestrian byways of Google, but it has yet to crack that bastion of academic kudos it seems. Put the title into the search engine and all you get back is apocryphal information about Stevies Wonder, Nicks and Ray Vaughn. I'm not really famous at all it seems, not even virtually.

I'd better go and put some underwear on.