Alec Mouhibian

Googling yourself is a nasty habit. Done once in a while it seems healthy enough. But even then it’s only a matter of time before you’re just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling away, being reminded of past embarrassments, feeling guilty that you’re not Googling someone else, yet unable to stop until everything within has been splattered onto the screen of the present and you’re completely drained. It’s a disease. And if you’ve ever clicked on repeat the search with the omitted results included, it’s clinical.

Then again, there’s always the chance you’ll discover something about yourself that makes the whole sordid business worth its while. Recently that happened to me. Deep into a mad bout of Googlebation, I came upon the page of this MySpace group:

The Don’t Be A Dumb Femnazi That Takes Everything Too Seriously (D.B.A.D.F.T.T.E.T.S.) Foundation would like to thank Margaret Sanger, Dr Alfred Kinsey, Christina Sommers, Camille Paglia, Alec Mouhibian, and everyone else that takes issues like gender and sexuality with an honest and open approach. Also, special thanks to George Carlin for making such great progress in the field of people being frank with one another.

Slap me silly and call me Camille! I haven’t been this flattered since somebody with poor vision once said I looked like Lawrence Olivier in Wuthering Heights. (How poor was his vision? I usually get Corey Matthews, the star of Boy Meets World who was always inexplicably horny for that hippie-infested neighborhood in Los Angeles.)

Paglia and me, cheek to cheek, with George Carlin bringing up the side? Not quite the sexiest situation I’ve ever imagined, but a close second. I’ll take it.

My inclusion in this company must’ve been inspired by the time I gleefully watered the dry, dry daisies of UCSB’s Women’s Center when I was a columnist at the Daily Nexus in 2005. “I’ll readily admit that the word rape kind of turns me on,” I confessed, “but that’s only because it rhymes with ape.”

The paper got a historical deluge of responses to the offending piece, and I got stalked on AIM. What a gas. I’m still grateful to all the gender feminists who wished me death upon the occasion. Their restraint was appreciated, in contrast to those who wished me enrollment in a women’s studies course.

All in all, the episode stands as a modest achievement in public service. The Women’s Center took two weeks off from proselytizing phallophobia to try and get me fired. I like to think that, because of me, a few vulnerable coyotes made it unscathed. I like to think that, because of my work, a few frat boys lost an arm.

Where have all the good times gone? My opinion editor at the Nexus had spent the first month of school in rehab for crack, after she got the job by sleeping with the editor-in-chief, who called me to his office amid the bloodbath to say: “Do you realize I won’t ever get laid here again? That’s a joke.” The last part was added a little too grimly, a little too quickly, obscuring exactly which half of the statement was gallows humor.

Ah, the Nexus. Best college paper in the country, and that’s not a joke. The spirit of the 1940s newsroom still looms there, drunk and proud. Here’s hoping my EIC is getting laid right now in a hammock somewhere. Here’s hoping my opinion editor is still alive. Bless ‘em both, they deserve it.

I never got to enjoy my fifteen minutes of fame. That’s because I traded it for David Brock’s soul. It was either his or Andrew Sullivan’s—then new on the subterranean market—and I took the one that keeps on taking. Does my decision seem shallow? Rest assured my first choice would’ve been the treasured soul of Robert Johnson, but Eric Clapton had swiped it just the year before. In return for what, who knows? Maybe the devil got to sit in on his rhythm section that year.

As for the founder of D.B.A.D.F.T.T.E.T.S., Riley Freeman, I’m glad to report he’s intellectually consistent:

Although I do think women should cook and give blowjobs, I think that men should cook and eat pussy, and they both should have jobs & an education. I’m all about equality, and I’m 110% for women’s rights and empowerment. But if you can’t take a joke or laugh about something, then you need to die.

This almost seems too good to be true. The group was founded in late 2006 and its founder is from Oklahoma. How was he aware of something that happened in Santa Barbara early 2005? Could this be one of many individually-tailored mirages constructed by Google to disarm those of us who fear its gathering omnipotence?

I follow Garin’s summer cleaning of spring skeletons, without the courage to look at them. Those early, embarrassing menstruations flowed from a place where the follicles were active but the hair wasn’t there. Thus do I utterly disavow anything to be found under my name in Google, that heartless biographer, which isn’t linked to in my archives page here. The only bearable memory I have of my high school editorials is, “Thanks to Clinton, I beg your pardon is no longer such an innocent phrase.” I guess that line’s okay, but it’s Al Franken okay.

It’s impossible to exorcise our past, but we can at least declare haughty superiority to it before anyone else gets the chance. And we can follow by thanking God that dubious metaphors are immune from maturity.

The “good old days” means a lot of things to a lot of people, but for a writer it must include the anonymity that was once granted to our past doings and writings — embarassing, out of date, and no longer ours. Thanks to the internet (the medium, supposedly, that did away with permanence) nothing slips from the records. A simple search of my name in Google will (forever?) reveal that I once ran for UCLA’s student government as an anarchistic candidate. And a few pages in, you will find this gem from the upstart 15-year old writer who had Ayn Rand in one hand and a thesaurus in the other: “If establishments of public education are advocates of preconception and predilection, then their conductors should not declare words of condemnation and scorn to our country, they should avow words of fidelity and commitment to this nucleus of justice and opportunity.”

I figure it’s better to ask permission than to say sorry — and take the skeletons out of my closet, before someone with lesser sympathies arrives with a search warrant. Alec?