A few months back I start getting all these spam texts calling me Jonathan:
Hey Jonathan … Yo Jonathan … How’s it going, Jonathan …
Which is really gaslight’y for a few reasons:
1. because Jonathan’s my dead brother’s name.
2. because Jonathan killed himself over thirty years ago.
3. because the texts would go from: Hey Jonathan, looks like it’s time to renegotiate that mortgage… to: Jonathan, it’s me, John, and I’m here to tell you how to get your hair back and get your groove with it… to: Tell Mr. Nice Guy goodbye, Jonathan. It’s time to show those chicks what their missing. To: Hi Jonathan! It’s me, your conscience.
Sometimes they wouldn’t even be from actual phone numbers: 401xi or 1%1@-hisnet.
At some point, I gave up blocking them and just went with it.
I started to wonder: Maybe the Dark Web isn’t just the place people go to plot the end of the world.
And make snuff porn and steal your identity, money, password, sanity, et al.
Maybe it’s where people who kill themselves go to haunt the little brothers who didn’t kill themselves.
But should’ve killed themselves instead of their big brothers because everybody knows their big brothers would’ve been much more productive members of society than the still living brother spending his life as an alcoholic, Adderall-addicted dog walker.
Like maybe in the afterlife Jonathan’s a real bro who hangs out with other bros who talk about banging chicks and how big of dicks they have when they bang these chicks.
Like maybe in the afterlife he was a real dick but a total different kind of dick than he was in real life.
Which makes me laugh but also kind of pisses me off:
To think that here we are thirty years removed and Jonathan’s still messing with my head, still gaslighting me, still being a dick.
Still making me write another sappy story about how I’ll never be able to leave his ghost behind.
Boohoohoo for you, why don’t you run cry to mommy about it …would be the actual text Jonathan would send me.
Which is fucked up.
Because she’s dead too.
Drevlow runs BULL and writes books about mostly the same bull stuff. His latest is a collection of connected short stories titled Honky published by Cowboy Jamboree Press (Aug 24). He lives in Statesboro, GA with his wife and three trash dogs. You can stalk him online at thedrevlow-olsonshow.com or on twitter, insta, face, bsky, & threads @thedrevlow.