Almost (Internet) Famous

On my dad's sudden trending

Of course my 73-year-old dad accidentally went viral on the internet. It was bound to happen sooner or later. And like some sort of cosmic joke, it makes sense that this would land in June 2007, during what was already the most stressful week of my life.

Before the old man started trending, my business partners and I were on the verge of selling our music company, an extremely complex, potentially life-changing deal that felt like it could fall apart at any moment. 

That very same week, my wife Emma and I were awaiting yet another pregnancy scan that would tell us if, after multiple miscarriages, this time we’d hear a heartbeat. I wasn’t sleeping much.

In the midst of all this, my dad emailed me with the subject line: CAN YOU FIX MY GOOGLE?

I was too caught up in everything to respond to another one of his nonsensical IT requests, which he’d send me periodically. He was really pushing this Google thing, though. He sent another email, then a text.

Another stream of texts and emails began trickling in, from friends and colleagues. Links to blog posts, articles, Reddit threads. All of them asking: Is this your dad?!

My dad was born in 1934 in Chicago. He spoke often of fistfights and brawls he got into growing up. He had the keenest sense of justice. Once, when a younger neighborhood bully punched my dad’s little brother, my dad took the bully’s bike, shouldering it as he climbed a thirty-foot tree. He wedged the bike in the upper branches. The bully cried and ran home.

My dad prided himself on never taking shit from anyone, and he brought this same intensity into the courtroom, where he was a successful civil litigator for decades. Nobody was getting the last word on him, ever.

Before calling him, I clicked on a few of these links. It turned out he had unwittingly started a feud with a blogger named Travis. 

My dad had called Travis on behalf of a photographer friend over a minor copyright claim, something outside his usual legal domain. Travis, though not an attorney, proceeded to school my dad in copyright law. Travis then posted a transcript of their phone call on his blog, in which he looked eloquent, witty, and brilliant, and my dad seemed like an angry fool who didn’t know the first thing about law. 

And that would've been that. It got picked up on a couple of blogs—it was a very minor thing. Unfortunately, this was when my dad emailed the thirty-something blogger, and challenged him to a fight.

Travis lived on the east coast, and my dad was in Los Angeles. So my dad tells him, over email, I’m going to rent a boxing ring, fly you out, and we’re gonna fight. He assures Travis: You’ll only need a one-way ticket.

Travis posts this email on his blog, and it starts trending, landing on the front page of popular sites, blowing up on Reddit. 

In his legal life, my dad wrote everything longhand. So he was hunting and pecking emails to Travis from his bed, likely with his laptop on his belly in the dark. The emails were riddled with typos and random punctuation. At one point, my dad called Travis “dyslectic.” I was cringing, reading through the posts.

Two camps had formed in the blog’s active comments section. One camp was convinced that this couldn’t possibly be an actual attorney—or even an adult. This lawyer must’ve been hacked, they said. There’s no way that the person who wrote these emails, with the misspellings—and the fight challenge—went to law school. 

The other camp had their knives out. They tracked down my dad’s IP address and confirmed that these emails did indeed come from this actual attorney in California. They posted his website and address online. 

They then launched an SEO campaign to strategically stack his Google search results with gleeful, mocking insults, calling him a jackass, a walking lawyer joke, saying they’ll make sure he never gets another client again.

This is probably a good time to mention that my dad named me after him, a junior to his senior. His Google results are also mine. Thus, both of our Googles were, at this point, well and truly fucked. There was nothing I could fix, other than preventing further damage. None of this was good timing for my own business dealings.

I called my dad and explained to him how public this was, and told him he had to stop emailing Travis immediately. He said he’d think about it.

I then emailed Travis, saying, look: my dad’s an old guy. He’s lost a step, and he’s all worked up. He’s actually a really good man, and doesn’t deserve this mockery. Everyone’s had their fun, I said, can we please just take all of this down? 

A day later, Travis kindly said he’d back off the attack, but that he’d spoken with his priest, and they both think it’s important to keep the posts up, so people can see what kind of person my dad is.

While I was attempting to negotiate this truce, my dad continued to email Travis. “This punk,” my dad told me on the phone, “is obviously afraid to fight me.” 

“Dad, you have to stop. You can never, ever contact this guy again. Promise me.” We debated this for at least a half hour until finally, he promised. One certainty with him: I could always take him at his word

For another year, my dad and I lived with ridiculously awful search results under our shared name. Fortunately, this was all overshadowed by the birth of my daughter. We’d heard the heartbeat, pattering away on the sonogram, my wife and I hugging with teary relief. Now, our girl was a few months old, giggling up at us with her gummy grin. Who gives a shit about search results?

On a visit to see my dad, as he drove the two of us along Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica, he told me he’d been thinking about things. 

“Maybe,” he proposed, “since you’re good at computers, you could hack into that guy’s website and take it down.”

I laughed. “Oh, Dad, that is the most insane fantasy.”

“Okay, here’s another idea,” he said. “Maybe we could get him on federal charges, or something.”

“Dad,” I said. “We have to drop this. Let’s focus on the good things—like your new granddaughter. Can we just forget Travis?”

He nodded, taking this in. After a good minute of silence, he gripped the steering wheel, and through clenched teeth said, “THAT FUCKING GUY!” 

I wondered if he’d ever be able to let it go.

A couple years later, I ran my occasional check of our Google results. Astonishingly, all of the blog posts were gone. Our results were back to normal. I clicked through to Travis’ blog, and it was offline. Strange, I thought. I googled him.

After the horrific mass shooting in Arizona, where U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded, Travis apparently posted on his blog: “1 down and 534 to go.” There were news reports that police then seized "a large amount" of weapons from his home. 

Travis wasn’t involved in the violence, but he’d weighed in, saying further: “I think that it is morally legitimate to kill pro-regulation senators and pro-regulation judges, if it can be done without harming innocents.” Now, his guns were seized, and his blog was offline. 

I called my dad, brimming with this bizarre news, including the fact that our search results were all clear.

He listened to the whole story, and said, “Huh. Well, that’s good.”

“You don’t seem surprised,” I said. “None of that seems crazy to you?”

“Yeah,” he said, seeming almost pensive. And then, like a happy afterthought: “You know what? Fuck that guy.” 

In truth, it was an epic journey he’d made, from the rageful “THAT FUCKING GUY” to the casual “Fuck that guy.” I thought to myself, this is as close as he’ll ever get to Zen acceptance.  

Of course at that point, Travis’ own Google results were page after page of abject shittiness. His own terrible, regrettable words, now trapped in digital amber. 

It struck me then that Travis could probably learn something important from my old man, something I’d come to see, too. In time, all our worries become meaningless, for one reason or another. This too shall pass. Or as my dad might say to Travis: If you wait long enough, your Google will probably fix itself.

Many thanks to

Jack Dixon

of

Longevity Minded

for the early read and helpful comments.

Thanks so much for reading.

If you enjoyed this post, please let me know:

1 — Leave a like. I’d be grateful if you’d consider tapping the heart 💙 at the top or bottom of this page.

2 — Get in touch. If somethings resonates or you want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear from you.

3 — Spread the love. If you know someone who may enjoy reading this, please share it with them.

---

Thank you for reading This Very Moment. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.