I always believed I was special, thanks to both Mr. Rogers and my own giant ego. Sure, I knew there were other Joel Steins in the world, but I figured none of them were desperately trying to vie for the public’s attention by revealing personal details in rhymed couplets. So when a friend told me that a singer-songwriter named Joel Stein has the website joelstein.com I experienced a profound identity crisis. An identity crisis in that I wanted to make sure I had a better girlfriend, a more successful career and a significantly better middle name. I’m a competitive guy. But it turned out that visiting joelstein.com was like looking deep into my own soul, which, of course, I enjoyed tremendously. Like me, this Joel Stein was 28, went to college and, even freakier, was also Jewish. His self-description made us seem as one: “It often seems like he’s playing for friends in his living room, letting them into his personal visions, sharing jokes and inviting them into his dreams.” He boasts of having “Dylan’s characterizations, Bowie’s surreal sexiness, Woody Guthrie’s social criticisms, Paul Simon’s intelligent humor and James Brown’s down-and-dirty funk.” Bowie’s surreal sexiness? This was getting eerie. Listening to his music, I heard the tunes that I would record if I knew how to play guitar. “The sun goes into her room/and catches the dust in flight/and gently warms the mattress/ that Katie’s resting on./Carefully she puts down her viola/next to the kitten on her lap/and when she wants to say its name/she remembers it has none./Uh-huh.” I cried a cry that only one Joel Stein can cry for the unnamed cat of another Joel Stein. But through my tears I realized that I’d be a fool to cede my identity on the world’s most powerful medium. So I called The Singing Joel Stein to tell him “this means war/so don’t let your kitten out the door.” Despite my intimidation tactics, he said he wasn’t willing to give up the domain name. “You could probably get joelstein.net, he offered, like some sleazy real estate agent trying to sell me a beach house 10 blocks from the ocean. This was shaping up as the greatest fight for personal identity since Senator Paul Simon showed up on Saturday Night Live the same night as the singing Paul Simon. As an opening battle cry, I decided to mention joelstein.com in this column in hopes that the site gets so flooded with visits that it freezes up. I don’t know if this is how the technology works, but it seems like a good strategy. Also I registered thejoelstein.com cleverly utilizing “the” to humiliate my doppelganger. Then I got an e-mail from The Singing Joel Stein offering me some free CDs, which seemed like an easy way to impress guests when they look at my collection. We even decided to get together next month when he’s in New York, which I was getting very excited about. But the more I thought about it, I realized that it was silly to play this ur-genealogy game, expecting someone to heal my existential angst just because their parents were as uncreative as mine. But still, I’m going to go to lunch with him, just to trick him into paying the bill so I can steal his credit-card numbers as part of the easiest scam in history. That way I can rack up enough debt on his credit card to keep him from renewing that domain name.
