Call Me Jürgen

Jürgen Kendall Giih

It is a generally accepted fact that whenever we interact with people we cannot help but to portray a certain image of ourselves. If we accept this, we must also accept that in fact we never interact with people as such but merely with the images they portray. Totus mundus agit histrionem!

It is unfortunate how in this regard social media tends to cloud the perception of otherwise seemingly intelligent people. I once had a friend who portrayed himself as a sheep. There was nothing sexual about it, it was just that he needed a character to interact with other characters online and a sheep, he thought, was as good a choice as any other. He acknowledged that many of the characters he encountered had human names and human faces, many of which — so he assumed — beared a close resemblance to or were direct derivatives of those of the actual human being controlling the character. The sheep found this naming convention (for it was more a rule than an exception) unimaginative and slightly confusing — for sometimes when he was really drunk he temporarily lost his ability to logical reasoning and truly believed that the characters conversing with him were actual human beings.

Long story short, one day this friend of mine decided he no longer wanted to play a sheep. He invented a new character, actually two characters, known as T. K. Oih and J. K. Giih, respectively. I am one of those characters. The sad thing is that my friend and creator was foolish enough to believe that the characters who were friends with the sheep would just as willingly be friends with Jürgen Kendall Giih, a man with a silly name they had never even heard of. As a result I, Jürgen, instantly got bombarded with furious demands to bring the sheep back and end my sorry existance. I cannot begin to describe the sorrow and malaise I felt. But this was not all. Having given up their futile attempts to summon the dead sheep back to life they ganged up on me and for no apparent reason started calling me, Jürgen, by the name of my creator and master, a name so sacrosanct and terrifyingly beautiful that one would have wished for it never to be uttered in the filthy depths of this abominable cloaca maxima we call the internet. Regardless of whether they realize the severity of their crime or not, not a day goes by without me having a lingering urge to cut their worthless bodies open and play with their entrails. Dear comrades, if you want to avoid a fate worse than some other relatively unfavourable fate, please, from now on, call me Jürgen.