There's context, of course: This is just some poor schmuck's mugshot from a DUI arrest in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. But his inclusion here really screws me. Listen, I have a lot of facial accessories -- the beard, the glasses, sometimes a hat -- for a reason: I want to be hard to identify in a lineup. It's a brilliant social strategy most days, but now it's biting me in the ass. Because, man, that guy could almost be me, couldn't he? If you didn't know me personally, you see "haggard white guy, facial hair and glasses" and you mentally fill in the blanks to build yourself a Brockway. So if somebody goes searching my name, they see: profile picture of me, profile picture of me, profile picture of me, then a mugshot of what appears to be the victor of the great biannual Survival of the Rapest Competition.

I'm not upset that somebody might think that I'm a criminal -- these columns are viewable by the public, after all; I've pretty well superglued that shit to the zeitgeist. I guess I'm just distressed because it implies that I can be caught.

Ah, but the game's not over. The top results are easy. Now scroll to the bottom of that page, and find out what the Internet really associates with the idea of you. The bottom of a GIS page is like the Internet's Rorschach test, where it shouts out obscenities based on the little human inkblots it sees up top. What did you end up with? Because I'll tell you: Mine's some bullshit.

I've got a lot of goth imagery, a couple of Twilight screen caps and a movie called Little Ashes, which IMDb tells me is about Salvador Dali exploring forbidden man-love in college.

I'm not sure, but I think the abstract concept of the Internet just called me a "fag."

Oh hey! All right. This isn't too bad. Those are all shows I enjoy and endorse. Good job, Netflix, you're making me look like a veritable connoisseur of nerdery. OK, let's just scroll down a little bit to the "based on your search" section:

Uh-oh.

That's a hell of a narrative unfolding in just a few movie posters. It looks like I spent Saturday night indulging my "sensitive" side a little with a viewing of She's All That, then grew wildly insecure about it and overcompensated by watching a bunch of manly sports movies and Captain America. Then, emboldened by a renewed confidence in my own sexuality and stirred by the rippling pecs of Chris Evans, I went HARD GAY and watched every single homosexual-themed flick available trying to find the closest thing to dudes humpin' that Netflix had to offer.

Again, it doesn't matter that I know the context and have a perfectly reasonable explanation: The sports movies are in response to me adding a motorcycle documentary (On Any Sunday is not a sports movie, guys), and I share a queue with my wife, who, like all women, finds transvestites irresistible, and fanatically devoured every episode of RuPaul's Drag Race and something called Paris Is Burning, so that's what all the gay porn is doi-

Shit, even I don't believe me.

Jesus Christ, is that ever an untrustworthy gaggle of links.

All right, so in one image we've established a few things: that I'm very interested in privacy and do not want to be tracked. That I want to know more about something called "warm bodies," the description of which ends with "Yes, please." Then I've got a link to something that almost casually mentions how to turn common starch into explosives, and a story about using hardcore psychedelics to cure a mental disorder.

Oh, and what's this at the bottom? A fucking military grade artillery silencer? Why would an ordinary human being be bookmarking that? Am I going to try to secretly explode somebody's house? That's not just another level of crazy; that's the final boss of crazy. Man, let's click through on that silencer link, maybe the context is necessary in this case, before anybody gets the wrong ide-

It's a cock. A giant metal cock.

So there you go: I, as an Internet user, am trying to hide my shady antics from others, say "Yes, please" to romancing the dead and am suffering from severe depression (but that's OK, because I'm managing it with horse tranquilizers). And if I can't get a handle on my mental problems, I'm going to stealth explode a small city with a giant potato gun shaped like a human penis.

I guess that's fair.