What about public computers, you say? That's mostly how I ran the blog for the first few weeks, going from public computer to public computer, using libraries and FedEx stores, until I realized there were cameras in all those places watching me peck away at my controversial little project. Anyone truly determined to find out who was behind the site would be able to do it.

And so I just gave up.

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Come and get me, coppers.

Internet personalities who try to remain anonymous after gaining public attention almost always end up being de-anonymized. A popular piece of wisdom when it comes to anonymous blogging is to always assume that you will one day be unmasked. It's a piece of advice that I took to heart: Day 1 of my blog marked the beginning of my mental countdown to the hour when I would come out from anonymity, preferably in a halfway respectable publication.

But little did I realize just how hard it is to get respectable publications to cooperate.

Faced with slush piles like black holes, it's easy for anyone to lose faith in their ability as a writer or in the value of what they have to say, since one could conceivably submit evidence of first contact with extraterrestrial life to a major publication and have the body, UFO debris, and accompanying report returned with a form rejection letter.

I submitted nine op-ed pieces to major U.S. newspapers in which I attempted to come out from anonymity (all of them rejected or ignored), as well as a 5,000-word essay (the same essay that would pull down over 8 million views four weeks later) to 11 small literary publications. Every publication that got back to me did so in order to reject me.

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Some more memorably than others.

Then one day an editor at POLITICO contacted my anonymous alter ego after coming across my blog, asking if by chance I would be willing to contribute to the magazine. Finally, the stars aligned. It's a damn good thing I checked my anonymous email account that week, or else I'd probably still be getting my attempts to come out from anonymity alternately ignored and shat upon by editors across the nation. Which brings us to another of the biggest things I learned ...

Although this would have been a near-guarantee of anonymity, it would have also been a recipe for ensuring that almost no one would ever see my site.

In order to steer a site out of the obscurity zone, you have to be able to react quickly to unfolding events in real time. If a major news story breaks that readers would expect your blog to address, you had better be fairly quick to offer your take on it. It can mean the difference between everyone reading you and no one reading you.

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Or starting to read you, then switching over to that website with the cats that all look like Hitler halfway through.

For example: The night POLITICO published my piece, I knew that a good number of people would be visiting my Twitter account, since I'd plugged it at the bottom of the article. Generally, when you know you're going to have visitors from a website plug, you want to have something awesome waiting for them when they show up to your site. Having a humdrum post about what you just ate for breakfast on your blog when thousands of visitors come banging down on your site is like greeting a dozen party-loving chicks at your front door unshowered and without an ounce of alcohol in the house.

A few hours before the POLITICO piece ran, I decided to strategically post a tweet that I was sure readers would like. One of the best strategies for this is the "deleted scenes" approach. You see a lot of Cracked writers going this route on their personal blogs when you click the plug at the bottom of articles, offering readers a few things that didn't make the cut for the article -- bonus material, essentially. In my case, I decided to have a tweet waiting for POLITICO readers that would impart a piece of amusing information that I couldn't quite fit into the article. The tweet read: "One thing I left out of that Politico piece: HELL YES airport employees often drink those bottles of alcohol you surrender at the checkpoint" (it's true, they do).

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"I'll need to confiscate any lime wedges or club soda you may be carrying, too."

When I signed in to Twitter a few minutes after the piece went live, it was up to 21 retweets -- already approaching the most popular thing I'd ever tweeted. An hour later, it was up to 54 retweets. I felt like a goddamned superstar already -- I had visions of becoming another Twitter success story like the many former Cracked writers I've watched ascend to fame. It could have stopped right there and I would have died happy.

The next morning, I signed in to Twitter and discovered I'd dropped my own personal MOAFT -- the mother of all fucking tweets. It was up to over 300 retweets. The day after that, it was up to 550 retweets and 220 favorites. Sure, we're not dealing with Ellen Oscar numbers here, but for a lowly, relatively unknown writer, it was big news.

Via Twitter

The strategic decision to have that tweet awaiting readers ended up making all the difference in the world (as you'll soon see), and it's an example of the kind of ad hoc strategizing you have to do in order to pilot a site to popularity. Already I sound like a grandpa reminiscing about a game-winning home run back in his old-timey ball-playing days, so I should really stop (more on this in a minute). The point is, it was necessary for me to think fast if I ever hoped to emerge from the chrysalis stage of semi-obscurity and morph into a beautiful goddamned viral butterfly that ladies found irresistible. Which reminds me ...

This is a lie.

I had been wondering if my former co-workers at Chicago O'Hare would end up seeing the story; now the question was whether any of them had not seen the story on national TV. Email from my former co-workers started pouring in almost immediately after the piece went live, most of them supportive in a holy-shit-I'm-watching-your-story-on-NBC kind of way. Somehow, I always imagined that my coming out from anonymity would elicit either the aforementioned shocked-and-awed response or an "I'll be damned! Look what that Harrington was up to all along!" sort of reaction.

I was surprised, then, when the other brand of email starting coming in: hate mail and sad mail. Many of the angry/disappointed former co-workers who emailed me felt as though I'd thrown the hardworking frontline TSA employee under the bus in return for publication glory.

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The third brand of email continued to offer me dick pills and questionable loans unabated.

The thing was, I'd actually been defending the everyman TSA employee for the prior year and a half on my blog, during all the periods when virtually no one was reading it. But when the POLITICO piece went viral, people suddenly discovered me and my blog and judged me solely on the one thing that happened to successfully make it into orbit. The resultant emails ranged from veiled death threats from former co-workers and warnings that the NSA was now watching me to people expressing their genuine fear that I may end up mysteriously disappearing one day soon.

The latter category of email brought up a question I've been asking myself from the beginning: Will I end up in legal trouble or have my laptop confiscated by the FBI or DHS? Possibly. That's the game I signed up for when I decided to click "publish" on that very first post. A few days after I came out from anonymity, a former manager of mine at Chicago O'Hare called and left a message on my voice mail requesting that I call him back. I never returned his call; I almost didn't want to find out what he wanted. And there's always the chance that one day, maybe soon, I'll get a knock on my door, an unfriendly letter in the mail, or another even more unpleasant phone call as a result of all this.

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Which tends to be the only type of call made by the FBI.

But I also got phone calls from interested film and TV producers, as well as from literary agents who thought my story and writing were generally hilarious, which means that, as an aspiring humor writer, even if I die under mysterious circumstances tomorrow, it was all totally fucking worth it.

Jason Edward Harrington does his best not to make enemies on Twitter.

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