Klaus Zynski is Dead

And I Killed Him

“Of course, O’Blivion was not the name I was born with. That’s my television name. Soon all of us will have special names…”

• David Cronenberg, Videodrome

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

My name is John.

My parents named me John but they called me Jack. Most of the people I know back where I come from still call me Jack. I only gave it up because I was too lazy to fill out a preferred name form ahead of college and so when I arrived as an eighteen year old undergraduate, John was the name on the dorm room door and I didn’t feel like correcting people. I was making a fresh start in a new place. It seemed appropriate.

A decade later I think I can admit that I was okay with the change because I was desperate to be someone else. I was a high school loser, slow to grow up, gawky, pimple-faced, undersocialized around girls, seeking attention through self-deprecation. That spaz who cuts a loud fart in class in the hopes the boys he calls friends will remember he exists. Sorry, Jack, you can’t come out with us. No room in the car for you. I sometimes wonder if they actually thought I believed that.

It’s only dawned on me recently that the tension I feel between myself and myself is a function of parsing that period of my life. The person I was has become loathsome to the person I am. Some people never leave high school. I can’t get enough distance between it and myself. To me, it’s never been a question of roads not taken. That’s where people go wrong in lamenting their own adolescent loathsomeness. If only I’d played football. If only I’d talked to that girl. If only I’d gone to that party. If only my band had played a Green Day song at the talent show. Nonsense. Fantasy. Vanity. All is vanity. The problem with every road not taken is that the person you were then would be the one walking down it. Wherever you would have gone, there you would be. The fault is in you. Not your stars.

College? Yeah it was better, mostly. Still, though, I found myself going in circles. Falling back into bad habits. Temper, young man, temper. When I was almost done with it, my father told me that I was “made for the next stage.” Adolescence, school, all of it, this was something to be muddled through so I could get to the part where my talents could be leveraged most effectively.

I didn’t feel like it at first. Most people don’t. Now I am the adult in the room. Now I make a respectable, median amount of money at an adult job with benefits. Now there’s just four short months between me and a very respectable petit-bourgeois sort of wedding to an immensely competent woman who, for whatever reason, is willing to marry a man who runs around in digital back alleys calling himself “Klaus Zynski.”

Klaus has gone on long enough, I think. It’s a good joke, probably the most successful I’ve ever told. But it’s begun to be more trouble than it’s worth, on virtually every axis through which I would like to further my professional and artistic life as a writer. Let me take you around the horn with it, I’ll keep it brief, you don’t want to hear me moan.

First and foremost I’m beginning to get some joy pitching and selling essays. When I place one, I tell editors to list me as JW Yablonsky, not Klaus. All my short stories are published as JW. The novel I plan to sell in the near future is JW’s, not Klaus’. Klaus has always been a branding exercise. A bit of affectation to associate my notes with the great anon posters of Golden Age Twitter in your subconscious lizard brain. Look the part, be the part. Same basic strategy which led me to adopt JW as a pen name. There are guys who already write novels under my government name, so I’ll use a different one.

Secondly, and I am grateful for this, let me be very clear, I am meeting more and more people from this site with each passing month. Every time I shake a hand and do the mental social arithmetic on whether I’m Klaus, JW, or just John, I desire, briefly, to combust spontaneously. It’s so stupid being Klaus in meatspace. I have yet to do it successfully. It grows even more absurd when I consider that the inverse is also true. More and more people I’ve met out and about are coming onto Substack and, given my firsthand experiences with this site’s discovery algorithm, I feel giving them a boost is the least I can do. Then they gotta thank me or acknowledge me as Klaus and the whole thing feels even more childish and counterproductive. It’s a performance enhancer for being seen and an impediment to being known.

Of course, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Klaus, JW, the whole thing is just safety netting below the tightrope walk of modern online life. If ever it should get a little too real, well, I just delete the whole thing and it’s like it never existed to begin with. Slide back into that banal little adult sinecure until I get the itch for validation again. My very first essay on this platform was about The Pain of Being Known.

But no pain, no gain. Things are happening for me in ways I never thought they could and I wish to meet them proactively. That will require some changes on my own part. Fewer than you think, though. It’s very much a “new name, same great taste” situation. I’m planning to keep the Michael Ironside in Scanners profile pic. I sort of consider it a good luck charm at this point. I dunno if I plan on a face reveal. Ideally they’ll print my face somewhere on the dust jacket for my debut novel. You can crack a copy open and see for yourself. Maybe you’ll meet me wherever Substackers gather. Perhaps I’ll be invited on a podcast which insists on video, or schedule another livestream myself. Really, I decided that the time was right to pen this essay and put the whole Klaus Era to bed formally while I was in the midst of that one-thousand sub celebratory livestream. I had fun with it, really. But that same self-consciousness I feel meeting a friend, a collaborator, a comrade and a fellow traveler from this platform in real life, with no masks or screens to separate us, began to creep up. It’s fun for awhile, but then it gets a little silly, doesn’t it?

Thank you to everyone who helped bring Klaus to life. I ask that you respect my decision to let him die.

In conclusion: