I could have been Bill Walton.

Like most, I dismissed Twitter as a playground for self-involved idiots when I first heard about it.  But I’m a frequent patron of Deadspin and Will Leitch was a Twitter partisan.  When two of my favorite writers, Drew Magary and Gourmet Spud, started a fake Twitter mocking my least favorite writer, Rick Reilly, I wanted to jump on the bandwagon.

I decided to parody Chuck Klosterman.  I love his two most fully realized books, Fargo Rock City and Killing Yourself To Live, but was unimpressed with parts of his compilations Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Klosterman IV.  But he was quirky and popular enough for me to alternatively lampoon and mimic. It was a work of love.  So, CK won out over Bill Walton.

When I started out it was easy to get followers because I already had follower networks on Tumblr and Deadspin.  But I was surprised at how many strangers started following.  That was, until I realized that a lot of these people thought I was Chuck Klosterman.  The title of the Twitter, FakeKlosterman, wasn’t enough to tip them off.

At first, I was flattered when people thought I was actually Chuck Klosterman.  I thought it obvious that I wasn’t him; I linked to my Tumblr, and if anyone went through the trouble to investigate other things I’d written (and linked to), they’d find a smug East Coast attorney.  Klosterman might be the type to create a fake Twitter version of himself, but pretending to be me would be quite the feat of performance art.  Also, as many of you might have noted, I’m not nearly the writer he is.

Nevertheless, I was delighted when I found out via a drunk tweet from one of Klosterman’s friends that CK himself thought FakeKlosterman was “semi-amusing.”  Not even my mom would call me semi-amusing. Sadly, when CK talked about Twitter with Bill Simmons, he did not mention FakeKlosterman.

The Twitter chugged along quite nicely: I came up with a “what your band t-shirt says about you” series that proved quite popular.  But after a while I gave up trying to pretend to be Chuck, and just started writing whatever funny was on my mind.  I was like a cover band who tried to play some of their own stuff, but I still grew in popularity.  Mostly because a lot of people still thought I was Chuck himself.  I got fan e-mails, include one person who clearly wanted to sleep with Chuck and gave me her measurements in a 5-page missive.  That alone almost made me quit.

By July I thought the Twitter page was running out of gas but Magary e-mailed me saying he wanted to put a FakeKlosterman tweet on Deadspin.  He also said he loved FakeKlosterman and to “never fucking stop” writing it (the gratuitous f-bomb is classic Drew).  The resulting traffic from Deadspin gave me more than 100 new followers, nobody else (not even J.E. Skeets or Jonah Keri) has been able to give me that much pub.  I felt like I had to continue.

And I did continue.  But my heart really wasn’t in it, and the product rarely resembled something Chuck Klosterman might write.  Ultimately, it was just me making jokes, getting new followers because some people still thought I was CK.  After a while, it just seemed cheap, and I was tired of pretending to be him.  I thought Drew had stopped following me (he hadn’t), so I used that as an excuse to finally pull the plug.  It was fun, but I’m glad it’s over.  I can’t be Chuck Klosterman.  Especially when I still use an alias for my own thoughts.