Everyone has Googled themselves at one time or another in their lives. Even you, dear reader, I'll bet. Why did you do it? Curiosity? Validation? Finding your own LinkedIn profile?

When Alfred did it, his reason was self-pity.

He was nobody, he had nobody, and he had nothing. His immediate family had died years prior. His extended family did not remember he existed, nor did he remember them—they might never have existed. His high school acquaintances had all fled the miserable small town in which he was now left behind, alone in a mobile home that was falling apart, living paycheck to paycheck from the Walmart where he stocked shelves part time, no hopes of advancement, no romantic prospects, no friends except for one Jack Daniel.

Often, and not only while he was drinking his friend, he ruminated thoughts of conditional suicide: I'll kill myself if I get fired, I'll kill myself if my car can't start, I'll kill myself if the store is out of beer. One day, after checking his email on the library computer and finding no new messages since the last week, not even spam, he thought: I'll kill myself if everyone forgets I exist. To obtain a second opinion as to that fact, he Googled himself: “Alfred Lieberheim”.

He expected, at best, an empty page. Or perhaps he would find out about the achievements of another Alfred Lieberheim, which would just make him feel even worse, which was very much the point. And indeed: at the very top of the page, he saw that one Alfred Lieberheim had published a book titled “Lost in the Map.” This put him in an extreme state of bitterness: like a lot of people, he had once fancied himself a writer. His freshman English teacher, Mrs. Biels, once told him he had too much talent to waste. Spurred by this compliment, he spent much of high school writing and rewriting and reworking the first chapter of his magnum opus, a coming-of-age story about travelling around the world, until life got in the way and it fell by the wayside.