When Homeland Security Came After Me For A SoundCloud MLG Sellout Rapper Alter Ego Parody

Stomastein, sometimes misspelled Stoamstein, because the joke was never meant to be a clean brand, was a SoundCloud and Twitter alter ego. 2014 MLG wallpaper. Studio-gangster pop-star stereotype. Conspiracy-adjacent sci-fi set dressing. A mainstream-rap villain who sold out, could barely rhyme, and still somehow had Rick Ross and Lil Wayne on the track as cheap impressions. The bios said parody. The pictures were Shrek and joke characters. Body-dysmorphic exaggeration was part of the costume. The point was that the culture will swallow blank, overproduced gangster theater without chewing. I was not hiding a cell. I was doing a bit so loud it was almost embarrassing. Comedy that sits next to Rucka Rucka Ali. Ugly words as costume, not a manifesto. This is the comedy half of the desk, and it is not lesser than the file. It is how I talk when I am not footnoting a tablet.

March 5, 2015 is the meme-worthy date, and I am fine with it being a legend as long as the legend stays accurate. Homeland and Secret Service came to the house. I did not invite them. I did not know a federal visit was inbound. Fight or flight fired. I fight. I struck an officer. A nose broke. That is on me, and I have said so in rooms where it cost. It was not a war on the United States. It was a startled man meeting a raid that had been summoned over a joke account. Eighteen months of federal time followed. They never actually prosecuted the SoundCloud as a bomb. The punch did. A goofy, obvious comedy bit was answered, in the dumbest American way, with a broken nose and a year and a half.

The anonymous caller in the paper was not anonymous in the courtroom. It was my father's then-girlfriend, later wife, a stepmother who wanted me out of the picture. She told them my ritual practice scared her and used the Twitter as proof. She testified to the act in court. That is the record I file. Not a mysterious tip from an intelligence shop reading my SoundCloud at three in the morning. A household call that laundered a family fight into a federal scene. The jury heard the clips. People laughed. Laughter is what you do when the exhibit is obviously a bit. They still had a body and a badge. So I still went. Families are not always a legacy you are proud of in every branch. Blood is real in the good inheritances and in the bad phone calls. I do not edit that into a nicer essay.

The joke that will not die, and I will not sand it down: the intentionally crafted studio-gangster pop star Stomastein is more "authentically gangsta," in the only sense that word has any comedy left, than the radio versions, because the costume got tested by the actual state and I did not drop the bit to become a respectable defendant. Commit to the bit even in the face of the feds. That is a clown noting that the feds spent treasure on a character who was already a punchline. Under the clown is a civic sentence I still mean. A nation that cannot tell parody from a plot will spend its Homeland budget on the loud kid and miss the quiet real one.

Unpopular speech is still protected speech. Parody is a coat. If the coat is ugly, that is the point of the coat. I take the strike. I do not take the rewriting. Stomastein was a SoundCloud MLG sellout-rapper alter ego. Homeland misread a goofy comedy bit. The stepmother called it in and said so under oath. I became a local legend for a day and a felon for a decade of headlines. Both of those are true. The Red Dead page is the same household in a quieter mood: a father, a son, a line that does not staff well. This page is the punchline. If you came here from the channels, welcome. The long file is through the other door. I am the same guy in both rooms.