I got a call yesterday right as I got home from a number I didn't know. I don't normally answer unknown numbers because they're usually people who are trying to trick me into answering the phone (and I don't mean that in a "I may be schizophrenic" sort of way), but this time I did. I said hello, and then some girl did, too.

"Hi I'm at this Borders in Pico Rivera and someone called you a douchebag so I'm wondering, are you a douchebag?"

"What? Who said I was a douchebag?"

"I'm in the chick's bathroom at this Borders! Your number is written on a stall in here with the word Douchebag written over it. My friend shouted, 'Hey do you wanna call a douchebag?' and I said sure! So are you a douchebag?"

"Well that depends on who wrote it, I guess, I can be a douchebag sometimes."

"Hey!," she shouts to her friend, "He admits to being a douchebag sometimes so that's cool. Hey, you sound pretty hot by the way."

"Oh, well, thanks."

"Just putting that out there."

"OK. It's so weird, I don't know anyone in Pico who would put my number in a bathroom stall."

"How old are you?"

"24. How old are you?"

"He's 24! We're 18. My friend wants to know if you have a girlfriend?"

"No, I don't have a girlfriend."

"He doesn't have a girlfriend! She says that instead of 'douchebag' they should have written 'guy with a hot voice'!" we all laugh merrily.

After discussing where we were from we elected to trade myspaces through text and, well, 18 year old blonde girl with a baby. No way was this anyone that anyone I know could know.

I called the only person I know who knows a girl in Pico, and knows Borders employees, and after a little recon work on behalf of the Borders employees, it was discovered to be real. My phone number and the word "douchebag" is definitely in the third stall of the ladies restroom. Interesting.

It's almost comforting to think that it is someone random who I jilted in the past who is lashing out at me by writing my number on the wall. Someone from reality, maybe someone I burned somehow, maybe some ex-girlfriend was randomly in the Borders in Pico and decided to scrawl my number on the wall; maybe some guy friend snuck into the ladies room and wrote it himself as a joke; maybe one of my friends had his girlfriend do it. That's all very innocent.

But then there's the scarier side to the whole thing, the paranoid side, where you have to look at the internet and what it does to our privacy, not to start to sound like a nut, but when things like this happen to me I think about it this way:

With a simple WHOIS on any of my multiple domains you can find my contact information, including the phone number written on the bathroom wall and my home address. You can use Google to look up a street view and see what my house looks like and what cars are parked outside (and easily link up my mentions of driving a hybrid with the Prius parked outside). The internet turns people into beacons of light, especially when you're super active on it.

I'm not as cautious as I could be, I'll admit.

This morning when I walked out to my car I discovered that someone had keyed the entire passenger side straight across. It was then that I began to wonder, is someone following me on the internet and saw that their "douchebag" prank backfired (via my twitter, in which I chronicled the whole thing) in a funny/cool way and decided in a fit of rage to key my car?

Was it Mike Doughty?

More than likely it's this certain person I know who is of low intelligence (who is now married to a guy who threw mixed up hair dye on the hood of this same my car four years ago) and I can kind of rest easy: they're far too stupid to do something actually sinister.

In the end, it sucks that my car is keyed, but I've got so many dings and scratches and misshapen spots in it now that it hardly matters to me. I'm glad my tires weren't slashed. I know guys who have gotten bricks thrown through the windows of their cars by jilted exes and found their tires slashed outside parties full of people they've known for years.

I can only hope that I one day piss off someone that bad.

I can only hope that when I do, they'll fall on their swords.