My name is Andy Reynolds. My father named me Joseph Reynolds, but that name never took on with my mother. There were issues between the two of them. She never explained what those issues were, but she did smile after the police told her that he had drowned during our vacation in Florida. She didn’t smile when they told her, of course. She cried into her hands like a new widow is supposed to do. The smile came that night. It came when she was downing a bottle of wine on the hotel balcony. She turned to me, she gave me the smile, and she asked if I wanted to go walk on the beach with her. We had a great evening, and nobody ever called me Joseph again.

For a few years, while playing drums for a band called Chairman Wow, I went by the name of Rage McFury. That never took on, either. Here's what happened at the end of that -

One night, I was at a party. After making my presence loudly known, I entered a bathroom with a bottle of vodka in my hand. I shut the door behind me, and I poured all the vodka into the toilet. Then I filled the bottle with water from the sink. For the next hour, I downed massive amounts from the bottle while refusing to share a drop of it. I made a boisterous and flagrant ass out of myself. I screamed songs from tabletops. I engaged in meaningless political debates with complete strangers. I briefly fought a guy who had been keeping his eye on me.

I had planned for the singing and I had planned for the debating, but I hadn't planned for that fight. And that's why it was such a perfect ending. Everybody there saw the horrific assbeating that this man put upon me. They all laughed as I picked my bloodied body off the ground. All those party people slapped the man on his back, and they congratulated him for a job well done. And that's when, with drunken rage and mad fury, I screeched that they were worthless bastards. I told the man that I'd kill him before the week was through, and he smiled at me. I was dragged from the party and thrown on the sidewalk.

Afterwards, all that was found of me were bloody clothes floating in the canal.

After Rage died, I put on a shirt and a pair of pants that I had bought from a street vendor (I bought an extra shirt to wipe the blood off me), and I bought a ticket for a bus to Florida. Nobody recognized me during the trip, of course. The sad fact is that the elaborate death scheme didn’t even need to be done. I could have just left town. Nobody would have known. But I did it anyways, because it was nicer to believe that there were still some people who would have given a shit that I was gone.

I was on a shuttle to Mars one month later.