My name is Benjamin Davis. My writing career began at sixteen when I made a Myspace page called “Fuck Saint Johns”.

Saint Johns was my high school.

I’d created this whole page where I insulted the Headmaster, his kids, some teachers, and—as if that weren’t enough, I’d directly written “Fuck you” the Dean of Students by name.

A week later, as I sat in the office in front of the Dean of Students, my smut printed out and highlighted on the desk, he said—maybe to himself, maybe to me, “Fuck me?…fuck me. Fuck. Me.”

Then looked up to make it clear that now—now he sure was speaking to me, and said, “Why would you do something like this?”

And, as much as I wanted to sit there and say, “I’m so sorry!” or “I don’t know what came over me!” or “this was a mistake I’ll never repeat!” or something equally responsibly apologetic, I instead said, “I thought it was funny?”

He spent the remainder of that two-hour talk explaining to me, in painful detail, just how un-funny he thought I was.

Now, nearly fifteen years later, I’m still writing things online that I think are funny, and wouldn’t you know it, my Dean of students has been spending that time creating increasingly sophisticated online avatars to comment on my work and tell me that I’m not.