His mother’s pregnancy having been dismissed as fake news, Dave Smith’s birth met with a mixture of curiosity and consternation. Unperturbed, he embarked upon a childhood filled with learning opportunities. Mostly, he learned that the term childhood trauma is ridiculously redundant. Don’t tell his mother.

Life was an adventure. He enjoyed his time locked in a cellar, occasionally fed store-brand tomato soup and raw carrots. Killing sewer rats provided both intellectual stimulation and exercise. Looking for wider horizons and hoping to score some really fresh calamari, he travelled in time to ancient Ilium, to about the day when Helen was having a few hundred ships launched in her direction. He chose the wrong side in a rather large war, being fond of underdogs, and, when they sacked Troy, was subsequently buried alive by a lot of happily drunk Greeks. In the nineteenth century, Heinrich Schliemann was considerably more surprised to discover him than anything else turned up by his trowel and, having no value on the antiquity market of the time, Dave Smith was subsequently discarded as another non-culturally-specific anachronism.  

Undaunted, he learned to support himself by washing dishes and, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, performing street theatre for German tourists. A victim of his own success, he was kidnapped by a rival interpretive dance troupe, bound and gagged, and secreted aboard a  passing dhow.  Upon his discovery by the crew, he was thrown overboard and remained on the bottom of the Mediterranean until 1967, when Eric von Daniken found him and identified him as definitive evidence of alien extraterrestrial involvement with humanity’s distant past.  

Between then and now is a blur of misinformation, disinformation, and religious dogma. Further performance art was disguised as a teaching career, which took up a lot of time but not too much for marriage, two children, and a loud, anxiety-riddled beagle.

Mid-morning, when all other dogs are having a well-deserved nap, you can find him sneaking around his neighbourhood in Ottawa, running from all other dog walkers as if they were zombies and his the last uneaten brain in town.

He spends much of the rest of the day at home, hammering away on his wireless keyboard, seasonally shivering and sweltering in a poorly insulated sunroom.

Dave Smith is not a clever pseudonym