David Smith on David Smiths

I fucking hate David Smiths. As a David Smith, I get to say that. There are too many of us out there. We’re everywhere.

Somehow I made it to eight years old before I met my first one. He was in the classroom next door. Another kid named Dave told me about him. I was vaguely intrigued, but I told Dave, “So what?”

Word traveled fast. David Smith took my "so what" as a slight. The Dave I knew told me so. He said David Smith wanted to fight me.

When I told my dad, he said, “You can’t go around fighting all the David Smiths.”

Relieved, I asked why not.

“’Cause there are too many!”

It sounds obvious now. But this was the first time it had ever crossed my mind. Hundreds of David Smiths. A thousand, maybe.

Fine. So I wasn't the only David Smith in my school. But then I found out I wasn't even the only David Smith in the family. Even my dad, Rick, is a David Smith: he just goes by his middle name. When he told me this, I assumed it was because there were thousands of guys out there trying to fight him. Trying to fight us. A million David Smiths that want the name to themselves. One, two, maybe even more, in every school across America.

I fucking hate David Smiths. New ones pop up on Google almost every year, outdoing me as a human being. David Smith is a renowned steel sculptor. David Smith is an iOS developer. There are tons of David Smith lawyers and accountants. The more casual “Daves” are no better. Dave Smith is a Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram dealer in the Northwest. Dave Smith is a standup comic in New York. Dave Smith is an engineer who invented a synthesizer and is the “father of MIDI.” I don’t even know what MIDI is. Nor am I a father. Who wants to have kids with a David Smith when all he’s going to do is try and name them David Smith? No one wants to even date a David Smith. They probably already dated one.

It doesn’t make it better to add a letter in between your David and your Smith. David A. Smith: there’s another thousand of those alone. A designer, a computer scientist, a fucking glass artist. And lawyers, so many lawyers. David B. Smith. More lawyers. More artists. Lord have mercy on David B. Smith, self-described as a fabric-based photo sculpture artist. Presumably desperate to distinguish himself from Dave Smith the steel sculpturist, his personal website URL has the word “the” before his name. As if adding “the,” as in “theee David Smith,” is going to convince anyone that there’s only one, and that it’s you.

I’m a David C. Smith, if it matters, but it doesn’t, because David C. Smith is an author who’s been churning out books since before I was alive. There’s no topping that. The game was rigged; there’s no point trying to contend. As for the other C’s, it just devolves into absurdity from there. The next one on Google is David C. Smith, a Bird and Bird Professor of History. If that’s a thing, what kind of thing is that? The third item on Google is the most absurd, but the most honest: “Top 25 David C. Smith profiles | LinkedIn.” Basically, LinkedIn is saying, Oh, were you looking for a David C. Smith? Well, get in line. We have a shitload of them. We could have sent Google our David C’s individually, but instead we made this page and dumped them all in. What, you don’t want to look at a page of multiple David C’s? Well, you Googled David C. Smith, you must have been looking for many people at once. What was that? You were looking for one person? Well, we don’t have one, we have thousands! We don’t differentiate between them. Why would we? Their parents didn’t care about them enough to make distinctions, why should we? We dumped them in a mass grave. Come on over and pick at the bones! What was that? You didn’t find your David C. Smith here? Well, fuck, we cut it off at 25. Isn’t that plenty? Certainly in a list 25 people long, you’d find a better David C. than the one you were looking for. Who else but a loser David C. himself would try and go deeper down the list than that? No one else cares about all these low ranking David C’s. They’re nobody!

And you thought nobodies were the nameless masses. But it’s much worse. Everyone knows I’m nobody from the minute you hear my name. Just another David Smith here. David Smith: one in a million, not in the good way. We’re worthless, but without any anonymity to hide behind. Trying to stave off the inevitable with a middle initial feels pathetic, like you really believe one letter is going to make you seem special. I tried for a while, on old resumes. But sticking the “C” in there just serves up connotations of “C” grades on transcripts, which I have plenty of and would rather not draw attention to. Now I just leave it off. Fuck it.

I’m a C-grade David Smith, with or without the C. Fight me.