Dad would often wake me and my little brother up at 5:15 am, still drunk from the night before, to go to posting practice. I was 7 years old and shivering because we lived in North Dakota and my dad hated keeping the heat on at night. My routine was to stand on top of the central air vents, after he would mercifully turn the heat back on, in my long johns while eating a heaping bowl of Frosted Flakes.

At 5:40 am he would direct me to the basement where our computers were located. I say computers but it was more like a server farm. We were posters. My dad had dreams of us going pro so he made sure we had the best equipment and he bribed the local Poster Association to get us in to Triple A Posting League. After a short warm up we would begin our serious posting at 6 am. Obviously we would check Something Awful for the latest news from the posting trenches but my favorite place to go ham was the news message boards. I’d be posting about how good Dick Cheney’s shot is one second and quickly pivot to how lame Al Gore was for believing in things.

But this was my downfall. This is why I was never destined for the pros. My beliefs weren’t sincere. I was nothing more than a troll. I was never able to capture the sickness of the world in a pithy and cynical yet humorous quip. That’s what separates the pros from the amateurs in Posting.