Author's Note: I suppose there is some semi-autobiographical detail to the piece below but mostly this piece is fictional, satire, and meant primarily as bleak comedy. I don't know if that makes it more or less discouraging to read that I find this piece absolutely hilarious. In any case, shout-out to Louis C.K. and Anton Chekhov for inspiring this. Mad props, bros. Heh.
Dewey at 30
It's the 20th of January and I have only regrets.
Oh, perhaps it shouldn't be this way, though. Facing 30, I have reached yet another admirable plateau in all my endeavors. My drawings, whose mediocrity so long constituted humor for all my acquaintances, now at least pass their muster in general. My music has finally started to materialize into something that they might even call brilliant in their ignorance (truthfully the music is not brilliant, merely exceedingly well-composed and well-executed). My understanding of minor seventh chords whose root falls on the second scale degree is so transcendent that I've been commissioned to write operatic arias on that transcendent understanding alone. Ah, but none of these things means anything to me! For my craftsmanship, musicality, and fastidiousness in these things is far exceeded in my prose. You see, my gift for writing is peerless in heaven and Earth. The nether world fights a chance, but what I've felt of sin has been inarticulate and hazy, and so when it comes to writing talent, I doubt the devil even has anything to offer me. My every word and sentence gently licks the contours of its every reader's soul, so artfully and precisely have I constructed it. The knife cabinet of my vocabulary has infinite dimensions and is continuous in each dimension. No one can cut a situation down to sixteen words more properly or efficiently. You can hear every rhythm of an act in the corresponding rhythm of my sentences. The clarity of my sentiments is unsurpassed; unsurpassed, that is, except by the beauty of my sentiments. No semantic stone is unturned except those stones that ought to remain unturned for reasons of propriety, taste, or simply because some answers to the problems of life are not yet held by even the finest and fluent of communicators (among which I am the crown jewel). Of course, even for the queue of these unanswered insights still awaiting proper articulation, I am the first, best, and most selective clerk. Let me take your order.
But enough of this pleasant drum circle. I would say more, but I think I've made my point. Let us then come to the wail of regrets atop the center of the circle of percussion.
Aside: The superintendent of my rented building once explained to me how certain varieties of sink faucets can leak imperceptibly because they aren't sealed properly. Every time you turn the unsealed faucet on, a small proportion of the water doesn't quite materialize in the faucet head, instead leaking through the sides and from there into the bowels of the wooden cabinet beneath the sink, slowly wearing that wood away, causing mold and eventually floods. Even as I write this, I must pause now and again to bear a slight well of tears in my eyes that never quite materializes, rotting away my heart and soul and viscera besides..
It seems like such a basic question, but what do we do everyday? I mean, sure, there's an obvious answer: we grind out work or we hazily let our leisure slip by, and ideally we live in a well-mixed concoction of the two that leaves us satisfied and grounded and well-spoken and spent. We first learn and then we mature and then we thrive in a constant pulse of action and then we age and slow and grow wise. Or so we hope. It's a simple process, it just comes about in such an irreducibly complex manner called the present moment and the instantaneous-future-becoming. The tapestry of life's unfolding has such a simple design, but try sussing it out with the eye and the head of a needle and see how simple it seems.
Ever in mind I've kept this vital fabric. But as I begin to age I realize I've lost the thread. It took years of idiotic introspection nurtured by benevolent delusion, but I watch everyone around me thrive (or at least, survive and grow and change), and I start to wonder why in God's name I took direct experience for granted to such an extent.
Aside: I studied all the right chapters and verses, I read up on all the religions. I could quote every church in America's individual catechesis seminars. I knew how everyone led their children to a life enriched by God. But despite all of this, I couldn't find God.
I studied all the theories and meta-theories of science. Definitions, proofs, and evidence and its implication. Once, on command, I fastidiously pieced together all of man's knowledge in its fractally infinite totality and figured out, for each pair or triplet of theories, what precisely the interaction between these theories was, and how far that interaction had been hitherto explored. And my special writings on these subjects earned me commendation from the foremost communicators and leading thinkers of my era.
After all my words, I don't feel any smarter. I don't say that with some sort of narcissistic entitlement: That is to say, I don't believe I ought to or deserve to feel any smarter after my journey. What I mean to say is that I don't perceive that I'm more apt to solve any practical problems except the problems that communication itself can solve, which is a surprisingly limited set. That is to say, I feel that on this Earth there is truly no finer or more studious communicator living, and, despite this, I feel that on this Earth there is no coarser or less well-traveled agent. I have a gift to communicate that transcends any other. And yet, despite this gift, I daily have to lie about how said day went when asked. Not because I am some sort of con man or grifter that must deceive by nature or a savant that must answer each question truthfully and literally. No, because I truthfully have no idea where my days go. To learning? Perhaps, but not to learning anything that would constitute my betterment, or the betterment of others. Surely I should feel smarter at least to the extent where I should feel comfortable with the things that troubled me as a younger man, or the scope of things that I am comfortable know should have increased relative to my discomfort. But alas....
Every month since I was 14 has brought with it a test of my own design. This test faithfully measures the extent of my intelligence in a systematic and comprehensive statistical way. For eight hours on the seventh of every month (coincidentally the date of my birth), I have taken a series of six tests, each designed to test several dimensions and immersions of intelligence. Verbal intelligence has always emerged as my highest test score, exceeding by margins the exacting scores of the foremost verbal prodigies of every era. In every sub-score, my own acuity at least compared against the right-most denizens of that sub-score's respective bell curve. Analogical reasoning, advanced descriptive creativity, situational distillation, pattern recognition in texts of arbitrary languages, vocabulary from four languages, verbal memory, and even a few abstract forms of glottal proprioception and oral flow that are described in esoteric linguistic journals. All of these I excel at, essentially beyond measure. My entire life I have been the only baseline for my own verbal intelligence and all others are simply part of a different sample, for all intents and purposes. Additionally, I read at a consistent, unfathomable speed; my prodigious reading only serves as the oceanic source for a vast and fresh river current, each of whose smallest tributaries has historically formed a delta of essay-length output at bare minimum.
With my level of intelligence, I wanted to build - and compulsively attempted to build - nothing short of the perfect human interface with which to communicate. I wished to become something more than ordinary through constant, ascetic discipline and solemn consideration and ultimate research. What you call "flash cards," I call the most rudimentary mnemonic device on the face of the Earth. My flash cards have eighteen dimensions, and that doesn't begin to capture the depths of my Ur-system's sophistication.
Truthfully, though, I realize today that I have robbed the world of a great genius, and as a rational person I feel the full weight of this realization in the visceral way that only a man or woman of science can understand. For you see, I am not a great genius. An unsurpassed interface perhaps: an unsurpassed prodigy. An unsurpassed literary talent. I should have been a great genius, and surely if I had just lived an ordinary life with my great intelligence in addition to my prodigious habits of observation, I would surely hold the key to many of our era's problems (and yes, despite exceeding you in one respect, I do say "our era"). I would surely have mathematical conceptions that would rival the great composers of music in their Earth-shattering scope. I would surely have an ego truly both humbled and exalted at once in that great tightrope that only the great can walk - instead of this facsimile, this husk, that masquerades as an ego but is nothing but an ever-written character modeled after some invention of Dostoevsky's. What I have, instead of an ego, is instead a veil of opulent and unreal mental vistas made verbal that writes itself so simply that it effectively becomes my character.
You see, my verbal intelligence for the first time since I began testing slipped perceptibly for two months in a row. The rest held steady but I expect similar drops over the next several months. My blessed interface - this masterpiece of God's design! - has peaked and my scope and depth and fastidiousness of communication have begun to stop beginning. And I don't know what to do, and the tears that won't fall are killing me, and all the things I didn't deign to disclose because I was busy learning how to better disclose them are starting to lock themselves up in a dark and inaccessible cupboard in my house of memories, and this cupboard will grow, steadily at first, until this cupboard engulfs the house, and in this house I will be alone, alone as I've always been, but alone without the possibility of climbing out, and God's gift-with-a-curse begins to seem more just like an ordinary curse. I have peaked.
One day I will be mute, or dead, or both. But I suppose the last words I'll be able to articulate is that I have let a great genius pass from this earth, and I didn't even need the usual push of envy or substance abuse or self-absorption or indecision. I simply made a bad decision, one born of the slightest intellectual hubris and the deepest desire for intellectual revelation, and now I will have not the right to the former nor the satisfaction of the latter.
Despite what I have done to the world, and to myself, I will henceforth bear my own idiocy nobly, and as the tears stain my basement and the water rises every day, I will not let my soul rot similarly into depths of hatred. No, instead I will learn, and hope that you, dear reader, as you witness me bear my soul, might do the same. Instead of hating this husk of an ego, I will build a house within the husk. I will atone for my intellectual over-reach with an equally excessive plunge into direct experience. I will be discomfited by my own shortage of experience and be falsely comforted by minor gains. I will find out what it means to dress well and speak kindly and I will know God before this life is up, or discover that truly I have no use of that fiction. I will love and decay day by day in the actuarial sense and in the sense that I will have pain and regret that I can never undo. But damn! if I'm not there already. But I will live. I will live. And I will turn my contacts into friends and my friends into deep wells of potential experience.
I will not be so foolish at 40 as I was at 30. I will grow wise. And if that wisdom carries the risks that lead to death, then one thing I know is that I can bear death, for it will not be in the unthinking service of a life wasted in thought alone.
FIN
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