as dumb as — a list of comparisons applied to me
as dumb as a sack of microwaved forks. as dumb as the night of the seventh, which is a date and a hot take and a sentence i refuse to finish. similes pile up around me like laundry. mondays are the worst day to count them, which is why i count them on mondays.
9:47am, friday. drafted from a chair the company assigns to a person who is, on the org chart, supposed to be approving a vendor onboarding deck the new hire emailed at 6am. the deck remains unapproved. the doc on the second monitor says “comparisons (working set)” and has, as of the kettle’s last gurgle, fourteen lines.
so. as dumb as. the phrase is a hinge. it is the part of a sentence that opens a door between you and a noun, then walks you through. a doorknob. a sack of hammers. a box of hair. the noun is the punchline, the hinge is the work. people use the hinge for years without noticing it. i noticed it last november and have been collecting hinges in a doc since.
as dumb as is an idiomatic frame people use to describe a person or a decision by pairing it with a noun chosen for absurd effect. the phrase is a hinge — the simile is the punchline. when applied to oneself it lands gentle. when applied to others it lands rude. the noun does the heavy lifting.
A FORK. ON A FRIDAY. ASKS NO ONE.
1. as dumb as, the working set of similes i keep on a doc
the doc has rules. each line must compare me to a noun that is, on its own, blameless. the kettle. the broom. the back of a spoon. the noun is innocent. i am the verb. the simile holds the relationship together long enough for me to read it without flinching. for the longer treatment of what dumb actually is and why it sits, on the kindness ladder, gentler than people pretend, see the pillar i wrote at this same desk a few fridays back. this post is a small service road off that pillar.
i’ll quote four current entries verbatim. “a man waiting for an alarm that has, by minute six, given up.” “a fork who has been to the seventh microwave and still expects coffee.” “a person who buys a third can opener because the second one is, demonstrably, in the dishwasher.” “a tenant who folds the laundry on the sofa and then sleeps under it because moving the laundry is, on a friday, more friction than it is worth.” the doc will reach two hundred entries by christmas. it cannot be edited. it is, in fact, a smaller wing of the kitchen-counter diary i keep for this exact purpose, only with a stricter grammar.
2. as dumb as a snooze that wins nine times in a row
the cleanest example in the doc lives at line six. a snooze that wins nine times. i wrote it after the morning the alarm and i agreed, somewhere around round five, to disagree silently. the alarm stopped sounding. i continued snoozing. eighty-one minutes passed. the bus left. the sun was generous. nobody intervened.
the simile works because the snooze button is a tiny piece of plastic and i am a person with a job. the comparison is unflattering, by design. grammar makes it survivable. the hinge protects the speaker from the verdict. that is the whole trick.
the 9-minute snooze interval is a piece of engineering nobody has ever explained to me. some appliance designer, in a meeting i wish i had been in, decided that nine minutes was the right amount of additional sleep a human should be granted before being forced to face a friday. that designer was, by my reading, gentle. that designer was also operating from a comparison frame i recognise. the speaker is me.
3. as dumb as the seventh microwave, briefly
the seventh microwave gave me my favourite line in the working set. the night of the seventh. the night in question — the date redacted to spare the appliance the embarrassment of being timestamped — involved a piece of lasagne, sparky the fork, and a ninety-second instinct that ended at eleven seconds with a small light show.
sparky was, until that night, a normal fork in a normal drawer. the seventh microwave wrote a black mark down one tine that, depending on the kitchen light, looks like a thin moustache. sparky lives on the counter most evenings now. sparky earned the upgrade.
i note, for the record, that comparing a person to the seventh microwave is a thing the appliance would resent if it were still around. it is not. it was retired with honors and a small handwritten note i taped to the bin. the note read, in pencil, “thank you for the lasagne, you were not warned about the fork, we’ll do better.” we have not done better. we have only done seventh, which is to say, eighth is on backorder.
4. as dumb as believing mondays are bad, which they are not
the comparisons are not always self-applied. occasionally the doc records a position i hold against the public. one entry, line eleven, reads believing mondays are bad. i hold that line carefully because it is, in shape, a hot take dressed as a simile.
the take, for the record, is one i mailed to dave at 11pm on a sunday last march and which he has not forgiven me for. mondays are objectively better than fridays. i hold this position from this same chair, on a different friday, which is, i admit, a small irony.
here is the case. friday is a building exhaling at thirty per cent capacity, the heating already turned down, the meetings scheduled by people who knew nobody would show. monday is a building waking up — coffee, intent, the elevator full of people who, briefly, mean it. monday is a project. friday is a closing tab. i recall reading, in a publication i closed during a tab cleanup last april, that the most productive day of the average week is a tuesday and the second most productive is a monday and the least productive is the day i am writing this. the publication had a paywall, a banner ad, and a takeaway i wrote on a coaster from the corner.
i’ll let dave argue it.
the pop-culture anchor for this kind of fixed-day mythology is the 2008 amc series breaking bad, whose entire moral architecture begins on a wednesday. the show makes, in passing, the case that days of the week are arbitrary frames the writer chooses to dramatise the protagonist’s worst decisions. mondays would have served the same plot. tuesdays would have, frankly, served it better.
5. why the comparisons land softer when self-applied
the entire engine of the phrase runs on the speaker’s relationship to the noun. when i say a snooze, i am the snooze. when a stranger says it about me, the stranger is the snooze. the noun is the same. the gravity changes.
self-application earns the speaker a small amnesty. it is the linguistic equivalent of opening the bad mail in front of the person who delivered it. the act of being the first to say it removes the worst of the sting. mom does this in seconds — she calls and asks how i am and answers her own question with a noun before i have caught up. i had not given her a haircut. she had inferred the haircut. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated.
self-applied similes also shrink. the more the simile is used on yourself, the smaller it gets, until eventually it is just a word at the end of a sentence about cereal. cereal is soup with rules and i am, frankly, dumb about the rules. the noun has, after enough repetition, dissolved into the sentence and become its punctuation. for the related entry on how this kind of self-aimed simile is the same engine as the questions you save up to ask friends at the bar, see the entry i wrote on the topic two weeks ago at this same desk.
6. verdict, the simile is the punctuation
so here is where this lands.
as dumb as is a hinge that swings between the speaker and a noun, and the noun is the punchline, and the speaker is the comma. when you say it about yourself, the comma is gentle. when you say it about somebody else, the comma turns into a colon and the colon is rude. the noun does not change. the punctuation does. the punctuation is the entire morality of the phrase.
the working set on my desk will keep growing. some lines will retire. some will be moved to the longer set of dumb trivia questions i am collecting in a separate doc with a different naming convention, which is the appendix the working set drains into when a comparison stops being domestic and starts being a quiz. the kitchen, by my read, keeps the only honest copy.
the vendor onboarding deck is still unapproved on the second monitor. the kettle has cooled. the doc has, as of the last paragraph, sixteen lines instead of fourteen. two more similes earned in the writing. that is, on a friday, a result.
i’m closing the laptop and walking the deck approval to the printer because doing it on screen would have been, by my own grammar, the seventeenth line of the doc. some lines you have to refuse to write, even when they fit.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
currently the comma in his own sentence, on a friday with two cold coffees and a deck that won’t approve itself
P.S. the working-set doc has now, by accident, a section called “retired similes” that contains exactly one entry — a man waiting for an alarm. i retired it because it had become true twice in one week, which is the rule for retirement.
