foolhardy — 5 things i did without a plan and survived

foolhardy is a quality, not an insult. i walked hank, briefly, without a leash. hank lives in 1B. hank is not my dog. the 4B guy watched. a foolhardy act, witnessed, becomes a story. an unwitnessed one, by my taxonomy, becomes a private medal.

11:23 on a thursday, parked at the workstation. the boss is in a vendor onboarding session in the conference room with no windows, complimentary fruit nobody touches. the elevator is not, today, a place i would like to revisit. the next forty minutes are mine to spend on a word i did not ask to embody.

so. foolhardy. nine letters that, in a properly run dictionary, would carry a warning label and a shrug. the word is not, in spirit, an insult. it is a description — a person who acts without the small interior hesitation that keeps most people inside the apartment on a weekday morning. i would like to defend the word, in five short headings, before the vendor finishes the dashboard nobody has opened since february.

foolhardy: foolhardy means recklessly bold — acting without the cautious pause most people use to keep small disasters small. the word is older than its current insult-tone, and its truer reading is closer to brave-without-a-plan than to stupid. i walked a dog that is not mine, briefly, off-leash. that is foolhardy in one sentence.

FOOLHARDY. IS BRAVE. WITH A WORSE PRESS TEAM.

1. foolhardy, the dictionary version

the dictionary gives foolhardy the small dignity of two parents — fool, the older noun, and hardy, the older adjective. hardy is the part the dictionary likes: robustness, weather-resistance, a small mountain plant that survives a winter. fool, on the same shelf, is treated as a costume — a man in patchwork who, by trade, said the things the king refused to hear. you can read the older end of that costume in the long, polite tradition of the licensed truth-teller in patchwork; it is the room foolhardy walked out of with the door still open.

the compound is, on paper, brave plus willing-to-name-the-thing. the modern reading lost the dignity. now foolhardy means a man who attempts something without first consulting a man who would have stopped him. the older reading is what i prefer: brave-and-then-deal-with-it. not the same instruction as be reckless.

2. foolhardy, my version, with examples

my version of foolhardy is narrower. it is not the version where a man jumps off a roof. it is the version where a man, at the corner bar named the corner because the owner ran out of names, orders a third drink on a weeknight because tomorrow has not sent its invoice. foolhardy is doing the small braver thing on a regular morning. not the cliff. the kitchen.

i’m aware this is the kind of definition a man writes when he has, in six weeks, done four foolhardy things and survived three. the survival rate is the only data i trust on the subject.

3. hank from 1b, the leash incident, brief

hank is the dog from apartment 1B. hank belongs, in the legal sense, to the lady from 1B who travels too much. she has been gone since sunday and she left a small folded note under my door, in the polite cursive of a person who has rehearsed the request, asking whether i would mind walking hank for the morning. i would. i did. i did not protest.

hank is a medium dog with a temperament best described as cheerful incompetence. the harness slipped, somewhere between the elevator and the lobby door, in the kind of small mechanical betrayal i recognize from every appliance in the apartment. for thirty-eight seconds — i counted — hank was attached to me only by a hand on the harness strap and a strong mutual understanding that we had both, individually, decided not to escalate. we walked, briefly, leashless, on the sidewalk. hank sniffed a hedge. hank did not run. in “marley & me”, the 2008 movie about a dog with a worse press team than mine, this is the scene that goes wrong. mine did not.

4. the 4b guy witnessed it from the elevator

the_4b_guy — i have never learned his name, he has never offered — was in the elevator when the doors opened in the lobby and i was three feet outside with hank, off-leash, in a posture i would describe as improvised dignity. he held the door. he looked at me. he looked at hank. he said, in the dry voice of a man who has been observing the building for years and grading us individually, “is that your dog?”. i said, “no.”. he said, “is that your leash?”. i said, “yes, technically.”. he closed the elevator door from the inside. that was the entire transaction.

this is the foolhardy event made structural. the act became a story the moment the 4B guy saw it. an unwitnessed leashless walk is a private medal. a witnessed one becomes a small piece of cooperative-board folklore that the 4B guy now owns, untaxed. the entry is permanent. the entry is, by every reading, accurate.

the deeper point is the witness economy. the slow, polite practice of telling someone the thing they saw did not happen requires the absence of a witness, or a witness who can be talked out of his own eyes. gaslighting, in plain language, needs a vacant lobby and a credulous audience. the 4B guy cannot be talked out of his eyes. the foolhardy act, performed in his presence, is now a fact. nothing burned down. hank ate a leaf. the harness was reattached on the second try.

5. the air fryer i used once was, technically, foolhardy of me

the second piece of evidence is the air fryer. it sits on the counter to the left of the seventh microwave — and this is the count, the count is canonical, the count goes seven. the air fryer arrived in the box and stayed in the box for fourteen months. i opened the box on a saturday in 2023 and used the air fryer one time. the result was a tray of frozen potatoes that emerged, by every measurable standard, edible.

using the air fryer was, by the household reading, foolhardy. not because the air fryer was dangerous. because i had, in advance, agreed with myself that this kitchen does not adopt new appliances. seven microwaves have lived here. one has survived. the air fryer was a foreign body. the air fryer is now back in the box. the box is on top of the cabinet.

i hold HT29 on a related question. a pension is a faith-based retirement system. the air fryer was, for fourteen months, a faith-based countertop appliance — i believed, on the day it arrived, that a future version of me would use it weekly, and i paid that version, in cabinet space, a small annual salary. the pension is a cousin of the long-running paid newsletter that promises to do the math for the man who would rather not. both are arrangements with a future self who may or may not show up. mine did, once, for potatoes.

6. verdict, foolhardy is just brave with a worse press team

so. the verdict, before the vendor finishes the dashboard tour upstairs.

foolhardy is a description that lost a fight with its own marketing. the word means brave-without-a-plan. the modern ear hears stupid-without-a-plan. those are different sentences. the difference is whether the planner you skipped consulting is a planner you should trust. on small matters — the dog, the air fryer, the third drink at the corner bar — the planner is a man in your head who has not been right since 2017. ignoring him is an upgrade.

i would, between the two costumes, pick foolhardy over careful four mornings of five. a longer audio version of all this lives in the audio companion to the order in patchwork, the one that fills a forty-minute commute. somebody has already written the version of this argument where the bag-holder is the guy at the end of the chain who buys what nobody else will. that one is a financial post. mine is a dog post. the structure is the same.

the lady from 1B comes back on saturday. hank is, at the moment, asleep on a rug i do not own. the harness hangs on the hook by the door with a note from me, in worse handwriting than the one she left, that says walked twice. ate one leaf. behaved. the 4B guy says hello. the 4B guy did not say hello. the 4B guy will, by my reading, never say hello. the note is a small foolhardy act. i defend it.

11:54, the vendor walkthrough still allegedly upstairs, the seventh microwave humming for no reason, a leash on the desk i should have returned. the post is done. the harness goes back at six.

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