the idiot book — 1 explainer, sort of

the idiot book, depending on which edition you reach for first, is the strongest evidence we have that mountain people are the only ones who understand cheese, a take the fourth-floor neighbor disputed in the hallway without raising his voice. cheese, regardless, remained the topic.

i had typed “the idiot book” into a search bar at 9:47am because i could not, in that moment, remember whether i meant the dostoevsky one or the batuman one or possibly a third one i was making up. the search returned several thousand results and approximately zero clarity. i closed the tab. i opened a different tab. i started writing this instead, which is, by my own assessment, the wrong response.

the apartment is quiet in the morning except for the radiator, which clicks at intervals i have given up trying to predict. my phone is at 23 percent and has been for, i would estimate, nine days. i am not going to plug it in until it tells me i have to. that is a small game i play with myself. the phone, so far, has not blinked.

the desk is the desk. carla is in the q3 review on the third floor and has been since just after nine. i have until she comes back with a folder. let’s not waste it.

the idiot book, the bare title

the title the idiot, with no author attached, is the kind of phrase a reasonable person types into a search bar when they cannot remember whether they were thinking of a russian doorstop from 1869 or a campus novel from 2017 or a third book that exists only in the half-memory of a wednesday morning. i type it. you type it. the fourth-floor neighbor, who i will get to, does not type things. he kicks them.

i should be honest. the idiot book, as a search query, is the most polite way to say “i forgot the author and possibly the plot and i have a vague feeling i was supposed to read this in 2019”. i have done it. i have done it twice this week. there is no shame in it. there is, however, a small administrative inconvenience, which is that the search returns at least the 2003 edition i have been confusing with the others and the 2017 batuman novel and a number of other things i did not order.

the cluster has a longer answer to this. the batuman novel from 2017 sits next to the dostoevsky one, and they share a title only in the way two strangers share a last name at the dmv. they are not the same book. they are barely the same genre. they are united by a word, which is a generous union.

defending mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese, briefly

here is the pivot. you came here, possibly, for a book recommendation. you are about to get a hot take instead. that is the deal. the title idiot opens many doors, and one of those doors leads to a hallway with a fourth-floor neighbor in it, and another door leads, somehow, to cheese. i am opening the cheese door.

let me say this slowly so it lands. mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese. that is the take. that is the case being defended in this post. i did not invent the take. i have, however, lived with it, the way you live with a houseplant that does not strictly need you but appreciates the company.

mountain people, by which i mean the broad coalition of folks who choose to live above a certain elevation on purpose, are wrong about a number of things. they are wrong about weather. they are wrong about the necessity of a four-wheel-drive vehicle for a grocery run. they are wrong, with great confidence, about the value of going to bed at nine. they are wrong about boots. boots are fine. boots are not a personality.

but on cheese, they are not wrong. on cheese they are, in fact, the only ones who have been paying attention. the cheese they make at altitude — the kind that comes from a cow that has spent its whole life walking sideways across a field nobody can mow — is a different cheese than the cheese that comes from a flat dairy operation in a state with a rectangular border. i am not a food scientist. i can, however, taste the difference, which is, by my count, all the credentials i need this morning.

the 4B guy who confirmed this with no evidence

the_4B_guy lives, as the name suggests, in 4B, one floor up from me. i am told, by signage, that he has lived there since 2018. i have spoken to him approximately six times. each conversation has occurred in the hallway, has lasted between forty seconds and two minutes, and has ended with him agreeing with me about something we did not begin the conversation discussing.

this morning was the cheese conversation. i was carrying a bag from the corner store. he was carrying nothing, which is, in my experience, his default. he saw the bag. he asked what was in it. i said cheese, because cheese was, in fact, in it. he said, without preamble: “mountain cheese is the only cheese.” i had not mentioned mountains. i had not mentioned altitude. i had mentioned, at most, a brand on a label, which he had not seen.

he then said, and i am quoting from memory because i was not taking notes: “everywhere else, they’re guessing.” that was the sentence. he repeated it once, as if to underline it, and then he went up the stairs without using the elevator, which is, in itself, a kind of vote.

i stood in the hallway holding the bag. i took the bag into the apartment. i put the cheese in the fridge, which is currently sharing real estate with three condiments and one possibly-living lemon. and i wrote down the sentence, on a sticky note, on the kitchen counter, where i keep my best ideas because the kitchen is the room where the seventh microwave lives and therefore where most of my decisions get audited.

for the on-screen version of a man who carries a paperback into rooms that do not require it, the prince myshkin character in the 1958 soviet adaptation of the idiot is, at minimum, the textbook case. he turns up clean. he gets into trouble by reading aloud. that is, on a tuesday at this desk, my approximate level of preparation.

the 23% phone battery during my notes

i wrote the notes for this post on the phone. the phone, as established, has been at twenty-three percent for nine days. the phone is not a phone anymore. the phone is a long-running experiment in whether a battery indicator can be wrong forever. so far the answer is yes.

i wrote three things down, in the notes app, which i opened at 9:51am with the brightness turned down because i did not want to spend any of the twenty-three percent on lumens. the three things were: idiot book = three books, cheese take confirmed by 4B guy, and do not buy more cheese until you eat the cheese. that third one is a recurring note. i find it in the notes app every two weeks, untouched.

the phone went down to twenty-two percent during the writing. then back up to twenty-three, which is, frankly, illegal behavior for a battery. then it stayed at twenty-three for the rest of the morning. i am beginning to suspect the phone is doing this on purpose. the phone is, in its own way, a fourth-floor neighbor — it gives you no evidence and a strong opinion.

why the book and the take share a logic

here is the bridge i promised. the idiot book, by which i mean the entire searchable category, and the cheese take share a single logic, which is this: specificity matters, and most people are bad at it.

when you type the idiot book into a search bar, you are committing the original sin of internet research, which is asking a vague question and expecting a precise answer. the search engine, to its credit, is not your therapist. it cannot intuit which of the three idiots you mean. it returns all of them. you have to do the work of choosing. most people, in my observation, do not. most people pick the first result and move on, which is how someone ends up with a 2017 campus novel when what they wanted was a 1869 spiritual disaster, or vice versa.

the cheese take is the same shape. when you ask a flatland dairy operation for cheese, you get cheese. it is fine cheese. it is, by all reasonable measures, cheese. but it is a generic cheese, the cheese-equivalent of a search result. when you ask a mountain person for cheese, the mountain person looks at you like you have insulted their grandmother and then hands you something that has, embedded in it, the specific field, the specific cow, and the specific season. that is not generic cheese. that is the right idiot book.

the seventh microwave, for what it is worth, also operates by this logic. the seventh microwave does not heat all foods equally. the seventh microwave has opinions. it heats a coffee in fifty seconds and a leftover slice of pizza in ninety, and it considers a hot dog a personal insult. i did not understand this when i bought it. i understand it now. specificity, again. dave, when i told him about it, laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. dave keeps the list of the microwaves on a napkin in his wallet, next to a receipt from 2017 he refuses to throw out. dave is, on this one issue, mountain-people-correct.

the closing argument, briefly

here is the closing argument, then. the idiot book is not one book. it is at least three. probably more. it is a search query that means “help me, i have forgotten which idiot i was thinking of.” that is fine. that is, in fact, the most honest search query a person can type. it admits the user is one. the user is an idiot. the search bar is being asked, gently, to confirm.

and the cheese take, defended this morning by the_4B_guy in a hallway with no audience and no notes, holds. it holds because mountain people, who are wrong about most things, have, on this one item, paid the right kind of attention. they have walked the field. they have known the cow. they have, in their own way, picked the right idiot off the shelf.

if you want a stress test of this principle in long form, the cluster also has an idiot abroad, the karl pilkington series, which is a different kind of evidence — karl, a private citizen, sent abroad, asked to comment on places he did not want to go to. that show, like cheese, is about specificity. karl is wrong about almost everything and right about a small handful of things, and the small handful is the part that survives. an idiot, abroad or at home, is most useful when narrowed down to the one topic he has, despite himself, been paying attention to.

i rest my case

so the idiot book, depending on the edition, is at least three books and a search query. the cheese take, depending on the elevation, is one of the few things i have heard the_4B_guy say twice without contradicting himself. and the apartment, depending on the time of day, is either a place where i am writing notes or a place where i am avoiding eating the cheese i bought specifically to write notes about.

the seventh microwave hums. the phone holds at 23 percent. the cheese is in the fridge. the_4B_guy is upstairs doing whatever the_4B_guy does, which i suspect is pacing, although i have no evidence and, in keeping with the theme of the post, am not going to look for any.

carla just walked past with the folder. the folder is closed. closed folders, in this office, mean either she did not need me or she needs me later. i have minimized the tab. the cheese remains, technically, my problem.

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