why am i so dumb — i asked dave and he laughed for nine straight minutes

i asked dave why am i so dumb and he laughed for nine straight minutes by the bedside clock, which is also the snooze clock, which is also the only clock i trust. the good knife was in the box. the dishwasher judged us both. the apartment did not intervene.

the call was on speaker because both of my hands were busy with a pair of scissors and a bathroom mirror, which is its own evidence and we will get to it. dave was eating something. dave is always eating something. the laughter was clean, no malice, just a man enjoying a question that he himself had been wondering about for fifteen years and finally got to hear out loud.

it is 10:51am on a wednesday. carla is in a training session on the third floor — the kind where someone in a polo shirt explains what a deliverable is to a room of people who already know. i have, by an estimate i pulled out of nowhere, the rest of the morning. i can hear the dishwasher across the building’s thin wall, judging the neighbor for what i can only assume is the same set of small daily failures.

why am i so dumb, the daily questionnaire

i ask the question every morning, between the snooze and the second snooze, somewhere in the nine-minute window the bedside clock allows me. this is the most honest part of my day. nobody is watching. the airpod that still works is in my left ear, playing nothing. the airpod that doesn’t is in a drawer waiting for a partner that will never arrive.

the question is not why am i so dumb and useless, which is a different question that belongs to a different morning, which i’ve handled in a separate longtail. the question is just why am i so dumb. cleaner. shorter. more honest, in a way. dumb is a verdict you can live with. useless is a sentence.

before i answer it i should tell you the question is not actually a question. it’s an admission, dressed up as a question, so my brain can hear it without flinching. you can read more about how that whole shell game works in the cluster’s main investigation into the word, which i wrote on a different morning, in a different meeting, when carla was somewhere else and the question was, also, somewhere else.

here is the questionnaire, in the order it arrives:

one, why did i agree to that. two, why did i say it like that. three, why did i think that was a good idea. four, why did the good knife stay in the box. five, why is the dishwasher still running. and a bonus six, late, around the snooze, why am i so dumb. the bonus question is the only one that gets a real answer, which is the laugh. dave’s laugh.

dave’s answer, timed, transcribed, archived

i called dave because dave is the only person in my life who treats my questions as data instead of cries for help. he picked up on the second ring. he said “what did you do” before i said anything, which is his standard greeting and which, on this particular morning, was incorrect — i had not yet done anything, i was about to do something, and the doing was the whole point of the call.

i said: dave. why am i so dumb.

he laughed for nine straight minutes by the bedside clock, the same bedside clock that adjudicates my snooze, the same bedside clock that is the only clock back at my place i trust because the microwave’s clock has been wrong since the seventh microwave arrived and i refuse, on principle, to set it.

i transcribed the laugh because i had a notepad open and nothing better to do. the laugh has three movements. movement one: the initial bark, two seconds, surprised. movement two: a long sustained wheeze with intermittent words, mostly “why” and “am” and “you”, in no particular order. movement three: the recovery, where he tries to speak, fails, starts laughing again, and finally produces a sentence.

the sentence was: “you’re not dumb. you’re just committed.” which is the kindest thing dave has said to me in a calendar year, and i wrote it down on the same notepad, under the laugh transcription, with a small star next to it.

dave keeps a list of these moments. he calls it research. he works in insurance. there is no research in insurance. but the list exists. it has dates and everything. the entry for this morning will read: called. asked the question. nine minutes. committed.

the laugh, as a phenomenon, has a place in pop culture. it reminds me of the bench scene in Forrest Gump (1994), where forrest tells a stranger his life story and the stranger doesn’t laugh, doesn’t react, just listens, because the stranger understands that some questions are answered just by being asked out loud. dave is not that stranger. dave laughs. but the principle stands.

the diy haircut as exhibit a

the reason both of my hands were busy during the call is that i was, at that exact moment, attempting to give myself a haircut with kitchen scissors and a bathroom mirror. this is exhibit a. this is the hard evidence. this is the part of the investigation where the prosecution gets to lean back in the chair and let the defendant do the work for them.

the diy haircut began, as all diy haircuts do, with the thought “how hard can it be”. the answer to this question is always: harder than you think, and worse than you can imagine, and you will not learn this lesson on the first attempt or the second or, in my case, the seventh, which is also the number of microwaves i’ve killed, and i don’t think that’s a coincidence so much as a personality trait.

i had, before the call, already cut a section above the right ear that i can only describe as geometric. an angle that does not occur in nature. the kind of angle a child draws when they’re drawing a hill and the hill is wrong. the rest of the head was, at that point, untouched. the plan was to fix the geometric section by matching it on the left side, then matching the back, then matching the top. this is the same logic that makes you eat a second cookie because you ate the first one.

the dumb-and-dumber manifesto, the version with the jim carrey film, is itself a meditation on commitment past the point of return. the haircut is just that, applied to a head. mine.

by the way: this is the third haircut i’ve given myself this year. the first one was a fringe i didn’t ask for. the second one was a back i couldn’t see. this one is a side that won’t end. dave knows about the first two. he does not yet know about the third. he will. it’ll go on the list.

the good knife, never used, exhibit b

exhibit b sits in a box on top of the fridge. the good knife. it has been in the box since the box arrived, which was a wedding gift for a wedding i was not invited to but a gift i was apparently expected to send and then receive back when the wedding was canceled, which is its own story and not this story.

the good knife is, by every account, very good. heavy in the hand, balanced, sharpened by a man named, i’m fairly sure, Klaus, who runs a small business now, employees with payroll. i have, in the year and a half the knife has been in my apartment, used it zero times. i open the box. i look at the knife. i close the box. i put it back on the fridge. this is the ritual.

why don’t i use it, i asked dave once. dave said: because if you use it, then you have to wash it, and if you have to wash it, then you have to dry it, and if you have to dry it, then it’s just a knife. and if it’s just a knife, then what was the point of the box. dave is not a philosopher. but every now and then he says something that makes me put the airpod back in the drawer for a minute.

the good knife is exhibit b because it is the physical proof that being smart enough to recognize a good thing is not the same as being smart enough to use a good thing. that is the whole investigation, in one drawer. the chart you came here for. the chart is a knife in a box on top of a fridge.

the dishwasher take, briefly, since it has opinions

i’d like to introduce, briefly, a related theory. the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you. this is not my line, this is something a man at the bar told me once, and he had a beard and he seemed sure, and i have repeated it enough times that it is now, for our purposes, mine.

the dishwasher in my apartment has not been run in eleven days. i counted. it sits in the corner of the kitchen, full of plates from a meal i ate alone, and every time i walk past it i can feel it forming an opinion about me. the opinion is mostly correct. the opinion is the same opinion i have about myself, which is why am i so dumb, and the dishwasher is, on some level, just an externalization of the question.

this is what i mean when i say the question is the diagnosis. the apartment has objects in it that ask the question for me. the good knife. the bedside clock. the dishwasher. the geometric section above the right ear. the airpod alone in the drawer. the seventh microwave, which works fine but has the wrong time on it forever. they all ask, in their small object voices, why am i so dumb, and i pretend not to hear them, and then i call dave.

verdict — the question is rhetorical and dave knows it

so. after the questionnaire. after the laugh. after the haircut. after the knife. after the dishwasher. after the airpod. after the snooze and the second snooze and the bedside clock that adjudicates them.

here is the verdict, as i note here, written down in the same notepad as dave’s transcription, under the small star.

i am not dumb. dave knows i am not dumb. that is why he laughed for nine minutes — not at the question, but at the fact that i, of all people, was the one asking it, when the asking is itself the proof that the answer is no. dumb people don’t ask. dumb people commit. i, in dave’s analysis, am committed, which is the polite version of the word, and which i will be putting on a coffee mug at some point this year, probably as a gift to myself, probably from the same site that sold me the good knife.

the question is rhetorical. dave knows it. the dishwasher knows it. the bedside clock knows it. the apartment, in its own quiet way, has known it for years. the only person who didn’t know it was me, and now, having written the investigation, i sort of do.

the haircut, by the way, is now uniformly geometric on both sides. it looks intentional, in a certain light, if you squint, if the light is bad. i am, on the strength of this, going to call it a style. the style is called committed.

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