am i dumb — a six step diagnostic i ran on myself

am i dumb is a six step diagnostic i ran on myself between aisles four and seven. the doctor would not return my call. the IKEA shelf would not return itself to upright. plants are the silent landlords. the good knife stayed in its box. results pending, possibly forever, possibly tomorrow.

writing this from the desk while carla is upstairs in the all-hands on the third floor, which means there is, give or take, the rest of the morning before someone notices i am writing instead of reconciling. the diagnostic was cheaper than a doctor and longer than i expected. three words. no adjectives. just the question, plain. nothing dressed up. nothing softened.

the brothers and cousins of this question already exist on this site, with their so and their useless and their and stupid, and they have done good work. i am not here to repeat them. i am here for the stripped version. the question with the lights off. the one you ask the bathroom mirror at 9-min snooze, before coffee, before excuses. there are six steps. you can do them at home. you should not.

1. am i dumb, the screening protocol

the screening protocol comes first because everything else is downstream of it. you have to ask the question without padding. no so. no useless. no compared to whom. just the three words. am i dumb. say it out loud in your kitchen, into the apartment, and notice if anything in the room flinches. nothing did. plants are the silent landlords and they collect rent in oxygen, not opinions.

this is the cluster pillar territory and it is well covered in the long form on what it actually means to be a complete map of dumb across every situation, which is the document the rest of these posts orbit. the pillar handles definitions. this post handles the protocol. the protocol is steps. the steps are below.

i timed myself asking the question. eighteen seconds, including the second take where i lowered my voice because the wall is thin and the man in 4B has opinions. the eighteen seconds did not produce an answer. they produced a feeling. the feeling was, broadly, maybe.

2. step one, am i dumb, the supermarket trip self-administered

the first real test is the supermarket. you go in for one thing. you write the one thing on your hand. you walk out with seven things, and the one thing is not among them. this is not a metaphor. this is a logged event, repeatable, reproducible, with a paper receipt as evidence.

my one thing was olive oil. i wrote OIL on the back of my left hand. i came home with a six-pack of seltzer in a flavor labeled cucumber whisper, two yogurts in expired-by-tuesday clearance, a candle that smells like a church basement, a frying pan i did not need (the second), a bag of pre-cut onions that cost more than whole onions for reasons that are, i’m fairly sure, written about in a serious magazine, and a magazine in a language i do not speak.

no oil. the OIL on my hand had smudged into OII, which i now understand was the universe pre-warning me. i am keeping the receipt as exhibit A. it lives in the receipt pile next to the unopened mail pile. neither pile is shrinking.

ONE THING. WRITTEN ON THE HAND. STILL. NO. OIL.

3. step two, am i dumb, the doctor visit i scheduled then forgot

the doctor visit was step two because if step one is conclusive — and it was — you escalate to a professional. i called the doctor’s office on a tuesday. they said wednesday at 10. i wrote it on a post-it. i put the post-it on the fridge. i moved it to the laptop on wednesday morning. then i moved it again, to the desk, where it joined approximately eleven other post-its, all of them important, none of them legible.

i missed the appointment. the receptionist called. she did not say where were you, she said we noted you didn’t make it, which is a more devastating phrasing, and she is, i suspect, a trained surgeon of a sentence. i rescheduled. for friday. i forgot friday too. there is a $40 missed-appointment fee. there are now two fees. the doctor would not return my call after that, which is fair, because i was the one who would not return his.

the question i wanted to ask the doctor was am i dumb. the question i would have actually asked is my knee clicks, is that fine. i don’t know which is worse. i’d like to think the second one. but i’m not, you know, sure.

4. step three, am i dumb, the ikea attempt, currently leaning

step three is structural. you buy a piece of flat-packed furniture. you assemble it. you measure it against plumb. you note the angle of its lean.

my shelf is at thirteen degrees. i measured. i used a phone app called LEVEL that i downloaded for this. the shelf has six dowels and i have, in my reckoning, put four of them in. there are two dowels left in the bag and, alarmingly, one extra screw, which means somewhere inside the shelf is a hole that wants a screw and is not getting one. this is, i would argue, the central condition of adult life.

the instructions are pictograms. there are no words. the people in the pictograms are smiling. nobody in real assembly has ever smiled. i looked it up — not really, more like i thought about looking it up — and i’m fairly sure the smiling pictogram people are paid more than the actual builders, which tracks.

this whole exercise is a cousin to the international research the man on the bus did, which you can see in the case for ricky gervais’s accidental philosopher, where the protagonist tries to learn things abroad and ends up learning the inside of his own head. the parallel is generous to me. i have not left the apartment. the shelf has not left the floor. we are, in our way, both abroad.

5. step four through six, am i dumb, the good knife, untouched

step four is the good knife. i bought a good knife in 2022 in a fit of optimism. it is a high-carbon-something with a wooden handle. it lives in its original box, in its original wrap, on the top shelf of the cabinet behind the cereal i don’t eat. it has not cut a single thing. i open the box once a year, look at the knife, feel a small wave of not today, close the box. the knife is, at this point, more of a museum piece than a tool.

step five is the plant audit. i counted. there are four plants. two are alive. one is a question. one is, charitably, “resting.” plants are silent landlords — they don’t ask for the rent, they just slowly remove the air from the room until you notice. i over-watered the question one. i under-watered the alive ones. the resting one i have stopped looking at because the looking, i suspect, accelerates the resting.

step six is the verdict, but the verdict gets its own h2 because verdicts are formal and i’d like to be formal about exactly one thing in this post. before we get there: the seventh microwave is on the counter, beeping, on a setting i did not select. i’d consult the harry and lloyd reference manual on what to do, but they were optimists too, and look how that went.

6. verdict, the diagnostic is conclusive, allegedly

the verdict is, formally, that the diagnostic is conclusive only in the sense that it does not conclude. that is also, technically, what the bench-bound philosopher with the chocolates said, in his way: life is a box of decisions, and you don’t know what’s in any of them until you commit, and by then the box is empty and you’ve eaten the wrappers.

so. am i dumb. probably not. probably tired. probably running a six step diagnostic instead of a quarterly report, which is, in itself, a kind of answer. the supermarket trip is logged. the doctor will not call back. the shelf leans. the good knife sits. the plants pay rent in oxygen. the verdict is pending, which is the only honest verdict any human has ever filed.

three words. no adjectives. asked, answered, filed.

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