dum dumb and dumber — a working hierarchy of myself

dum, dumb, and dumber are not three movies. they are a hierarchy of myself across one tuesday. the IKEA box on the floor is not a metaphor. it is dum. the half-built version on the wall is dumb. the version trying to read the manual upside down is dumber.

the desk, 1:42pm, a wednesday. i ate lunch at this same desk, which is, technically, against three different policies. carla is the all in hands on the floor i third have generously until the next thing on the calendar, which is something with no agenda.

the IKEA box has been on the floor of the apartment for eleven days. that is the dum stage. eleven days is, by IKEA standards, the median. by my standards, it is a personal best in the wrong direction. the box contains a bookcase. the bookcase, technically, has a name. the name is, i think, billy or hemnes or something with a vowel that does not appear in english. i will not look it up. that, in itself, is a small dum decision, the foundation of the hierarchy i am about to lay out.

dum dumb and dumber: a working three-tier hierarchy of self-assessment that maps onto any tuesday spent assembling, half-assembling, or actively misreading instructions for a piece of flatpack furniture. dum is the unopened state. dumb is the half-built state. dumber is the active misreading state. the three together describe one continuous tuesday in which a single human being progressed, technically, downward.

DUM. DUMB. DUMBER. ALL ME. ALL TUESDAY.

that is the headline. people search for the phrase dum dumb and dumber and expect to find a discussion of three movies — sometimes called a franchise by the kind of people who use that word about furniture as well. there is, in fact, a franchise. you can read about it in a moment. the more useful version of the phrase is the one i’m using now. it is a hierarchy. it is, in my apartment, a calendar.

tier one — dum, the unopened state

let me lay out the hierarchy from the bottom, where the box has been sitting for eleven days and counting. the dum stage, in my private system, is when the object is in your apartment but not in your life. the bookcase is in the apartment. the bookcase is not yet a bookcase. the bookcase is, currently, a long flat box with a small white sticker on the side that lists, in five languages, the things i am about to do wrong.

the dum stage has its own mini-economy. you walk past the box. you tell yourself tomorrow. tomorrow is the lie that runs the entire stage. by the eleventh day, tomorrow is, technically, also a long flat box. you cannot open tomorrow either. they are stacked in your hallway. you can only walk past them. nobody has, in the eleven days since the bookcase arrived, mentioned it. that is the dum stage’s quietest feature: the social contract holds. people do not mention the box. you do not mention the box. the box, technically, is the only honest party.

for the longer treatment of what dumb means as a definitional matter and why i hold the position that it is gentler than its reputation suggests, see the i wrote pillar on the topic from this same the present chair post inherits argument and that applies it to a piece of pressboard.

tier two — dumb, the half-built state

on day twelve, in a fit of optimism that i will, in retrospect, classify as dumb-adjacent, i opened the box. there were, by my count, fourteen pieces of wood, six bags of small metal items, one large plastic bag of dowels, and two booklets, one of which was, somehow, the right manual and the other of which was, somehow, the manual for a different bookcase entirely. the second manual had a name with a different vowel.

i picked the wrong one first. that, i would argue, was already the second tier — the dumb tier — but i did not know it yet. tier transitions, in this hierarchy, are usually invisible at the time and obvious in retrospect. the dumb tier is the half-built tier. the bookcase, after three hours, was a structure that looked, from one angle, like a bookcase. from the other angle, it looked like a fence with ambition. from above, it looked like the kind of thing a person at a party would describe as “a metaphor”. it is not a metaphor. it is a fence with ambition. those are two different things.

this is also where stefan would weigh in, except stefan is not here. stefan is friend of the a friend who, at parties, explains things using both hands a glass and of red stefan would, with confidence, tell me that flatpack is a dialogue between user and designer, that the half-built state is the generative state, that the bookcase, in a sense, knows what it wants to be. stefan would also, before the night was out, tell me that wine has notes of forest floor. stefan can be right one and a half times per evening. on the bookcase point, this evening, half a point.

tier three — dumber, the active misreading state

the third tier, the dumber tier, was when i flipped the manual upside down to see if it would help. i would like to be clear, for the record, that i did this on purpose. it was an experiment. the experiment was: does the manual, read backwards, contain different instructions. the answer, after eight minutes of squinting, was: technically, yes — they are the wrong instructions, but they are different. that is the dumber tier. the dumber tier is when you produce new wrong information from old wrong information by changing the orientation of the page.

i pursued the wrong instructions for about twenty minutes before i realised what i was doing, which is, in itself, a sub-tier worth naming. dumber-adjacent is when you know what you are doing and continue. that is the tier where dad’s old line — “a man learns more from one mistake he names than from twelve he forgives” — kicks in, except dad is, in this post, a quote at a barbecue, not a person in the room. dad would have stood next to the bookcase and said the line. i would have nodded. i would still, probably, have flipped the manual.

the cultural canon, briefly handled, since i’m using its name

the canonical text, of course, is the 1994 film about two protagonists who do not know which of them is which, which i have, technically, watched seven times since 1998 and continue to find new arguments inside. the title is the manifesto. the title says, in three words and one conjunction, what i am taking eight hundred to say in this post. the title says: both at once, equally, all the time, as a feature.

for the longer treatment of that title and what it does as a piece of cultural shorthand, see my standalone notes on the phrase. the present post is, technically, the unopened-box prequel to that one — the third tier nobody talks about, glued onto the front. the franchise, in cultural terms, did, in fact, expand horizontally over time, with sequels, and a prequel, and a small period of streaming-platform availability, which i will, in a separate post, complain about. for the wider cultural-tourism-by-character family, the closest sibling i can recommend is the long-running case for staying home, written from the same desk i’m at now. that piece argues that travel is mostly a way to relocate your existing dumbness to a different time zone. the same is true, structurally, of flatpack furniture: the bookcase is, in a sense, a small holiday for a part of the apartment that, until now, was empty.

where the hierarchy ends, when the bookcase is, eventually, finished

i would like to tell you that, by next tuesday, the bookcase will be assembled, level, full of books, and proudly leaning against the wall like a bookcase from a magazine. i would like to. i will not. by next tuesday, in all likelihood, the bookcase will be a bookcase from one angle, a fence with ambition from another, and, viewed from the floor, the kind of half-finished structure that allows a person to keep saying, on a sunday call, “i’m working on it”. mom hears that line. mom lets the pause sit. mom knew. mothers know it their power is it cannot be defeated.

i am, in fact, comfortable with this. the hierarchy is not, in my reading, a problem to be solved. the hierarchy is a small private joke that lets me classify any tuesday into one of three categories. on a dum day, i am gentle with myself. on a dumb day, i am amused with myself. on a dumber day, i am, at minimum, productive enough to be writing about it from a desk. the hierarchy makes the week, in its way, navigable.

verdict — the bookcase is the test, the test is ongoing