dumb dumb dumber — 3 syllables, 1 autobiography

i opened the cardboard sleeve on saturday morning and found, in marker, a small misspelling of my name with an extra letter. an accidental rebrand. idiomm, three beats, exactly the shape of the week i had just survived. somewhere under my couch, a yoga mat sleeps on top of another yoga mat sleeps on top of a fern who stopped breathing in october.

writing from the desk, monday, 11:34am, while the floor below runs a procurement onboarding nobody booked me for. the radiator is humming a note half a step flat. nobody has slacked me in twenty-six minutes, which, in this building, counts as the morning being on my side.

so. dumb dumb dumber is the rhythm of my week, written in three beats by a man at a coffee shop counter who did not know he was diagnosing me. he asked for a name, i said mine, he wrote it with an extra letter. when i got home and stuck the cup on a coaster, i looked at the spelling and thought: yes. the cup got it right where the dmv has been, technically, lying about me for nine years.

dumb dumb dumber: a three-beat rhythm that describes a week in which the same misstep escalates one rung. dumb is monday. dumb again is wednesday. dumber, by friday, is the same posture with a paper trail. it is the cadence of small mistakes that refuse to recant, and by saturday it sounds like the chant of a real life.

DUMB. DUMB. DUMBER. ONE PER DAY, MINIMUM.

before this gets away from me — for the central word in slower motion, see the pillar on why dumb is a defensible position rather than an insult, written from approximately this same chair on a different day. the present post borrows that argument, splits it into three syllables, and pins each one to a small piece of evidence from the apartment.

1. dumb dumb dumber, the rhythm of my week

the cadence is not metaphor. i count it. monday i set the alarm for 6:14am and tapped snooze nine times in a row, a 9-minute snooze stretched into a tenth tap that, by minute three, was no longer ringing. the alarm has, in some structural sense, given up before the week begins. that is dumb. one beat.

wednesday i tried to fix the alarm by setting two alarms, ten minutes apart, on the theory that the second one would treat me as an emergency. the second alarm rang from a watch on the dresser and i, in deep sleep, tapped snooze on my phone — which had no alarm running — for nine straight minutes. dumb again, with strategy. two beats.

friday i sat up at 6:14am, looked at both devices, and turned them off before they rang, on the calculation that, structurally, i had already lost the morning. dumber. three beats. the rhythm complete. the bus left without me. the bus does not know about the rhythm. the bus knows about the schedule.

2. the barista said it casually, i wrote it down

the rhythm got its name on saturday at the coffee shop on the corner. the barista, a woman in her late twenties with a small ring on a chain and a kind, weary patience for the regulars, asked for a name. i said mine. she wrote it on the cup.

i walked to a window seat, set the cup on a coaster shaped like a leaf, and looked at the writing. an extra m. idiomm, in marker, at a slight downward slant. the marker had skipped, or her hand had hesitated, or the cup had moved a millimeter. doesn’t matter. the cup said: idiomm. one extra letter, three syllables forming on the tongue: dumb. dumb. dumber.

i wrote the rhythm down on the back of the receipt. the receipt became, that morning, the only piece of paper in the apartment with a thesis on it. the barista is, in some sense, the most generous editor in the building. she writes you down without judgement and lets you read yourself back. she is the opposite of stefan, the wine guy at a tasting last spring who said “interesting” about my choice in the voice of a doctor reading a bad x-ray. stefan corrects you sideways. the barista corrects you by accident, and the accident is the whole gift.

3. the yoga mat, third one, in attendance

the apartment, when i got home, agreed with the cup. under the sofa, a stack: brenda the dead plant on the floor, the second yoga mat on top of brenda, and the third yoga mat on top of the second. the third one i bought after the second had, by my count, witnessed two stretches and a moving day. the second had been bought after the first, which had also witnessed two stretches and a different moving day. the math, on this front, is consistent.

i bought the third because the spring catalog showed it in a lavender colour i convinced myself would change my life. the colour, on arrival, was closer to a hospital corridor than a lavender. the mat went under the sofa within nine minutes of unwrapping. it has been there for fourteen months. the second mat, beneath it, has been there for twenty-six. brenda, beneath both, has been there since the autumn she gave up on me. the stack is a sediment record. dumb, dumb, dumber, in vertical cross-section.

4. brenda the dead plant, witness to all three syllables

brenda was a fern. she was a tenant, in the silent landlord way that plants are tenants. she charged rent in attention and i defaulted. i kept watering her with the small can from the window for eleven days after the leaves had gone dry, on the theory that the leaves were being dramatic. they were not being dramatic. they were dead. i moved her under the sofa because the trash was a step too final for a thursday afternoon, and now she is the bottom layer of a small monument to repetition.

brenda is the closest thing the apartment has to a witness. the snooze button cannot testify. the bus left and did not write anything down. the barista was a one-time observer, hand to cup, unaware of the case. brenda has been here through every tap, every yoga mat that arrived in a tube, every sunday call. she heard them all and could not say a word, which is, structurally, the perfect witness. for a longer entry on what the apartment writes down without me, see the field notes on whether i am dumb, tested by the appliances; brenda is on that list, near the top, in green ink.

5. the dishwasher take, on principle

the linguistic detour, briefly. there is the 1994 film whose title is the same rhythm by other means — the original two-man road comedy with jim carrey and jeff daniels earns its title because the two characters move from dumb to dumb to a third place that is, by a generous read, dumber and proud of it. owen wilson is not in that one. jeff bridges is not in that one. people search those names anyway, on the theory that any pop-culture road movie probably has at least one of them in it. the film is the rhythm in two suitcases.

for the longer treatment of adjacent territory, my piece on why the original is, frustratingly, not on disney plus answers a related question and ends, like most things in this kitchen, at a microwave.

6. verdict, the repetition is the diagnosis

a calendar invite just dropped — “sync re: vendor onboarding kickoff” — for 1:42pm. the cup from saturday is on the desk, empty, label-side out, the extra m holding its position.

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