Newcomers to this blog may get the impression that I think I'm smarter than everybody else. For example, I've suggested that author Mark Halperin wrote his bestselling opus
The Truth Machine "in seventh grade study hall." I've ridiculed parents who won't let their kids read
Harry Potter, asking them whether there was "some kind of natural progression from J.K. Rowling fan to goat-worshiping cultist." I called my junior high teachers "smug, sorry-ass, close-minded, by-the-book pablum-spewing dullards." I've ridiculed fundamentalists for believing that "God invented photosynthesis before He created the sun."
Look, I'm not going to lie to you. I
am smarter than everybody else. Well, ok not Stephen Hawking, but then I could kick Stephen Hawking's ass in Ping-Pong. Generally speaking, for every person on earth, I'm either smarter than them or I could beat them at Ping-Pong. And in some cases, both.
Although, come to think of it, how smart can Stephen Hawking be if he couldn't even get the right disease? Stephen Hawking has
Lou Gehrig's disease. How does that make any sense? Lou Gehrig was no rocket scientist, but at least he was smart enough to get the right disease. That's what the historians would like us to believe, anyway. Maybe Stephen Hawking and Lou Gehrig once had a secret dalliance in the men's room after a physics conference at Yankee stadium and accidentally ended up with each other's diseases. And then it came out that Stephen Hawking had Lou Gehrig's disease, but somehow nobody ever noticed that Lou Gehrig had Stephen Hawking's disease. Man, I wonder how he pulled that off. You'd have to be the
luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Where was I? Oh yeah, so I'm way smart. Also, I have an uncanny ability to stay on topic.
In all seriousness, I occasionally get comments from people expressing amazement at my ability to write all these crazy posts or design a kickass blog template or write code that does
really cool stuff and doesn't break most of the time. "How do you come up with this stuff?" they ask.
I don't really know how to answer that. It's just the way my mind works. I will tell you this, though: There are some drawbacks to having this sort of brain.
Here's the rub, see. No matter how smart you are, you only have so many brain cells to go around. So like Keanu Reeves in
Johnny Mnemonic, who had to dump a chunk of long term memory (his childhood, along with his acting ability) to serve as a courier of sensitive data, my overdeveloped cognitive functions in certain areas have left me with atrophied faculties in other areas.
Basically my mind is a very loosely organized cloud of abstract concepts and concrete trivia that float about aimlessly until either a request comes in for the name of Richie Cunningham's older brother on the first season of
Happy Days (Chuck), or an unexpected collision spontaneously results in the creation of something like
Kenny Skywalker or
Vincent Van Gobot. I can jump from Lou Gehrig to
Johnny Mnemonic to
Happy Days because in some twisted way, they're all related in my head.
My subconscious mind is even weirder, by the way. I've told you about my dreams about
Huey Lewis and
Jimmy Walker, respectively. Sometimes I think I should just turn this blog over to my subconscious. Last night I had a dream that I was at a Christmas gift exchange where
Chris gave me a mylar balloon on which was imprinted a hologram of my face superimposed on a pumpkin. And that wasn't even the weirdest dream I had
last night. I also dreamt that my older brother and I were sitting by the side of a road when a helicopter flew overhead carrying a milk carton the size of a house. I turned to my brother and said, "That is a big f---ing milk carton." End scene.
The drawback to having a brain where pretty much anything goes is that I have an impossible time trying to keep track of things that are, to my way of thinking, completely arbitrary. Why does my dentist appointment have to be
this Thursday? Why not
next Thursday? Why do I have to turn left to get to the dentist's office and not right?
The result is that in many ways, I'm a complete idiot. Here's an example of the sort of thing that I do on a regular basis: The other day I ate a bowl of cereal with slices of banana on top, which isn't so dumb in itself, but stay with me. I only used half the banana, so I left the uneaten half on the counter. I also happened to have a half-finished can of soda in the fridge. I was going to sit and read for a while, so I got the soda out of the fridge, put it on the counter, grabbed my book, and then carried these items over to my chair in the living room.
I went to the bathroom and came back to find a paperback and half of a banana next to my chair.
And here's the really remarkable thing: I didn't think, "Silly me, I grabbed half a banana instead of half a soda." I thought, "Why the hell is there half a banana next to my chair? What kind of
demented freak would pick up half of a banana from the kitchen, carry it into the living room, and set it next to my chair? What is this, some kind of a joke?"
That same week I found myself sitting at a stop sign about a mile from my house. The car in front of me went, and then the guy to the left of me, and then suddenly it was my turn, and it dawned on me that I had
no freaking clue where in the world I was. I was literally like a deer in headlights. I had three options, and for a million dollars I could not have told you what direction my house was. So I drove straight through the intersection, realizing immediately upon getting onto the one-way street that led back to the freeway that I should have turned left. I had to call my wife and tell her I was going to be late because I got lost a mile from our house.
A few weeks back I was carrying a bucket of sprinkler fittings to our barn, and I stopped along the way to pick up some garbage. I deposited the garbage in the dumpster and then started back to the house, realizing halfway back that despite the fact that I had never actually made it to the barn, I was carrying an empty bucket.
In a similar vein, a few days ago I took the trash out to the dumpster, and my 6 year old daughter tagged along. I was carrying a garbage bag from the kitchen and a wicker wastebasket from the kids' room. We got to the dumpster, I dumped the trash, and we started back to the house. "Daddy," my daughter says, "Where is our wastebasket?"
Thank God for females, huh? Somebody's got to keep track of this shit.
Let's see, what else. Two weeks ago I left my headlights on at work, so my battery was dead when I went to leave and I had to get a jump-start. Last week I left the power cord for my laptop at work, which meant I either had to drive back to work (about 90 miles), go without my laptop for 4 days, or buy another one. (I bought another one, and yes honey I'm still planning to return it to Best Buy if I ever remember to take the other one home.) Yesterday I not only took a wrong freeway exit on the way to work; I also missed on onramp on the way home.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Besides, I think there's something else I'm supposed to be doing right now. I'd better go find my six-year-old and ask her what it is.
Now where the hell did I put
humor-blogs.com?
Labels: Caption Contest, Full of Myself