I’ve been called gay a lot.

When I was young, I had faggot written on my gym clothes a couple times. Been picked on on the school bus, been called a queer at clubs, sporting events. My dad sat me down and asked me if I was gay, after I came back from college. My mom, in her mom-ly way, asked plenty of times. Teachers. Dad sat me down again like twelve years after college and asked me again (lol srsly tho, does u has the homos). One memorable time I had it spit in my face at a lunch table, and when I chose to pay up and find a less phlegmatic place to eat my fries, two more folks threw their (pro) opinion in on the Great Gayness Debate. I mean, _I_ knew I liked looking at boobs, but when you’re a young virgin with zero sexperience, life is a confusing, terrifying haze of insecurity. After the accusations piled up and mounted in direction, I started to wonder. I mean, this was like some kind of social signalling, right? This many people can’t all agree on a thing without some kind of significance to their accusation. They could site all kinds of reasons I was a faggot, from drivin’ in the fashion of one to liking “their” type of music, my disdain of the cocaine-and-cheap-vodka-pressure-cooker rapeshed atmosphere of dance clubs, my lack of proper bro-upmanship to male friends who successfully cheated on their girlfriends (regardless of how hot the chick was – this earned me a “giant faggot” I think that’s like the difference between Assault and Aggravated Assault), my clothes, my “faggy eyes” and my “soft little gayboy face”. Even my love of books was a significant statistical point, and what did I have to balance all this? My insatiable lust for vagina? Hardly enough, it would seem, to balance over such a huge pile of obviously reasoned opinions.

Clearly we needed more data. I catalogued all my interactions as I entered the adult world. Again, more data, again, no solution to the equation. I just kept having to assess. Did I have frosted tips? OF COURSE I HAD FROSTED TIPS. IT WAS THE 90S YOU GUYS. Did I keep my hair neat? Yeah, my shit’s all curly and it looks greasy unless I do something with it. Was I fat? Duh. Was I introverted? Of course I was, I was constantly trying to figure out why I was straight when I was CLEARLY gay. Did I tip even the ugly lookin’ strippers at the strip club? YES, DID YOU NOT SEE THE CHEWED UP DROOPY HALF-TAN ORANGUTITTY HOMEGIRL JUST SHUCKED OUT HER FILTHY GREY K-MART NURSING BRA? THAT WOMAN HAS CHILDREN TO FEED. LIKE EIGHTY CHILDREN OR SOMETHING — OF COURSE I’M GONNA DROP A FIVE. IF SHE DANCES FOR TOO MANY MORE SONGS WITH ALL YOU CHOADS SCRATCHIN’ DICK WELL OFF THE RAIL, I MIGHT BE FORCED TO GO BUY HER A FUCKING BREAST PUMP AND SOME VITAMINS AND A BOOK ABOUT BECOMING A DENTAL HYGIENTIST. I neither fell in love with a stripper nor believed one was secretly in love with me. I didn’t think joining the Army would be that much fun, I hadn’t shot a gun, stolen money from my parents, vandalized the school to stick it to the man, nor snuck out late at night to meet up with my “boys”, I’ve _still_ never caught a fish. I shouldn’t have to point here that Team Hetero is losing the numbers war in a big way, and I could keep on these completely un-straight facts about myself for seven more rambling pages, but you can relax, I won’t.

It took years of gathering this data and taking it to heart, amassing such a huge wide catalog of reasons I’m a faggot that it bordered on silly, accepting that there was simply something wrong with me that for whatever reason I couldn’t quantify. I accepted my faggotry. Over the years I toyed around with things. Had some awkward threesome makeouts with some very lovely couples. I called myself “Bi” in college. Maybe it was because I was confused, maybe it was because I wanted to be. Bisexual is still sexual, and that’s better than asexual faggot. Obviously the chicks weren’t diggin’ my whole faggy “situation” as outlined above, and while I still wanted to stick my weiner in THEM, many of them seemed quite convinced that I was looking for a penis to stick in me.

And so it went, for years and years. I dated, mostly online, I found people who were willing to talk to me despite my fagginess. I found women to date, and people to talk to. And I stopped trying to correlate other people’s “data” to my reality. It turns out that’s not healthy, you can’t try to live for others perceptions, and you can’t try to live for their validation. And back when I was trying to balance the sheets on my sexual preferences considering outside sources as valid as my own opinions? Every single accusation was terrifying, every time my dick was called to doubt it slayed my confidence and my mood. Now that I know better? I just look at the hater who is spitting his hate, and think, “Bitch, I know I’m fabulous! That homo hate? Old and busted. You need to upgrade your haterade to something fresh.” And that’s what’s up.

It does get better, in part because as you get older the accusations of others have less impact, but mostly because you learn how to make it better. You learn how to weed out the assholes and let them live their miserable lives as far away from you as you can. You learn how to be you. I’m 33 now. All official. And I’ve finally learned how to be me without fear and without shame. It’s magnificent.

The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim – Not the game of the year 2011 despite the fact that I spent more time playing it than any other game.

I played the living shit out of Morrowind, a game that came for free with a motherboard I bought back in the day. It was fun fireballing the shit out of some necromancers and then flying around with my pants of +1000 flying and then being stealthy and stealing shit, but when it came to the last, say four hours of gameplay, the game was no longer playable as a mage/thief. As soon as you were in caves with guys who looked like the narc-lephant tubesteak from Mos Eisley, you were getting smashed in the face pretty regular. The way they “fixed” this, at the end, was to give you Sunder and Keening, which (along with the handcondom Wraithguard) turned even the most weenie bookworm magenerd into a God amongst Gods, physical stats inflated like a pro athlete on horse steroids, ready to stuff some Ash Vampire asshole full of magical artifact and slice the Corprus cure right out of their prostates. There were annoying parts, it was crashy for me throughout the time I played it, the Rock Gliders were fucking terrible and it was far too easy to accidentally smash through from Starter McEasy’s cruise to pick up a rock for some guy into Holy Crap there’s some Daedric shitstorm happening please let me escape. But it was a good game, and by the time I was done, I was just as happy to put Dagoth Ur into the big sleep with a hammer and a chisel as I would have been with some spells. This game was probably 20 or so hours (with some side questing), which at the time was epic beyond epic, and it had a bunch of expansions (that I never played through). On the whole, it was fun, engaging, and I never felt too much like the interface wanted me to hate it to death.

When I heard that there was going to be TESIV: Oblivion, I was pretty excited. Hell, I could put up with some rock gliders again if it means I can stuff two enchanted ebony gauntlets into somebody’s nosehose and make their brain explode, right? Here’s the rest of my Oblivion review: Un. Fucking. Playable. Boring, unengaging, with a difficulty curve about as steep as a wheelchair ramp to a public library. Whereas wandering too far off your path in Morrowind could get your balls mounted on an Orcish mantle, wandering too far off the path in Oblivion was the quickest way to accidentally get mired down in some impromptu Clannfear population control “quest”, where you slowly start to wish you were watching Jurassic Park and masturbating instead of playing this shitty game. Never finished this one, despite FOUR attempts to go back and play it.

So, seven hundred years later, when I heard about Skyrim, I instantly ignored it. Who fucking cares, they’re gonna get good voice actors and it’s gonna have two well-modeled characters in it and then I’m gonna be beating up palette-shifted imps that scale in level with me for no readily apparent reason, right? Fuck off. Not interested. But then a ridiculous number of my friends started to play it and rave about it, so I decided to buy it. Good decision? Yes. Good game? Yes. Game of the year? SO FUCKING NO. NO NO NO. Now, I’ve dislodged like a full waking week’s worth of time into the game, so I can’t argue about the gameplay per dollar value proposition of the $59 retail price – Dollar for hour this game is an enormous bargain, better than drinking with my friends, movies, novels, or any other non-advertisement subsidized entertainment I’ve indulged in this year. So… why isn’t it my game of the year?

Lets talk, for a moment, about console porting. “Console port” is one of the nastiest phrases in PC gaming, usually spit out in a huff when gameplay mechanics are so kluged to fit keyboard and mouse play that it’s obvious someone’s retarded nephew headed up the PC port team. Lots of initially-console-only games that get released for PC three or four months later have this problem, the game is simply designed and tested for play with a controller, and using a keyboard and a mouse to simulate a controller input is frustrating and horrible. Burnout Paradise (and several other similar driving games like Midnight Club 3) is really pretty, fun to play and fun to drive in on the Xbox. On the PC it was horrific, almost exactly the experience you’d expect trying to use a mouse and keyboard to drive a car. GTA IV (a game I was very exited about before playing it) wasn’t exactly crisp on the console, but on the PC it becomes a bleary vague nauseating headbob nightmare. These “console ports” are usually hindered by graphical bugs, gameplay bugs, crashes, poorly bodged UI elements, and frequently a keyboard completely mapped out with random commands spread across the keyboard “intuitively” (press H for help, press P for put your dick in it, press Y for yes). Skyrim has ALL OF THESE PROBLEMS AND MORE. The person responsible for the dialog tree/system menu/inventory menu should be forced to play games with clean UIs for a fucking year for the sins of Skyrim. I can’t tell you how often I have scrolled down a list of items (Skyrim is a traditional TES game which means, basically, you’re going to have four million things in your inventory at any given time) and clicked, only to have the UI randomly decide what I WANTED to click on was the thing at the top of the list. I’ve actually had to develop a system of rabidly scrolling up and down with the mousewheel and then up and down on the movement keys to make sure my “selection focus” is on the right subsection of whatever I’m looking at. And even then it’s only like 75% certain I’ll click on the right thing. I’ve wasted many a black soul gem and listened to many an uninterruptable, interminable introduction dialog because of this. I get dumped out of sales dialogues sometimes because I clicked on some non-selective zone of the left hand dialog that happens to be in the crook of the N or whatever. I’ve listened to one Jarl or another talk about his area of the Reach like 10 times because I just couldn’t seem to click anything else. I’ve ended up skipping HUGE sections of story-enriching dialog just because I know it just doesn’t matter enough to put up with trying to get all the back story, it’s going to take twenty minutes of scrolling up and down and clicking and doing random shit to get it to click the right option. The system menu and inventory share this lack of click-zone cohesion combined with lack of comprehensive keystroke options to complete actions. Let me explain. To craft a dagger, you find a forge, go into the “Iron” menu, and select dagger. Then you either click it some random number of times and then click OK to each time, or you click and hit Y, or you hit “E” (intuitively selected as the keyboard shortcut for “craft itEm”) and then Y. Or hit OK. Every time. Ridiculously, this is the BEST crafting interface in the game, requiring the least retarded number of steps. Enchanting is a matter of selecting an object (by clicking), selecting an enchantment (by clicking), selecting an “intensity” for the enchantment (by clicking and dragging or using the left and right keys) then hitting enter, then selecting a soul gem (by scrolling down an interminably long list of gems), then hitting R (to (silent R)enchant) and then click OK or hit Y. Don’t even get me started on creating fucking potions because it’s just worthless. It’s past frustrating, even in “cheating by looking on the internet” form, seriously, look at this page and tell me what the fuck is going on. JUST SELECT YOUR INGREDIENTS BASED ON THE EFFECTS BUT DON’T END UP WITH TOO MANY EFFECTS! I wasted half an hour making healing potions to keep my elfwuss alive before realizing that the “Potion of Healing” was actually healing me for 52 points and then draining 40 points of magica. For… some reason. I’m sure. Recharging magical weapons, of course uses the keyboard shortcut T, for “recharge this Thing” and is the only area of the UI which doesn’t respond to the mouse wheel, and inexplicably doesn’t have a scroll bar to the right to indicate you can scroll down at all, you simply use W and S to go up and down. WHO THE FUCK DESIGNED THIS SHIT. Seriously, were you guys not allowed to talk to each other while programming this shit?

There’s a whole host of other problems I can mention but they’d all be excusable if the crafting and dialogue interface weren’t so fucking horrible. The map is 3D but for some reason you can only zoom from “looking at a topographical map from 10 feet above the table” to “looking at a topographical map from 6 feet above a table”. Travelling to an area doesn’t clear any fog of war, no, no, your map has active cloud cover that obscures the very, very vague paths that lead you through mountain passes (which are sometimes intentionally misleading, making it look like there’s a wide winding path up a face when in fact it’s a ski-slope of impenetrable rubble). Stealth is a joke, guards will regularly detect you even when wearing magical stealth boots and gulping invisibility potions, but it’s OK because only rarely will a mission involving stealth NOT be fixable by just murdering everyone in the current area code. I completed all the Mage’s college quests with a warhammer and the two default spells they give you at the beginning (plus the ONE spell I had to purchase to gain entry). There were two pretty cool puzzles (the big dwemer sphere that you had to “align” the crystal with fire/ice and the dungeon you had to use elemental spells to unlock doors in) but then there were 40 more dungeons whose only “puzzle” was to turn some pillars to the symbols CARVED IN THE FUCKING WALL BEHIND THEM. This is the ancient Nord version of putting your password on a post-it on your monitor I guess. The MOST interesting and engaging quests were completely optional Daedric shrine quests. And worst of all… I’m not done yet. I’ve got hours and hours in and no sense of completion. I’m the Archmage of a whole college, the king of thieves, the master assassin and not at any time has it felt like “woo, that was awesome”, it always just feels like putting a line through a to-do item and completely un-like, say… portaling Wheatley to the moon, or exploding an enormous, armor and laser encrusted RadScorpion, or even finally fucking killing a mob in minecraft — any number of other awesome gaming moments I’ve had this year.

Brad and I had a discussion about Skyrim in which he very astutely pointed out despite all his problems with the game that he had 80 hours of play in it and it “didn’t owe him anything”. It’s true, I don’t feel like Skyrim owes me anything. In fact I feel a little ashamed I’m not gamer enough to finish all the food left on my plate (there are gameless kids in africa who would LOVE to enchant just one dagger), but ultimately my time in Skyrim is going to go out with a whimper and not with a bang. Instead of a sense of ultimate badass completion, it’s gonna feel like quitting a shitty job.

Tags: elder scrolls, game of the year, games that have fart humor, games which took up too much of my time, goty 2011, skyrim, tesv

I occasionally get asked for advice and really why would you ask me anything. Here is my response to this email.

PS I am totally moving another person to Portland even though you all told me to stop.

question… in general…

(disregard grammar, consider theme)

Well, that sentence is a natural paranoia/worry/fear manifesting as a chink in your artistic/professional self-opinion. There are literally dozens of very good reasons that it’s silly to think that about Portland, but they’re kinda complex to explain and very easy to just see, so I’ll ignore those and march forward into the “artistic/professional self-opinion” bit.

So, basically, leadership and true human “excellence” come from a very specific mental conditioning, it requires some intelligence combined with some humility in the early years, and then a very specific voice. God’s maybe, mom. A girl you think is hot or your priest, tells you that you’ve “got it, no sweat, you’re born to do this” and it emboldens you. You decide to DO SOMETHING in all caps don’t care what it is because that voice? It was right and you wanna hear it congratulate you when you’re done.

Now, that’s all fake. That never happens. What actually happens in that fleeting moment of inspiration is a stopwatch starts. That moment of actualization? It was a reset. Right at the moment? There’s only two voices in your head. Your own strong, familiar internal dialog, and the voice of someone who loves/fucks/titillates/nurtures you saying “You can do it”. And the stopwatch is now counting how long it takes for a voice of terminal doubt to get in there and jam up your shit.

For a depressingly large chunk of folks? THAT voice sounds just like Dad or Mom or themselves when they’re drunk and it just beats em’ before they even have a chance to think about what the “something” was. Afterglow is over and who gives a fuck what some stripper says anyways, fuck it. They’re done. Back to frappuccinos in the new reusable ultrachug with bonus drinkDiaper(tm) and trying to up the threadcount on the sheets.

If you make it all the way to “fucking around trying to think up what something to do is” without getting jammed, you’re now a doodler. You’re a tinkerer. You read a lot to try to get ideas or you learn how to run long distances or you get a job or you finish college or whatever. Stuff that’s easy to get into a track and push on gets completed. Things that are more free form tend to either not get finished or you run into obstacles. But you’re still young and nothing has stopped you yet and your great awesome young brain is just wet and hot with ideas, you’re soaking in em’! SOMETHING is in there just waiting to get out, as soon as you figure out what it is and how to do it.

So, if you manage to tinkerdoodle around enough and still not get upset and stop, and you get bored with all your hamster-wheel life progress meters, you develop some skills, and now you’re a journeyman. A person who can do. Not maybe SOMETHING in all caps but stuff, you can do stuff.

This is where almost all of the adults on the planet stop. They can do their oil changes and clear their toilets or they can take a pretty good wedding picture or they play guitar in a local band. They bake a wicked apple pie or they write a pretty good essay. They still dream a little, but they have enough “life lessons” that the voice of terminal doubt? It’s their own. And it comes in a cool breath of logic, yeah we’d all like to sing an aria at the Sydney Ampitheater but there’s a mortgage payment dummy! Or, in many cases, SOMETHING came to be. SOMETHING turned out to be a son, or hitting upper management or owning a muscle car just like the one in that movie except for the rusty muffler, and it just takes up the slack in any left over creative impulses. I’d write a symphony but Die Hard is on and that’s my favorite nap movie.

And then all that’s left are the artists, craftspeople, psychopaths, the sociopaths. These three groups have something unique inside them that tells them that they need to DO SOMETHING REAL BECAUSE THE REST OF THIS SHIT IS FAKE. Artists feel the whole sentence. Craftspeople hear “Do something real”. Sociopaths get “the rest of this shit is fake”. Psychopaths get “DO SHIT”. They’re intelligent enough to be bored by their station, have successfully avoided or defused internal doubt and external judgment, and the drudgery of day to day existence hasn’t curbed their intense need to externalize their singular vision. They’ve developed their skills through long practice and have developed exquisite “taste” in their particular fields of interest. This is where Rick Perry lives, and Churchill, Ted Bundy, Pablo Piccasso, Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen. It’s where genius and madness are stranded with each other when the masses return to rest. Which is unfortunately why you’re running into so many dickholes.

But I digress — there’s nothing to be gained from _thinking_ that sentence, unless you wanna go think it to you at… fourteen? That’s a “terminal doubt” of the kind that can only work when it’s integrated early. It’s an ineffective deterrent thought-scourge that you ran over your ego dozens of times like some kind of purification rite and it’s silly. You’re past that. It’s an emotional
damage-control device you’re using to preemptively prepare yourself for failure and it’s the sort of shit I do all the time. I do it less now. Because I recognize that forcing myself to a psychological low before starting a project is counter productive, the “net happiness” from a situation where I forced myself to live out every variety of failure before starting is a low gain proposition if I succeed wildly, and in every other case is a stone cold bummer followed by a halfass payoff. It’s a weak type of magic spell that you learn when you’re young and have no other use for all that beautiful brain that god gave you, like a really shitty computer program that just pulls up the pictures on your SD cards where it thinks you look “extra fat”, it does it very slowly, turns on all your fans while it does it, and when you agree that the picture is bad, it doesn’t do anything with it, it just finds another one to show you. Sometimes it just shows you the same one over and over for hours until you agree you look fat in it.

Quit doing it. Or, do it alllllll right in a big ass pile. Say it out loud to yourself, say it in words so you have to hear it. Say “I’m a fraud and a fake and nobody believes in me and I’m gonna fail.” say it in the mirror and cry about it, cry over all that wasted effort you gave to projects that went nowhere and mourn the innocent youthful you who squandered so many opportunities. Do it all the way out. If you have a relationship with god? Talk to him about it. Or just talk to somebody dead about it, it doesn’t matter, pick somebody who can hear you, and who most of all can effortlessly understand the emotions which are forming your words, and talk to them. Have that out. Get real stoned. Make fun of yourself. But only do this doubting out loud. ONLY do it out loud. Don’t write it, don’t let yourself do it in the car in your head. If you’re in the car and you start having this desire to dig down a sadness bunker to wait out the war? Talk it out. Talk to the radio guy. Talk to the commercials. No I do not care about five dollar foot longs all week mother fucker because I have a fucking problem here that you would not believe. Don’t let it live in your head. Because it’s a loop, it’s a computer virus, it’s like you looked at too many porn sites and eventually your computer starts running like shit (I mean a regular computer not your immunodepressedMac), and you need a reboot, but the brain doesn’t “do” that, so…

There’s a concept, in the new “cloud computing” paradigm, of having “tiered infrastructure”. Basically, you can run a whole computer and if part of the computer’s software is gonna be thrashing the hard drive, you can physically store that data on really fast memory, and all the boring text files and backgrounds on much less expensive, much slower hard drives. This is “tiered storage”, the hard drive looks like one big thing to the computer but it’s split up according to how fast we need access to it. I believe the human brain, having billions of years more R&D time, is like “tiered compute”. We have this big fancy new part, cerebral neocortex, which is capable of all kinds of neat “wide” processing. It can take really big ideas and think about them all at once, think about their relationships, we can hold dissimilar ideas and compare them. Then we have the paleocortex limbic system, which is just kinda “where the rubber meets the road”. It’s where we keep “what gunshots sound like” and “the sick feeling when you know you broke a limb”, and the fear of strangers. Interior logic fights, stuff that’s all hypothetical and never needs to interact with your sensor organs or limbs? The brain starts to run them as efficiently as it can, and the neocortex is waaaaay complicated and takes up a lot of kilocalories. Part of the brain’s survival-efficiency routine is to makes the loops smaller and smaller, and stuffs them further down the stack, if you can basically reduce a very complex argument to “you are dumb” and you iterate it often enough, the brain will try to just throw a “you are dumb” signal out from the limbic system on an interval to make you stop using the fancy part so much. So you get all the endocrine system triggers that come with feeling shamed/stupid on a regular tap and then it just lives as tension in your lower back forever. Forcing yourself to talk it out brings it back up to the fancy processing and lets you experience it fully, which will help the brain stop trying to simplify and automate it.

Here’s what you should be thinking about. How much stuff you can sell on Craigslist in the next three weeks, how to work the logistics of leaving and driving up, how many people you can find to take your lease. I have four days of vacation to use before the end of the year, two of them are yours if you need a copilot. Past that, it is in the chubby thick babyhands of Dr. SpaceJesus. Go have your freakout, take a nap, and then re-assess your to-do list when you’re done. It’s like jackin’ off before a date so you’re not all nervous.

I’ve been using LogMeIn Ignition for the iPhone and it’s super duper crazy radical. Using it over 3G is not quick by any stretch of the imagination, but its usable, I was able to repair the port forward rule for SSH on my router with only two redraw-hiccups. For any emergency, gotta get into the computer and print out those boarding passes for Asshole McGee, why the fuck didn’t I email that file before I left type situation? It’s kinda killer. There is only ONE thing that it can’t do that I occasionally need (the ability to send a control-alt key combo without anything else, in order to escape a VM that doesn’t have Tools installed). And I’m a weird edgecase motherfucker so… Check it out here. LogMeIn Pro, bee tee dub, seems to be totally fucking worthless and not worth the money unless you are a crazy person. Remote printing? Hurf. Ignition is like $15, and if you’ve ever been away from home and thought “if only I could get on my computer and do that right now”, it might be worth it.

Tags: logmein remoteadmintools

“Exceptionally bright, good class participation, bad handwriting.”

I have always been very bright, and very very patient. This pairing was, until recently, what I considered my greatest gift. I wasn’t verry pretty, nor graceful; healthy; successful — But smart as a little monkey and patient enough to wait out the goldrush suckers and bamboozlers, wear out the brutes and the quick, until I could bring the powerful leverage of my monkeysmarts into play. And at each step of my social and educational journey, I was attentive, intuitively capable and intellectually open, able to make rapid leaps between active cognition, internal synthesis, and then re-communicate core ideas of lessons learned. I boil down the lesson very efficiently, I regurgitate it very convincingly, and I follow it very well. I did great on tests. Teachers loved me. I could not pay attention in class and finish all my homework before I got home. Other students hated me, but my ability to turn that blanket of attentiveness and communication to them gained me a small but insanely close group of friends. I excelled in almost all areas of academic study, I was taking college level math, english, chemistry (a subject which I hated and still loathe, but whose central concepts were so easy for me to regurgitate that after an all-nighter out dancing I managed to best all my classmates in a state chemistry competition), and had fully exhausted the physics program available at my school, instead spending the after lunch period idly toying with electronics while talking to my Physics teacher.

There are really two major crises which can arise when an intelligent person is made to believe at an early age that they are smart enough to not have to _learn_ things. One, it can make them into a sociopath. Learning how easy it is to dupe people around you is intoxicating. (Donald Trump is many things but he is not dumb. He is smart enough to realize he can get people to agree with _him_ and not his _ideas_ by using the right tone.) The other is that they get convinced that they are the smartest person in the world. Guess which one I picked (and I thought I had self-esteem problems! Hah.)

Being the Smartest Person in the World

Being so smart that people assume you know everything sucks. At first it’s fun because it’s titillating to impress people. And as a kid, I assumed eventually I would find some core group of competent adults that is out there running stuff while all “the idiots” meander. But eventually, the fun wears off and by the time I was about… ten I had become so nervous about ever NOT knowing the answer, about ever NOT having the solution, or being awkward at a task, that I was embarrassed about being taught. Embarrassed about learning things FROM other people. Because they were all dumber than me! How could THEY, with their slow moving brains and their chubby stupid hands, teach me! ME! The boy who was so smart his dad just _knew_ he didn’t need some gross “sex talk”. The boy who was so bright he just learned things by _being_! So without realizing it, I committed myself fully to the idea that I was the smartest person in the world. I obsessively collected “farcts”, specific details which belie deeper knowledge of a process or concepts. When I didn’t know a thing it was embarrassing, so when I found out about anything I needed to delve as “deeply” into it as I could as quickly as I could, just so I’d sound knowledgeable if somebody happened to want to talk about frost-damage on cactii or old tractors or South American regime changes. And each time I was rewarded for farctical information, it emboldened me further. I _was_ the smartest person in the world. Everyone agreed! Because they were always impressed by all the stuff I knew. And knowledge is power! So I knew I had power, and I was smart enough to know have read that with power comes responsibility. And being the smartest person in the world must be a seriously big responsibility. It meant I could never ever ever let other people be better than me.

This interestingly idiotic assertion of intelligence wasn’t really conscious. Or not wholly. I knew I was separating the world into two camps, the competent (me and some unknown army of people who make the world work right) versus the incompetent (everybody I had met in my entire life), but it didn’t feel mean, it just felt like I was doing the retards a favor by not expecting much from them. I was angry at the world for not opening every door for me, in awe of my smartness. And I fed that burning anger, like it was ragefire that sustained me.

Into that fire, I fed five jobs, eight years. Countless friends. Unknown chances at bliss. I fed it my energy and my sadness and my hatred and my love and everything I had. Every single thing I had I fed into the same stupid fire, convinced somehow that I could make it burn so hot that struggle itself would cease to exist.

And one day I woke up and tasted the ashes in my mouth — the charred cumshot of a decade of masturbatory rage. I’m done with being angry that the world isn’t perfect. I’m done with being angry that I am not perfect. And I’m done with assuming I’m too smart to have to learn.

Next time: How I learned to stop worrying and love Dr. SpaceJesus.