Not just dumb but superdumb – that’s the story of my life. You know that thing where people like to imagine the situation – hypothetical, of course – where they can go back in time and say something helpful to their younger self? Some kind of deeply inspiring message, or whatever crap? Well I wouldn’t say anything to my past self – I have no inspiring messages whatsoever to pass on! For one thing I know that there’d be no point – nothing anyone could ever have said to my younger self would have made the slightest bit of difference to him because he was just too dumb. I know it doesn’t sound very kind or very compassionate to say this – it’s not politically correct to say of someone that they are ‘incredibly dumb’ but since it is myself that I’m talking about here I think I can get away with! Who’s going to object, after all? I’m not going to object because I know that it’s true. I have the inside-story on that. In retrospect, I can see that I was not going to change my course for anyone – I simply didn’t have the capacity to change and that’s the long and the short of it. People talk a lot of shyte about making ‘poor life-choices’ in my opinion. They are such wankers! When did they get that shit from, I’d like to know? Where do they dream that up? I’d like to grab one of those people and give them a right good shaking. ‘Get it into your head asshole,’ I’d like to say, ‘for you they are no ‘advantageous life choices’ – you’re going to be an asshole whatever choices you make!‘ Can an asshole choose not to be an asshole? Can a dumb idiot choose not to be dumb idiot? Is that a choice that is open to us? Think about it for God’s sake. Just think about it for a minute. Do yourself a big favour! All of this sounds like an insult of course, but it isn’t. It’s a pure statement of fact and there’s no judgement in it. How can we object to something that’s a pure statement of fact? If you stub your toe then you stub your toe – end of story! It’s not an insult to say to point out the fact that you have stubbed your toe, it’s just painful, that’s all! Not an insult just painful. The same thing applies with being incredibly dumb – it is a state of being that brings a lot of pain with it (boy does it ever!) but it’s not an insult. If you think that it is an insult that is simply because you are dumb – incredibly dumb in fact – and that isn’t an insult either! It’s just a statement of fact. Please don’t get offended – just think of it as some kind of kindly passerby noticing that you stub your toe and expressing sympathy – ‘That’s gotta hurt, buddy!’ they say with an encouraging smile, ‘that sure must hurt, my friend…’ So what can you do when you are incredibly dumb, you might ask, missing the point entirely. The point being that you can’t do anything. You can’t even believe it for a start! You won’t take it on board. No way will you take it on board – if someone pointed out the fact to you then you would interpret this as meaning that they were being horrible to you, mean to you, and you’d be angry with them. All you can do is carry on being an idiot, carry on being dumb, and pay the price that you inevitably are going to have to pay for it. And maybe once you have paid your dues – twenty, thirty years hence – you won’t be quite so dumb anymore! It’s not a process you can rush, needless to say – much as we might wish it was! You can’t rush it – you can’t take a shortcut out of here. All you can do is suck it up…. You didn’t choose to be an asshole and you can’t choose not to be – what’s so hard to understand about this? We don’t understand it though – instead we keep shouting our big dumb mouths off about ‘poor life choices’ and recriminating against ourselves for having made them, trying in this way to fool ourselves that it ‘could have been different’. Or that it will be different, if only we could manage to make an ‘intelligent life choice’ for once, an ‘informed life choice’. Well good luck with that one buddy – that’s all I can say! Good luck with that one…