Chapter 7: I Want To Scream!

I WANT TO SCREAM! My wife was working in the garage today. She came into our bedroom where I do my work from during one of her breaks. She wants me to get rid of most of my books because I’m not smart enough to understand them anymore. Not my fiction collection, but my hard and soft sciences and language, theology books. I couldn’t even argue the point. I told her I was going to keep some for sentimental reasons. It made me cry. I had to get off the phones for a few minutes.

I had built so much of my self image around my intelligence. My ability to remember and integrate facts across a wide range of subjects. Oh, I know I wasn’t the smartest. I studied under people who made scary smart people look stupid. I knew I was smart enough to hold my own against most. I wouldn’t have been afraid to tackle an expert on his own field if I was given enough lead time. I gloried in it. It was the one place I felt respected.

I grew up without a father in a time when that mattered. You were treated as if you were socially inferior if you didn’t have two parents. Some parents literally wouldn’t let you be around their children or god forbid talk to their daughters. This wasn’t guesswork some of these people would tell you why you couldn’t spend time around their family. We were poor. In “Pursuing Andrea” Michael tells Andrea about cutting his hand with an ax while trying to cut wood when it was 14 below because his mother and sister were cold. That really happened. I was 12. I didn’t own gloves and socks don’t do shit when it’s that cold.

Andrea was real too. Unlike Michael I didn’t win her heart. I did win her friendship and in the process she reignited my humanity which had been all but extinguished by the time I had met her at 13. I wear a tattoo in her honor. If she was still alive she’d beat my ass for that, but alcohol killed her several years ago.

No Father, no money, no status, no social skills, what I did have was a mind. I found that the more I used it and the more it was recognized the more respect I got. It eventually allowed me to have mentors which guided me to fulfill my life’s goal. I also found myself accepting it as my due to have professors in certain fields accepting me as their peer even though I carry no degree. To have it stripped from me is in a sense being cast back into that childhood that I worked so hard to get away from. To have it put in front of me so bluntly today was agonizing.

At one point, I found myself wondering what the barrel of my pistol would feel like against my temple. It wouldn’t hurt. A friend of mine knew a guy who got popped in the head and survived. He said he never noticed. I saw it for what it was: a temper tantrum. Darian’s pissed. As one of my more recent teacher’s said “Fair ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

I just have to learn how to live with being relatively stupid. Obviously, it can be done. There’s lot’s of stupid people who live wonderful lives so I ought to be able to manage. I know what this sounds like and I won’t apologize because unless you’ve lost a significant portion of your intellectual capacity you’re incapable of understanding.