Lost

I always seem to think of these things at 4pm on a Friday afternoon, but it would really behoove me to find a publisher for my payphone stories. I tried this a year or so ago but was uninspired by the responses received. One outreach resulted in me publishing a few stories at a rather moribund, murky kind of web site with no following. I didn’t do full due diligence on that site before diving in.

The other response was also uninspiring, coming several months after I sent the inquiry and focusing on stuff that didn’t interest me.

I just posted a pretty decent story to the payphone site, but I don’t know how many people would read it. And I’ll certainly make no money in return for my effort, since ads on that content do absolutely nothing.

I feel lost this week. I slept 12 hours for 3 nights in a row. I reminded myself of the main character in “Fat Man Down”, one of Joe Frank’s greatest sets. I’m not overweight but the opening of that show describes someone who just could not get out of bed, who slept longer and longer to keep himself from the burden of reality.

Today I was up way earlier but directionless and self-loathing interfered with getting much of anything useful done. I was out last night around midnight, restlessly waiting for anxiety meds to kick in. I have had such good luck with the anxiety and blood pressure but all of a sudden bam, it’s back in the stratosphere again.

I have this trouble most often when I fail to eat, which has been a lifelong oversight of mine. I just don’t remember to do it and when I do eat it often feels like a perfunctory chore, as if it is something I do only to stay alive. This week was an example of that. I ate close to nothing on Wednesday, and then Thursday I think all I ate until 7 or 8 pm was a banana and a very small slice of pizza. And you know, I did not feel hungry at all.

The therapist seems to think I should take an IQ test. I think she is interested in knowing for her own curiosity what my IQ is. She has repeatedly asks if I am “one of those super smart people?” I don’t think my IQ would be as high as she thinks.

I have always been skeptical of the value of an IQ test. I grew up thinking that all it these tests really measure was your ability to take a test. Her response was that that would been have fair enough to say of certain tests from my generation, which were criticized for basing too much of a test-taker’s success on school knowledge. The newer tests supposedly address that complaint, focusing on shapes and concepts, not facts.

But what would my high IQ get me? A job? I think it would get me laughed out of a lot of job screenings.

If my IQ is high then it should be no surprise. My mother’s was off the charts. She was in the top 1% of the 1%, pretty much acing the MENSA test and blowing through another test for something called the Society for Philosophical Inquiry. She had me believe the Society had an admission process that made getting into MENSA look like you’d gotten into Kindergarten. She may have exaggerated, but I tend to take her on her word, meaning that whether it was altogether true or not she honestly believed what she was saying.

To add to my belief in her sincerity on this matter was her progressive disdain for that organization. The “Society” published articles by its members in a newsletter, which I think was published quarterly. mother described the content of these articles as shockingly banal. “These people think they are something,” she would say. One particular story really piqued her. I never read it but she described it as a lengthy, dramatically built up account of something that was made to sound like a rupturous, gestapo-like intrusion of government into the life of this private citizen.

Did they raid this person’s house looking for the Nixon tapes? Were there black helicopters and rabid bomb-sniffing dogs? No. There were not.

It was an IRS tax audit. For weeks Mother could not stop heaping scorn on this story. “A freakin’ tax audit. Is that all?” She said they made it sound like the KGB was backing the intruders up via walkie-talkie when in fact not only was the visit from the IRS relatively routine but the details made it sound virtually innocuous. The author owed no money or suffered any unexpected financial hardship. It was just a routine audit on a randomly chosen citizen.

Mother would say “In our next issue a Society member recounts the horrors of JURY DUTY in a blistering 50,000 diatribe.” In predicting the denouement of this hypothetical story my mother predicted the prospective juror would be dismissed upon arrival at the courthouse.

To keep it fair and real, I never read this stuff, so I don’t have an opinion. My mother never contributed a word to the Society’s journal, though I don’t know why that should be a standard for her to meet before commenting on it herself. I don’t know if she ever even considered doing that, but for as well as she could write I know that publishing was something she never did.

I’ll tell you what, though. As candid as Mother was with me about this stuff she made a big deal of making sure I did not tell anyone else about her membership in the Society. She said it makes some people feel bad to know about these things. I think she was specifically referring to a neighbor, who had recently taken the MENSA test and failed to get in.

That gets back to my question of what, exactly, a high IQ would get me? If I take my mother’s word for it I think it would cause stigma more than anything else. For much of contemporary functional life I think intelligence is vastly over-rated, as is creativity. On most day-to-day contexts, from working at a food counter to conversing with friends I find that creative thinking is an annoying, bothersome pain in the ass. That is because so much creative thinking isn’t bad but what euphemistically could be described as “necessary”. Bad ideas have to be entertained, vetted, and wrung dry before settling on the good ones. To invoke Thomas Edison’s genius ratio I think it’s true for creative thinking: 1% inspiration gets all the respect while the 99% perspiration is dismissed as an irritant.

Phew… Getting outta here, it’s hot as hell in the ghetto coffee shop today.