The Stupidity Diaries

Over the last two years or so I have come to the suspicion--vague at first but recurring until I could no longer ignore it--that I am getting progressively stupider.

Nobody like to think they're actually losing intelligence as they get older, but of course it is as much a part of the natural order as the tide or changing seasons. Science tells us we ought to expect the gradual softening of intellectual faculties, the onset of absent mindedness, dementia and worse. Though I'm still middle-aged, I often find myself unable to answer my son when he asks me to define words like "absquatulate," and simple Latin translations or queries about famous historic battles such as that time Superman fought Mohammed Ali--events whose smallest details I was once able to recount without a moment's hesitation--now send me scurrying off to my vast library of classical erotica.

What has changed? True, a recent MRI of my brain revealed one or two localized areas of white matter demyelination, but a radiologist friend assured me that these lesions are nothing to worry about, typical of any male who has sustained repeated blows to the head. Yet I still find my reaction time is slowing, and when I asked a question I can almost feel myself flipping through some mental file-cabinet, frantically searching for the answer while at the same time trying to look down the blouse of the secretary flipping through the file cabinet next to mine, mentally peeling off her blouse to cup one creamy smooth and freckled breast in my palm.

Ultimately I decided to make some "lifestyle changes" to see if I could halt my steadily deteriorating mental state. I would keep a journal, a diary, if you will, to incorporate whatever the results might show. Perhaps someday, a thousand years from now, others would look upon my account and find some succor in its pages. Meanwhile, I decided to make three specific changes in my life and stick to them for a year to see what would happen.

First, I have decided to stop drinking turpentine. Hard as it is to admit, my consumption various solvents and stains has been increasingly slowly but steadily over the past decade. What was once a recreating diversion has become a nightly ritual of relaxation and although have no definitive reason to believe this dependency has any effect on my cognative powers, it does occasionally result in blackouts, rages and blindness, so perhaps I'm not entirely wrong to make this change. If, after a year, my ability to process information remains unchanged, why, the turpentine will still be there.

Secondly, I will completely stop using the internet excent in emergency cases where I need to check my email or confirm movies showtimes, book a flight or download a coupon. These days there is more and more data confirming what's being called "internet apnea," wherein we actually breathe more shallowly while online, thus delivering less precious oxygen to the brain. How true this is! How many times have I sat looking at certain web-sites with a noose looped around my throat or a plastic bag over my head, and felt so short of breath that I could practically feel my brain cells winking out in their thousands, like lights going out across some vast cityscape in one of those movies where they have blackouts across the city because of something that happens.

Not that I'm one of those Luddites who believe the internet is evil. Like many things, like a loaf of bread or a vial of crack cocaine or a child with an automatic weapon, there is a time and a place for it under certain circumstances whereas, under other circumstances, not so much. It's like it says in the Bible, too much of anything isn't good, except for God's rain of fire and blood upon the guilty.

A final lifestyle change in my attempt to derail the onrushing freight train of stupidity is the most obvious -- and it starts at my bookshelf. I was always a voracious reader, devouring whole books in a sitting and later vomiting up the damp crumpled pages and trying to flatten them out and read them. Later I moved onto the classics, large, dusty leather-bound tomes whose spines crackled as a gouged a screwdriver through them with a mallet, or flipped idly through their stiff pages searching for money. Most recently I have to admit that the authors I tend to read--Collins, Steele, Bertinelli--weren't helping me stave off the stupidity curdling in the pit of my brain.

No, from now on, I will read only the classics from a carefully composed reading list. In the year to come I shall read (or listen to) one book per day, starting with the obvious Don Quixote, the father of all Western literature, followed in short order by Moby Dick, Frankenstein, Moby Dick Vs Frankenstein, Dracula, Blackula, The Cadbury Tales, Aqualung, Romeo Must Die and so many, many more.

Ambitious? Certainly. But only by embedding my nose in the deep warm firm fragrant breasts of Mother Literature can I slide my tongue gently over the stiffening nipples of Language as I lower my hand slowly down to the soft moist cleft of Knowledge, rubbing my thumb in gentle teasing circles across the blood-flushed nubbin of True Culture until I finally feel my intelligence exploding forward in a great geysering spray of Smartness.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get started.