Stupid Is As Stupid Does

I just noticed that there is like no one reading this blog. Am I really that boring, folks? Well, I guess my life is not all that exciting. Neither is MS all that exciting. So duh. No brainer, right?

But what can I do? I mean, I'd rather be writing from some exotic foreign locale, say the top of Mt. Everest. Well, on second thought, I wouldn't. Lets say maybe the little hill down the street from here, the one you can drive to the top of and park.

The one positive thing I can say for Mt. Everest is that there are no parking lots up there, which would lessen my chances of getting lost. I have particular trouble with parking lots for some reason. One would never have guessed, before MS, that a parking lot could be so mystifying. But there you have it.

My wife said to me this morning that she had just noticed yesterday that I have trouble thinking. Uh . . . okay. Two years after the onset of MS, she notices this? Better late than never, I guess.

But perhaps this says something about the power of appearance. It's the old You don't look sick routine. The confusion rattling around in my brain is of course perfectly obvious to me, but what does confusion look like from the outside. Perhaps I seem just a bit befuddled sometimes, a bit absent-minded--too much on my mind, no doubt.

My stepdaughter concluded the other day that I was just getting old. I suppose that people attempt to minimize the disease by suggesting there's nothing profoundly wrong--it's just a natural thing. You're getting old.

No, I'm not getting old, ya little punk!

Maybe part of it is that people don't want to face things any more than we do. The difference is that they have a choice, whereas we do not. Illness often has a way of seeming illusory, right up until it slaps you in the face.

Or maybe I'm just playing stupid. Maybe it's convenient sometimes to be stupid.

But of course playing stupid would be a luxury. I don't have to play at all. Or if I do play, it is in pretending that I'm not.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

There's a difference--a really big difference, actually--between having done something stupid, and having purposely done something stupid. I seem to have lived much of my life, made many of my decisions, according to the latter mode.

Why is this, I wonder now, and rather stupidly so, as of course time has moved far beyond any window of opportunity that might ever had existed for retraction or repair. Is there some deeply ingrained inclination, an unconscious rebellion against good reason, that has goaded me in every critical moment irrepressibly toward the sphere of things which are universally inadvisable?

Perhaps the rebellion has been against my father. He, after all, had often either called me stupid outright, or at least implied the same. Did I decide, again in that deep in the soul storehouse of knee-jerk inclinations, to go ahead and show him how stupid I could really be?

Am I therefore a success, albeit a stupid success?

Or maybe my toxic reaction against good sense is found in simple stubbornness for its own sake, a will to break the mould no matter what the mould might be, no matter how proper, prudent, fitting, needful.

If they ask for your coat, give them your cloak as well. If they compell you to go one mile, go yet another.

Riduculous, is it not? Yes, it is.

Stupid is as stupid does.