How Dumb I Am

In earlier passages I have suggested that I may be very stupid. Who doubts this?

The essential question remains: How dumb am I?

Where do I rank among retards?

“Intelligent” “Smart” “Genius”

Often over the course of my half-or-so-century have I been called intelligent or smart, even a genius, by people who know me well. Should I put all of those words in quotes? Yet these very same people wisely dismiss my opinions and observations as dubious at best. They know too much about me to give me the benefit of the doubt.

If I ever took a real IQ test I was never told. I was twice drafted into my public schools’ gifted & talented programs — it did not occur to me in those days that this might have anything to do with IQ. I actually thought I must be not only gifted but also talented.

In the early 2000s I clocked in at 135 on Tickle.com’s free online IQ test while drunk, not trying, and in between tasks. Indeed, the problems reminded me of a bunch of tests I took in grade school. Then Mensa did attempt to recruit me — they probably get desperate now and then for money and geniuses.

My experience has been that if you know someone’s IQ score, it is because that person told you so, bragging. Draw your own conclusions.

I’m no savant. I’m no prodigy. Somewhere I picked up and entertained an idea of brilliant as distinctly lesser than genius. I might allow it if I weren’t such an idiot.

For the Love of God

Rather than carry on with colorful and off-color hyperbole and metaphor to fortify my insistence, instead I can demonstrate by anecdote.

Earlier I thought I had treated my experience and positions on my Christianity thoroughly and efficiently. Yet I overlooked one key element and failed to place it in my calculations: love.

Scripture throughout focuses on God’s perfect and expansive love. Much more has been written and discussed about love as a concept. If there are many types of love, they are all but love. I don’t think a Christian can deny or ignore the primacy of love.

I am today inadequate for the task of defining love. Some Bible verses say God is love. Could we then say love is God? I bet many Christians would agree if I said love is of God. I do admit my unconditional faith in scripture does not extend all the way to First John, but it seems reasonable — it’s just not much of a definition.

However, I think love must be admitted into any discussion of Christianity as the way of redemption. God’s love is cited, and it is plain enough, as the bedrock condition for which the salvation of his fallen creation is necessary. Love is why God does this.

Furthermore, Jesus cites love of God and love of others as the supreme commandments. Imperative love as the verb.

In my essay on forgiveness, I completely neglected to include God’s love as the primary condition, and Jesus’ commandment to love. Which is dumb.

Midnight Bonbons

Following that rather innocuous oversight I am confronted by a much more disturbing, perhaps endless list of anecdotes from which I might procure a selection that firmly establish my claim to stupidity. But my abundance of idiotic episodes is actually unmanageable, as evidenced by my prolonged inability to even write this entry.

My original inspiration to write this was driven by a series of blunders that I made — and continue to make — in regards to online social media activity. Basically, I randomly post opinions and edgy content, and I squabble with randos in comment feeds.

One of the dumbest things in this category that I did recently was when I went on a new block chain-based social media platform — incidentally pimped out by Tim Pool as a “free speech platform” on his nightly live stream show (I won’t cite the platform’s name) — where I eventually posted some spicy content. Later on I came to my senses and learned the hard way that I can’t edit or delete or even hide any posts, nor can I delete or hide my account, on this stupid platform — all posts are permanently public, baked into the block chain. Is it really “free speech” if I can’t remove, revise, or toggle the visibility of my own content? It’s also a bitch just to change the user profile details. And that’s life on block chain, I suppose.

Since it’s unavoidably on the record, here is the spicy content I made and posted.

From this single post one can surmise the actual turmoil of my day-to-day musings. No one I know understands this about me, which is precisely why I do it. It’s almost a kind of compulsion, like gobbling candy and cake after midnight. Recently my kid complained to me about how I’m posting on alt-sites and mixing it up with weirdos who usually, almost always, demand that I declare my position on Israel. It’s a sight no one should see: a parent stuffing his face in the middle of the night to assuage the terror of desolation.

So if you want to find out what I have to say when I’m just twisting off, if you want to know just how truly dumb I am, there’s currently no better indicator than my account on Gab.

Actual Idiocy

This is not self-deprecation as a form of deflection, not virtue-signaling false humility. I want my reader to understand that regardless of my obviously screaming hyper-intelligence and well-reasoned opinions, I am a very stupid person. I want to confess it all, to lay all bare, as I have before God, so that there is no misunderstanding about my own self-knowledge. But that would literally take the rest of my life to write and I aint got the stremth.

db!