Dumbest Bubble in the Fizz

Today I want to talk about ignorance.

A lot of people are going to read that and get entirely the wrong idea. They're going to think, "Uh-oh, here goes, the smart-mouthed columnist is going to go making fun of our president again. Hasn't our poor president suffered enough from being called a moron by that Canadian woman? Who does this guy think he is, thinking he's so much smarter than our elected president?"

No, really, I don't care about George Bush's ignorance. It's my own that interests me. As 5 out of 6 girlfriends have put it, I only care about myself. This is in fact the source and substance of my ignorance. If it isn't about me, it must not be important enough to know.

At this point it is entertaining for me to reflect that I am ignorant as hell, and yet I write this column. Ha. I know incredibly little about everything but I write these tiny mini-treatises every other week and some of you actually read them all the way to the end. I know because three of you have told me so. What gives?

I like to think that my ignorance is a light, a shining beacon, for others. Because if I can turn my affliction into a proud asset, what else is not possible? Cannot then the blind lead us to greener pastures? Cannot then the lame trample our foes? Cannot then the Honda total the SUV instead of vice versa?

This is my promise to America. I will remain ignorant as long as it takes to achieve my dream in which everyone, not just the rich, can live their lives without having to know what it's like to have to know too much. We should all be able to say, "My tuition is paid for; you have to give me an A." Let me show the way.

The most important thing I ever learned in life, I learned in kindergarten. No, I'm kidding, I learned it in graduate school. But I could have learned it in kindergarten. It was that stupid. The stupid thing I learned was: if you need to know something, ask.

You might think, "That is counterproductive. If I ask questions, pretty soon I'll start knowing too much and then I won't be ignorant anymore. I will lose my identity. The next thing I know I'll start speaking with a foreign accent and wearing purple scarves, if I don't already."

No you won't. You only have to pay attention to the answers you receive long enough get things done. Then you can forget them and go back to being yourself.

Isn't that what it's all about? It's about being yourself and nobody else. If you learn a lot of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with you then you won't be you anymore. You'll be one of those pinheads that gets interviewed whenever Jim Lehrer doesn't know why Americans are too fat. The trick is: be Jim Lehrer, and you won't have to be the pinhead.

In the meantime, you may be surprised at how much you can learn just by thinking solely about yourself. For example, I like to sit on my butt and stare at the ceiling. Because of this, and because of the delight that I take in contemplating this fact, and because I am alert and receptive to sympathetic delights, I have learned in time that G. K. Chesterton once wrote 20 pages about a ceiling. Some day, or in another life, I may read those 20 pages. Later, I may learn who or what G. K. Chesterton was. Likewise, I once had sex in the front seat of a Dodge Omni, so I know what a pain parking brakes can be.

The thing that's annoying about George Bush isn't that he's the dumbest bubble in the fizz. What's annoying about him is that he's defensive about it. Like Clinton with his "I didn't have sex with that woman," Bush could benefit from outing himself. He could admit that he never wanted to speak to Gore because he was afraid Gore would know something he didn't. If Bush would publicly admit that he was ignorant he could prove himself to be the great leader that he so far has only pretended to be.

Yo Mama Is A SUV

When I was six I knew that I would never lack a home. I could stay at my parents until I finished college. After that, I could always sleep in my spaceship, if necessary.

As I grew older, I came to realize that I was being silly. It didn't have to be a spaceship. It only had to be an all-terrain ground vehicle with a self-contained ecology. The ecology would include me of course. It would have a fully automated hydroponics system that would not only grow my food for me, but prepare it and serve it to me. If it weren't also a spaceship, that would be OK. It could be a time machine, for instance.

I pictured the thing being only half as long as the average camper.

My design didn't even call for a convenient door, because there would generally be no reason to leave the contraption. I imagined that I would have a television screen with which to communicate to the outside world. I could manipulate external objects with robot arms. Somehow all the books I might want to read would fit in the on-board computer.

My seat would recline to a bed. When I needed exercise I could pull a lever (all the best inventions were controlled by levers and large impressive dials in those days) and suitable exercising devices would appear at my hands and feet.

Eventually, I began to sense a crucial flaw in the design: there was no passenger seat. I came to realize that there must not only be a passenger seat, but there must be no levers between it and me. So I was finally led to appreciate the idea of a camper with a separate space for a bed.

Campers, and their latest incarnations, the SUVs, are not just alternative homes that can ease the suffering of the houseless, they are also archetypes. The security they represent is the security of the womb. I am sure that this is why so many American guys feel they have to have an SUV. They miss their mothers, in a physical way.

Clearly though, the homeless have especially good reasons to appreciate the camper. Lets say you live in Lynnwood, in a house, and the backwards government of Lynnwood criminalizes people who live in houses. Well, then, you're stuck. But now, suppose you live in Lynnwood in a camper, and the backwards government of Lynnwood criminalizes people who live in campers. Then you can drive to Bothell and wait for them to be backwards. Bothell is prettier anyway.

Lynnwood's stated problem with the camper-endowed and other such homeless, is that they often relieve themselves in bushes. This doesn't prevent everybody in Lynnwood from owning campers and/or SUVs and polluting the air I breathe by driving them unnecessarily to and from work. Taking a daily crap in the air is still OK for Lynnwood, Everett, and Mark Sidran. Just keep it off the rhododendron roots.

Then there are people like Dave, whose real name is also fake. Dave is an old friend of mine who once made the mistake of morally opposing a war while people with guns were transporting him to it. They put him in the brig. After that his life sort of went downhill.

What makes Dave interesting, besides being a man of convictions, is that he is a whiz at creating shelter in deep forest, but his livelihood (recycling the cast-off toys of the middle and upper classes) depends on living in the city. So he would be a perfect candidate for a camper, except he can't drive.

But Dave shares the dream we all have for that mobile womb. He just has had scale his dream back to more of a rickshaw-like vehicle. He would build a home on wheels which he could physically pull from parking space to parking space as needed.

Such dreams are so powerful that they consume men like Dave, so that they spend years fretting over blue prints of the perfect home away from mother, and never demand more from society than that their dreams should be possible.