I knew a man once who knew nothing at all and I believed him to be stupid and ignorant and could not understand why he never seemed to get smarter or learn much about anything. You could engage him in a conversation if you had .an enormous amount of patience and a humanitarian bent to offer food to the starving only to see them stash it away for later.

Or maybe they sold it and bought some booze. Numbs and then kills ya much quicker.

“Will work for food…” Ah, yes, but money is much more readily available to give, eh wot guvnor?

Only advice ever seems to be in greater abundance.

Read your Chesterton? Read your Wolfe? Read your Chaucer, Yeats, or even Clancy?

What’d you learn? Oh, you didn’t read them.

How about your New York Times or U.S.A. Today? They always have the straight scoop.

Oh, no money to buy or time to read I guess huh?

Watch the news? Consider any deep analysis on any important topics or issues of the day, this day, OUR day? Hell, any day?

Maybe just a glance at the barbershop or airport I suppose.

The first 10 times I would try to teach my kids something they would respond, when it was discovered that the thing had gone undone that “I didn’t know”. Each time I would go through it again and make them confirm that they understood and had no questions. And each time was followed by “I didn’t know”. Such a juvenile cycle.

It would seem to me to be hard to learn so much and know so little.   The amount of stuff you “didn’t know” would have to overburden just about any brain. Even remembering to not know what you should know would seem a very hard task when applied with such a broad life brush.

Too little and too darn late I think.

So you never know and you never plan to know. Do I have that down correctly?

I’ll just bet you would know to run from a hungry lion wouldn’t you?

I’ll just bet you would know to run toward a bunch of twenty dollar bills blowing around on the pavement wouldn’t you?

I’ll just bet you would know to take your hand out of that flame now, yes?

And wouldn’t you know not to piss into the wind; and not to go outside naked in the cold winter; and not to wipe your ass when you need to; and not to not pay your taxes because if you don’t you will just disappear somewhere; and not to ram your car into a tree at high speed; and certainly not to light a match when you smell gas; and not to jump out of an airplane; and not to piss off your spouse when he or she is holding a knife; and definitely not to use the toaster in the shower; and not to try to read in the dark if you tried to read at all; and not to jump out of a speeding boat when you know you can’t swim; and not to stick your hand into a hornet’s nest; and not to sharpen the blades on your mower when it was running; and, well, and and and….not to always just simply say “I didn’t know”??

So if I got that straight it seems that you are smart enough to know some very important things but really claim to not know some things that may be the undoing of us all in the end.

No matter whether it is to know to or know not to- I had always figured you to be a bit smarter than all that.

Maybe I should throw in with your lot and just ignore all that is happening with our once-great country.

Maybe I should get started not knowing and then I, too, can simply be …comfortably dumb.

Just like you.