I should probably put a few style books on my Kindle just in case, so I won't have to use DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn't track you, to prove I have heard of them, that I can if need be cite things like a scholar. In case anybody out there suspects that I never got a PhD because I'm not smart enough, as opposed lacking the self-discipline bordering on masochism one must exhibit to attempt such a thing.
One girl I dated actually followed through on her high school plan to get a PhD in Russian Literature by writing about an obscure poet from (I think) Petrograd so she can go around signing herself Doctor [Whatever] for the next 30 years, even though her actual career has nothing to do with the subject and doesn't require such a credential. But advanced degrees were expected in her family, her older siblings and their spouses had or were pursuing them, so she couldn't let down the side; and perhaps also she presumably wanted to prove that she didn't spend six months getting naked with me every Friday evening because she was a total dimwit.
When she told me she'd worked out that plan with her school guidance counselor, to get a PhD she'd never really need, I told her it was pretentious bourgeois wankery, and advised her to do something else, such as marry me, have my baby, and make an honest househusband out of me, which of course I didn't think she'd even consider so it was safe to suggest. Who in her right mind would get a PhD in an obscure subject just to prove she could? At the time I wrote parodies and pastiches of translations of dead French poets, but that took very little effort as, for example, the sonnet form requires only fourteen lines, and alliteration, allusion, assonance, and enjambment come naturally to idle eccentric with a congenital gift of babble.
Yet upon reading her published dissertation, which I hunted down in the local university library twenty-two years after she got rid of me, I could not withhold my admiration and respect for the fact that she actually followed through on that ridiculous scheme, and that she invested several years and fuck knows how much of her father's money in tracking down all those publications and all those interviewees, thereby proving herself my intellectual superior, to herself at least.
To be fair in those days I had a near-fatal case of Dunning-Kruger and loved to babble on about things I had only a cursory knowledge of, because I thought that's what people with 140+ IQs did, which doubtlessly annoyed the fuck out of everybody who knew better, as APs in an expensive Quaker school presumably did. It turned out that people were right when they said that IQ scores alone mean nothing, you have to back up your bragging with actual achievement, and that by the way she was absolutely correct in leaving me for dead, as it felt at the time. This realization by the way was one hell of a comedown for me, that exploded in my head once I got on the Internet and gained access to all the world's knowledge and to people who could compare Derrida and Pagels having actually read them; so thence I've spent the last fifteen years trying to prove to myself, by voracious reading in those subjects that interest me, that I'm really not a total dimwit after all.
So I hope getting involved with me was the stupidest mistake she ever made, which if so means she got that over with in her junior year of high school; I'd love to take credit for the forty-four years of brilliant successes that might have followed that, inspiring her to decide--as her people are wont to decide-- "never again." Even if she did have surgery on her nose and marry a frigging Midwestern shegetz with an even more common English name than mine which she replaced her own with, and go around putting "Doctor" before her name instead of "PhD" after it like more modest eggheads do.
I used to count this person as the love of my life, going by the extreme emotional investment she somehow called up from me and the six months of near-total collapse that followed her 'escape', yet in the years since then I have been kicking myself with "what was I thinking?" It wasn't that I punched above my weight, the kind of chicks a white trash eighth-grade drop-out are supposed to chase after literally bored the fucked out of me, but that I gambled so much on such an obvious long shot. That works okay for picking Derby winners, but then I never bet more than $5 on any horse race and have only lost less than $20 in my whole life.
I never had much success with either playing the ponies or fucking the fillies, but at least I was smart enough to not bother accumulating all the tokens middle class white men are supposed to be able to show for themselves and then lose everything because of an idiotic miscalculation or two. As I saw it there's not much difference between gaining a normal life and being an inveterate gambler, except that when gamblers win at the track they get a lot of money but when normal men win they get saddled with a lifetime of debt and perennial exhaustion. Only a damn fool--in my expert opinion--would take either role.
So the dear Doctor was right, I never got anywhere, but then I never had to try very hard either. Dragging my crazy ass through day after day has indeed been tiring, but that--as with reading thick books with lots of big words in them--came naturally to me. As does emitting this unnecessary torrent of neurotic drivel that I really can't expect anyone to read.
Nor did I ever lose very much.
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