(This originally appeared in Brutarian Quarterly #53; for a while I wrote a column there about ignorance in general and my ignorance in specific. It was a lot of fun and I figure I’ll post them here now and again.)

Episode Seven: Monetizing Ignorance

Use As Instructed.

FRIENDS, lord knows there are plenty of things I wish I could forget. Like the time in High School when I got really drunk and. . .well, actually, that covers most of High School, so it might be best to delete those seven years entirely. Or the time in college when I got really drunk and. . .well, actually, those are eight sloshy years that are best forgotten altogether as well, filled with bitterness and heartache, unrequited love and poor diet choices.

The point is, there’s plenty of terrible, hurtful memories I’d like to get rid of, most of which involve large groups of people laughing and pointing while I weep. This is where you realize that ignorance, often relegated to insult-comedy and character assassination, can actually have a beneficial affect on your life. Ignorance is not always a Bad Thing, in other words. Properly channeled, it could be one of the greatest medical advances ever.

Consider, if you will, the debilitating effect knowledge has on all of us. Terrible knowledge. Knowledge of pain and suffering, of humiliations and consequences, of evil and of pain. It’s a wonder any of us attempt anything after the age of twenty-five. The fact that any adult is in any way functional I put down to the glory of alcohol abuse, although I freely admit the negative affects of such a lifestyle often cancel out whatever false courage The Drink gives you. If we could simply delete unwanted memories whenever we liked, think of how much extra courage you would have on a daily basis? I mean, I wonder to myself what kind of superman would I be if I didn’t have this memory of being promoted to Senior Patrol Leader of my Boy Scout Troop when I was fourteen and entering into a six month slide of Epic Fail that resulted in me shying away from any hint of authority or responsibility ever since. Man, if I didn’t have that terrible memory—which involved the scorn and derisive humor of not only the former SPL whose position I inherited, but of the adult Scoutmaster and Assistant Scoutmasters as well—I might have actually become ambitious in my life. I’d probably already be ruling the world, except for that panic-inducing experience.

Now, because of my ill-fated attempt to be a teenaged authority figure, I flee any sort of responsibility, and I live in Hoboken with four cats instead of in some secret underground base with an army of mercenaries ready to die for my cause.

Imagine, though, if I could erase that memory and start fresh. Wake up tomorrow and no longer have any idea that taking on a leadership position might lead to humiliation and horror! Sort of like in that movie The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, except instead of erasing bad relationships, erasing any kind of bad experience that now makes you think twice before doing something. In other words, not so much erasing a memory as inserting ignorance. Ignorance which then acts to protect you from fear.

After all, why do most of us refuse to do things—say, mainline heroin, or jump out of a plane without a parachute? Simple: We know the consequences and choose to avoid them. But what if we didn’t know the consequences? That’s right: We’d be superman. And, yes, most likely dead within a very short period of time. But like the Replicants in Blade Runner, we’d be gods for that very short period of time, wouldn’t we? Unstoppable, completely without any common sense or fear of dismemberment.

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Of course, I am old and dissipated by Drink. The world has likely passed me by, and it’s too late to save me—besides, my list of humiliations which have scarred me into terminal passivity is far too long. You’d pretty much have to delete my personality entirely and reboot me as a thirty-seven year-old infant. Which no one wants. So I must instead bend my intelligence and severe lack of restraint on helping the world altruistically, using my immense fortune and bottomless resources to invent The Inner Swine Bad Memory Redactor.

THE INNER SWINE BAD MEMORY REDACTOR (BMR)

The design of the Implement is, of course, pretty simple, and some might say that I’ll never get a patent as there is ubiquitous prior art. That doesn’t matter—the important part about the Bad Memory Redactor is in its proper use. If you learn where to apply the BMR and with what amount of force, you can surgically remove specific memories with complete accuracy and almost no negative side effects. For the purposes of this essay we are not counting the memory loss as a negative side effect, of course.

The procedure is simple: Based on detailed phrenologic diagrams supplied wit the the BMR, you simply select the spot on the head which will delete the appropriate memory. Then have your subject concentrate on that memory until it is all they are thinking of, filling all of their thoughts. Then you rear back and give an accurate but forceful smack with the implement. Like magic, the memory is deleted.

Think about what you could do if you didn’t know everything you know! Have trust issues? Burn out a few traumatic experiences from your childhood and ta-da! You’ll be a trusting, secure person. Fall out of a tree when you were five and get the heebies every time you’re up high? One expert swing of the BMR and you might realize your secret dream of being an acrobat. Haunted by dreams of being naked in front of crowds? One quick, slightly excruciating application of the BMR in expert hands and you’ll be break-dancing on stage in front of thousands in no time.

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Ignorance does not have to be solely an affliction—it can be used as a tool as well, the same way debilitating alcohol consumption can help you through trauma even as it rots your brain and destroys your liver. Certainly you don’t want to be deleting every single bad memory you have—aside from making you incredibly dull and probably doomed to an early death due to your complete and impenetrable ignorance, the repeated head traumas would probably result in some semiserious and somewhat permanent brain damage. But for dealing with the occasional phobia-inducing searing hell of a memory, it’s genius. I’ll start the rates at $1500 per treatment, medical bills not included, though I will throw in a free ride-and-dump to the local Emergency Room if you fail to regain consciousness within an hour. Which hardly ever happens, trust me.

(This originally appeared in Brutarian Quarterly #52; for a while I wrote a column there about ignorance in general and my ignorance in specific. It was a lot of fun and I figure I’ll post them here now and again.)

Episode Six: Retroactive Ignorance

I Title this: Handsome Bastard

They say that time travel is impossible. “They” being the faceless, cruel scientists who actually rule this planet with their “knowledge” and “expertise”. If I had knowledge and expertise I’d probably be unstoppable, but this damned ignorance keeps getting in the way, dooming me to a life of beer-swillage and remote-fondling. And, of course, pondering ignorance and its power, which is apparently infinite. When they figure out dark matter and string theory, I’m sure what they’ll find at the core of the universe is, you got it, ignorance. In fact, a sufficient level of generalized ignorance even makes time travel possible, and not in the traveling-forward-in-time-at-regular-speed way.

Usually ignorance is pretty much in the moment and, like the elusive rainbow, disappears the moment you realize it was there at all. But sometimes ignorance—such is its power—can cast a long shadow backwards in time as the sudden inrush of knowledge that fills the vacuum exposed by your realization of ignorance sheds light on past events and makes you realize you’ve actually been a jackass for much longer than you had previously imagined.

The effect is startling. Trust me.

Naturally, such revelations are almost always humiliating in nature, for vengeful ignorance crushes its enemies and punishes those who attempt to dispel it. The worst part is, with retroactive ignorance the humiliation reverberates backwards in time, illuminating the last few months or years or decades of your life in the harsh yellow light of Fail.

An easy illustrative example of this is the simple mispronunciation of words.Say you spend your entire adult life pronouncing “segue” as seeg. “And then we seeg into the next scene.” You do so completely free of shame or self-consciousness because you don’t actually realize you’re pronouncing it wrong—you’re ignorant. And no one corrects you because they know how embarrassing it is to be corrected about something trivial like that. Then, one day, you’re reading a ridiculous column in a cool underground-type magazine and some points out that it should actually be pronounced segway, and you quickly experience the following string of events:

1. An urge to snort and point out how ridiculous this is to someone standing near you
2. The sour, rotten tendrils of doubt poke through your bravura
3. You look up the word and realize you have been saying it wrong for approximately your whole life
4. You are embarrassed
5. You start recalling how often you like to use the word in your daily conversations because you think it makes you sound erudite
6. Flashes of all the moments in time you’ve used the word go through your mind as your humiliation speeds backwards in time until it reaches you as a zygote and implants itself inside your soul
7. You realize your whole life has been a terrible sham and failure and begin to contemplate suicide
8. Someone says let’s go have a drink and you cheer up, but resolve to never use the word again
9. After three or nine drinks you suddenly realize you just used the word “segue” sixteen times in conversation and mispronounced it, as usual, all sixteen times
10. And no one corrected you in any way
11. So you decide they are all your enemies, secretly laughing at you behind your back, and excuse yourself to go throw up in the bathroom, attempt to climb out the window in order to make a dramatic and secretive exit, get wedged in the small bathroom window, pass out, and wake up the next morning in a hotel room in Mexico, sitting in a tub full of ice with a cell phone duct-taped to your hand

This happens. Trust me. Such is the power of ignorance.

In fact, I doubt it could ever be proven that the sudden realization of long-standing ignorance doesn’t actually alter past events as opposed to merely altering your perception/recollection of them. Say you suddenly remember a moment when you used “segue” incorrectly and now you remember that everyone burst into laughter and at the time you assumed it was because of something hilarious you just said even though what you said wasn’t all that hilarious, but now you see they were laughing at your sad lack of proper pronunciation. Or were they? Maybe they were laughing at something you said—until you realized your ignorance, and changed the past.

String theory is a hell of a thing. You can’t prove I’m wrong.

Of course, having established that Ignorance can travel backwards along your timeline and alter events in the past, isn’t it conceivable that it can also change the future? After all, once you learn how to properly pronounce “segue” you’re unlikely to mispronounce it in the future (unless you are brain damaged in some way). As a matter of fact, you’ll probably go out of your way to ensure you don’t mispronounce it ever again, as from that point forward you will be sadly aware of the humiliation involved. You will take steps. You will write the word phonetically on your hand in permanent marker. You will practice in front of the mirror, privately. You will invent little mnemonic games to help you remember.

In other words, you will consciously change your behavior, thus altering the future.

You’re starting to see why we should immediately build a huge golden statue of the God Ignorance and start slaughtering cattle at its base, yes? Ignorance could crush you, boyo. It holds the Deep Magic in its taloned hands.