The Inner Swine Guide to Ignorance, Episode 5

The Inner Swine Guide to Ignorance
Episode Five: The Walk of Shame

Friends, like many of you, I once aspired to be a rock star.

This was before I realized how uncommonly dorky I am, of course. Plus the complete lack of musical talent—I mean, Mozart was composing when he was what, six years old? And The Beatles wrote complex, timeless pop songs before they even knew a single thing about formal music training. Me, I could sometimes hum a song well enough for it to be recognized [1]. Sometimes. Most times when I hummed, I wound up receiving the Heimlich maneuver and mouth-to-mouth from a concerned stranger.

Of course, that’s what you get when you hum tunelessly in public. Yet another lesson Ignorance has gifted me with.

Still, this didn’t seem to be a real deterrent. First of all, electric guitars appeared to me to be magical instruments wherein you simply strummed the strings and Black Dog by Led Zeppelin came booming out [2]. Second of all, most rock stars seem kind of dopey, so I imagined it couldn’t possibly be that hard to take three simple chords and write something like Wild Thing [3]. Sure, maybe something like Layla would be a little beyond my thick, peasant fingers, but a couple of chords? Why not. I’m a reasonably intelligent man, with reasonable dexterity [4]. If I were a more self-confident nerd I’d make some lame role-playing joke here about having a 3 Dexterity, which most of you wouldn’t get, and you’d then ask your nearest nerd friend who’d explain it to you, and then you’d mail me some sort of devastating insult regarding my nerdiness. Damn your eyes.

Back in college [5] my old roommate donated his cheap starter guitar to me when we moved out of our apartment in order to save him the trouble of dealing with it, and I spent a few months creating my own riffs and chords in a vacuum of any knowledge whatsoever, a sort of Asperger’s version of music. In the loneliness of my new apartment I have no idea if any of it resembled music at all, and no record of those compositions survives today, sadly. Perhaps they were the brilliant, haunting music of an alien intelligence, or maybe they were just the atonal janglings of a moron who didn’t even know how to tune his instrument. The world will never know, and you’re possibly lucky for that—the guitar neck snapped one night without warning or fanfare, a final sour note burping into the air and then fading away.

For years, I forgot all about guitar.

I’m a big believer in what I call Heinleinism, based on the famous quote by Robert Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

In short, I’ve taken to heart the notion that I should be able to perform a wide range of skills. I don’t require that I be particularly good at them, but I think I should at least attempt to learn something more than the basic math and language skills that allow me to live a normal life in the United States—I mean, everything I use at my job I more or less learned in Grammar School (with the exception for the soul-deadening willingness to sell my time in exchange for cash, a skill you generally learn in your twenties after being beaten by life a little). It don’t require any fancy thinking.

Of course, I’ve pretty much failed at everything I’ve tried since this realization. I tried my hand at computer programming and while I can write a decent Visual Basic ditty, I have no real grasp of the art. I tried to learn how to really play chess and now have one lazily-memorized opening and some basic strategies in my brain to show for it. I tried to learn French and can now say stuff like “Good day, my name is Jeff. I must be going to have one glass of beer, please. Now![6]” and very little else. Still, I figure someday I’ll find myself in the midst of an action-movie disaster and I’ll be that character who’s a Jack of All Trades, Master of None who’s backstory has been one of failure and humiliation, except in order to survive the disaster he will need every shred of his half-assed, vague skills! So I keep plodding on. Guitar was next on the list.

Next stop: The Walk of Shame.

The Walk of Shame is a time-honored tradition for Ignorants like Your Humble Correspondent. It starts with a rush of enthusiasm:

ME: I’m going to learn how to play guitar!
YOU: Who are you again? And why are you standing on my table? And MY GOD WHERE ARE YOUR PANTS?[7]

This sometimes, though not always—the pull of The Drink is insidious, and many times my bout of enthusiasm for learning has been sidetracked by a celebratory cordial that has stretched out into a Mexican Holiday of some months—results in a serious attempt by The Ignorant in question to learn the skill mentioned, and since Ignorants are kind of slow-witted, we usually tell everyone in shouting distance of our plans. We brag of our determination and talk fondly of the steps we’re taking in order to attain the goal.

Then, naturally, we fail.

Maybe not totally. We might pick up a few things, a couple of tricks, some basic knowledge—and as this reduces our total store of ignorance, it isn’t a complete waste of time. But after telling everyone that you’re going to play guitar someday soon, when you emerge weeks later dehydrated and sallow and all you can do is hesitantly pick out Mary Had a Little Lamb in a shaky, barely-recognizable rhythm, you get to walk by all your friends and family with head hung in shame, while they all think the same thing: Why did we think for a second he could pull it off?

Because, you see, Ignorance is not simply a lack of knowledge. It is the lack of knowledge-acquiring skills. A true Ignorant isn’t simply lazy—though we do tend to be lazy, lordy yes—but also incapable. It’s what separates us from the Normals, who I define as anyone who understands instinctively how to make minor repairs.

After the Walk of Shame, of course, there’s nothing left for it but to drink heavily for a while, thus reducing even further whatever feeble skills and memories you have, and the cycle is complete. After a while you will doubtlessly start to have an urge to learn something new, and the whole horrible thing begins again, leading inexorably to the Walk of Shame. Believe me, I know.
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[1] Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to identify the song I am humming, and it maddens me. Either I am experiencing something akin to what Paul McCartney experienced when he dreamed “Yesterday” and walked around humming it, waiting for someone to tell him he was stealing someone else’s song, or I am being beamed alien music from another planet, or this is the theme song of my inner monologue, leaking out. Which is: Awkward.