Creative talent doesn’t mean you actually have any fucking clue.

The same is true for raw intellect. There are plenty of ‘educated’ nominally bright but clueless people making sure the trains run on time in every country in the world. The Secretary of Transportation in the US is a glorious example.

Even worldly success doesn’t mean you know anything, except for how to move the economic levers around to your advantage enough of the time to prosper more than the guy trying to sleep in a bus shelter.

Ultimately there is no unit of measure for cluefulness, and no way to tell if you’re right about anything ever.

Sometimes it’s tempting to fall back on empiricism and the scientific method, because they provide the ultimate promise of understanding some limited part of reality in its totality. Either this frog is a vertebrate or it isn’t. Either this celestial body is a planet or a planetoid or something else. Science gives us a satisfying illusion of objectivity, more than art does, more than religion does, even more than money does.

In the end though it consists of higher quality smoke and better mirrors. They taught us about the big bang. Now they’re reconsidering. Who knows? Nobody ever.

I feel … that this is the main problem with having to be around people.

Everybody is so certain.

The more certain they can blindly whip themselves into being, the more likely they are to rise to positions as petty tyrants, when people collect themselves into corporate groups.

Accepting some version of reality and calling it Right is rewarded, at least if you pick the version they want you to pick. Working … it’s so dignified, ennit?

The best jobs are the ones where they leave you the fuck be.

The best relationships are the ones that are almost as good as being alone.

I made up that last line when I was 28, and when I told it to my paramour she laughed merrily, because she felt the same.

That was a good day, and being Right had nothing to do with it.

Amirite?

Hardly ever.