Why Intelligence Is Useless....

I think I have come to the conclusion that all this knowledge I have attained, all these facets of growth and learning that I use to guard myself, that like minded pretentious people use to guard themselves, is, as I get older, becoming more and more useless. I think somewhere between digging into books by people I admire and forcing myself to read those by people I despise, I have learned far too much, become so jaded by the naivety of society and of the people that share my convictions and beliefs, that I've given up on any semblance of hope for the world I live in.

If that sounds sad or selfish, I'll be the first to agree. I'd gladly give back what I know to be that stupid, grammatically challenged ten year old from Georgia. He had faith in people. He looked forward to things. The twenty five  year old me has no faith in people and mildly enjoys the prospect of things to come. He stews in his sarcasm, dreads the next caffeine fueled Facebook debate. It's all a cycle, a vicious cycle of my intellect vs your intellect. The issue isn't who's smarter. It's that it doesn't even matter. 

The wisest of men often die the greatest of fools. I never understood that growing up, discovering Flannery O'Conner in high school, openly rejecting Mark Twain in college. I could not comprehend that intelligence had this epic downside, this sort of enveloping darkness to it. You come to a point where there's not someone who's got a last confession about the real world left. You come to a point where adults you once assumed were brilliant become painfully stupid satires of your youthful concept. That's where the depression of reality becomes all too real, where you'd give anything to be ignorant, to be simple. 

Your brain, my brain, is a prison. And all we have to fight it with is love.

The truth is that love is beyond intelligence. It seeks something of us not taught in a school or a television special...or a book. Love gratifies the ignorant and informed alike. None of us are immune to that possible glimmer of hope that it provides. That's why we need it, why we should strive to embody it. Our best minds cannot decipher love as a concept. We, ourselves, are clueless. I think I can live with that if it means there's one thing I can't get enough of, that attacks my darkness with light.

Love is a lot of things, the wife sleeping next to me, the sound of "Master Of Puppets" in shitty headphones, miles of beach, newborn babies, the taste of blood after a good fight, broken people lifted up....and maybe the way cracked neon looks in the darkness of the Nevada desert. Old things can become new. Water can be turned to wine. And for all the distress my knowledge brings me, love, in the form of a good nights sleep, will detoxify today's cold reality so that tomorrows can be less of a drain.

Figure it out, smartass.