Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (2 page)

F
irst, meet my brain. It is the size of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s fist, the consistency of flan, and weighs as much as a two-slice toaster. You probably think yours resembles a shelled walnut, but mine looks more like
ground round with a high fat content. If you saw it at the butcher’s, you’d ask for something a little less beige.

If you were a plastic surgeon, you’d say my brain needed a facelift. The reason my brain is so wrinkly and ridged is that, like a suitcase packed with a lot of junk, it contains too many neurons to fit smoothly inside my skull. If you ironed out my brain, you could use it as an ironing board cover.

Or you could use it to power your night-light. Do you know that operating a robot with a processor as fancy as your brain would require the same amount of energy generated by a small hydroelectric plant? You could not afford its electric bill.

Of late I’ve been a bit worried about it. My brain, I mean. Although the combination to my junior high school locker seems to be stored indelibly in some handy nook of my temporal lobe, right next to Motown song lyrics, could it be that elsewhere up there, not everything is in shipshape? When I ask my brain a simple, no-brainer question like “What is the word for that thing that’s sort of a harmonica but more annoying and looks like you could smoke pot with it?” or “Who did that fat actress with those eyes and the diamond marry twice?” or “
Abjure
or
adjure
—which is the one I mean?” or “Did that lady say to turn left or right at the light?” or “The guy who just said hello to me—do I know him?”
or “Have I already told Phil and Cynthia this story I just started telling them?” or “All that stuff I used to know about Charlemagne’s in-laws—where’d it go?” or “While I was looking at the fabric on the sofa in the background, did the villain in that scene get killed off?” or “What did I do last Saturday?” or “Did I turn
off my phone?” or “How in the world was I planning to end this sentence…?”

Anyway, what I believe I was going to say is that my brain is not nearly as quick on the draw as it used to be. Indeed, sometimes, when I look for my glasses while wearing my glasses, I think, “My, my, it’s going to be a very smooth transition to dementia.”

What is going on? In my darkest moments, I imagine that my friends are humoring me when they insist the amnesiac lapses of their brains are no less alarming than mine. (“Have you ever squeezed toothpaste onto your contact lenses?!” a friend asked triumphantly.) Could they be conspiring to shield me from my diagnosis, kindly reasoning the news would only agitate me since there is no cure for what my brain has? Another interpretation is that my think tank is filled with so much accumulated intelligence—the shoe size of my ex, the names of Sarah Jessica Parker’s children, the calories in cottage cheese—that the contents are gunking up the works, not to mention leaving room for little else.

Or perhaps my brain simply has too much on its mind. How can it be expected to function when it must check my e-mail and texts every two to three seconds? Multitasking? It can hardly task. Back in the halcyon
days when my cerebral cortex was in its prime, it had a cushy to-do list—a little homework, a few friends’ names to keep track of, nothing more. Not even laundry to sort. Still another theory is that my brain was never the hotshot I remember its having been. Was it ever really able to solve a polynomial equation? I think yes, but I can’t make promises. (You don’t think I kept a math diary, do you?) Furthermore, no matter what my upper story will tell you now, my habit for losing things goes back at least to my early twenties. Once, in a school cafeteria, I frantically asked all servers and eaters and cleaner-uppers in sight whether they’d seen my large black tote that, unbeknownst to me, I was conspicuously toting under my arm. I got funny looks, but nobody broke the truth to me.

Then there’s the saddest possibility yet: Maybe nothing’s the matter with my gray matter. Except for age. CORRECTION: second-to-saddest.

My brain is no spring chicken. It is as old as the wait for Godot, the hydrogen bomb, and Methuselah’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- (and so on and
so forth) grandniece. How old exactly does this make my brain? Do I have to say? My mother would disapprove. On my last birthday, she said she remembered turning my age and feeling sorry for her mother for having a daughter so old. On the bright side, my mother still remembers. Her mother, my grandmother, remembered most things until she died at age ninety-nine, except she thought she was ninety-seven because, as we later determined, she forgot she’d lied about her age.

It is possible that you will become so immersed in solving the puzzles in this book that you will lose all sense of time, forget to eat, and eventually starve to death. It is also possible that
here
will give you a paper cut that will become infected and the infection will turn into flesh-eating disease and you will be dead before you can say, “Page thirty-two.” Or perhaps you will be so startled by what I have to say your heart will say whoa and you will keel over for good. This is all possible, but it is not probable. In fact, the odds of dying from complications of this book are one in 233,457,830.

DIRECTIONS:

Below are several other unlikely ways of dying. To be fair (to fate), they are arranged alphabetically. Number them with number one being the most farfetched.

ANSWERS:

SCORING:

To compute your score, calculate the difference for each item between the number you assigned it and its actual number. Now add up these results. Or have your bookkeeper do this. If you received a score of 15 or less, you are immortal.

DIRECTIONS FOR THE ONE PERSON WHO HAS NEVER HEARD OF
MAD LIBS
:

Ask someone how to play.

Last night? When was last night? I, uh… what
did
I do? Hold on, lemme look it up in my whatchamacallit, __________ [THREE-SYLLABLE NOUN]. Uh-oh, where’s my—don’t tell me I left it in the back seat of the __________ [LONG WORD]? Oh. Here it is. How’d that get inside my __________ [LARGE HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE]? Anyway, we went out with the whatstheirnames. He works with whosis and she’s the one with the brother. The brother went to jail for, what’s it called? __________ing [THREE-SYLLABLE VERB ENDING IN
-EER
]? We went to that movie that’s very popular but nobody likes. Called maybe __________ [SCIENCE WORD]? The suave guy who used to be in everything but now you never see him, he’s in it. Didn’t he direct that movie where people smoke? I think it has a __________ [PREPOSITION] or a __________ [CONJUNCTION] in the title. So, what’d you do last night?… What do you mean you and I had plans?!