Do you ever reflect back on your life? By reflect, what I mean is, do you ever think back to all the stupid things you’ve done over the course of your lifetime? I know that I don’t. Until recently, when I looked back on my life, I would choose to only think about the good times, ignoring the bad or, at the most, write the bad times off as unfortunate, unlucky or unfair. I’m no expert by any means. I have no data to back up my hypothesis. I have only a gut feeling. But it is with that gut feeling that I can say that if more people really looked back on their lives, really examined it, they would realize as I have, that everybody on this planet, all human beings, are really fucking stupid.

Say it with me, “I am a god damned idiot.”

There you go.

Let me explain how I got to this notion. I was at The Rainbow Room here in Hollywood. For those not local, it is not a gay bar. It is a rock and roll club where any given night, you can run into various rock stars from Slash to B Real. Needless to say, there are a lot of tattoos in this bar. I started to write a bit about tattoos and how they are worthless, have no real meaning and only serve to help those who get them jump on yet another bandwagon. Just like Justin Bieber fans. The contempt was flowing through me as it does anytime I start to get into a writing zone. Blasting the lemmings. Mocking the sheeple. It was then I started to recall a tattoo that I had considered getting when I was 18, a St. Ides label. That’s right, when I was 18 and first started drinking alcohol, I thought it would be cool to get the crooked “I” from the label of a 40 oz. malt liquor forever engraved in my flesh.

Hey, it could have been worse.

What can I say? It seemed cool at the time. Stupid ideas always do. Generally speaking, we really don’t do the things we identify as stupid as they arise. Even the rare times we do, we just call it stupid to satisfy the judgment of others, all the while judging them for their own stupidity and lack of vision, courage, etc. It is only with the passage of time we can look back at these events and see them for what they are; fucking stupid.

Then I started thinking of other stupid things I’ve done. The time my friend and I thought it would be a good idea to drop an M-80 in a glass jar of jelly and see what happens standing 10 feet away. The time I knowingly dated a coke head because she “seemed like a free spirit.” The time I took a writing gig for a comedy website without pay. All seemed like good ideas at the time. All fucking stupid. And that’s when it dawned on me. If the stupid things we do can only be identified in retrospect and our lives are full of stupid things we’ve done, then what’s not to say that we’re not completely stupid right now. This moment. This point in our lives. We are all god damned idiots.

You said it, Keanu.

I am of the opinion that we all live in a constant state of stupidity and that we are unable to see the bubble of idiocy we live in because we’re too stupid to perceive it. Why do you think most old people think everybody is stupid? Because everybody is and they can see it. The wisdom that comes with age is simply manifested through a lifetime of fuck-ups and bad decisions. The cruel truth to this truth is that by the time most of us realize it, we die. Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.

“Oh, shit.”

“But what about all the intelligent things man has done over the years?” I say to myself in my best Eric Somers inner dialog voice. What about it? How do we know how intelligent they were? Computers, airplanes, cars, the Large Hadron Collider; are they really so smart? Or are we just very adept at making complicated ways to kill ourselves? Once again, history has taught us nothing if not that the “great minds” of contemporary times have been mostly wrong and usually harmful and almost always fucking stupid. From Avandia to Zeppelins, mankind has had countless good ideas turn into a warm blanket of dumb with the passage of time. And we always say, “How could we have been so stupid?” Guess what? We weren’t stupid. We are stupid.

A really smart kinda stupid

Depending on which group of dummies you are to believe, humans as we know ourselves, have been on this planet from 6000 to 75,000 years. Either way, it’s a long time. How do we know if, in the cosmic classroom of “intelligent beings,” we’re not the slow kids? The slack jaws sitting in the back, eating our paste and shitting our pants, delusionally thinking that everybody thinks we’re cool? Wouldn’t that be great? To be visited by an alien race and they tell us, “Uh, yeah, we’ve been observing your progress now for the past thousand years and we feel it is in your best interests if we hold you back for another thousand and give you some time to mature intellectually. However, you will be happy to know that your fellow classmates, the whales, are being moved to Advanced Placement!” I love the idea of flunking as a species.

“Hey humans, shove those fish up your ass! We’re out this bitch!”

Hey, it’s not our fault, right? We’re just stupid. I mean that. It can’t be our fault. The only thing we can do is recognize our deficiencies and come to terms with them the way mentally retarded people do. Mentally retarded people know they won’t conquer the world and don’t care to. They just want to be and I have always found them to be much happier as a result – as long as nobody tries to steal their bike. Embrace your stupidity, my fellow morons. Together we will enjoy the little things in life like eating, laughing and fucking and we will be the enlightened ones, drifting through this life one fuck-up at a time and not a care in the world.

Or maybe you disagree with me. What do I know, after all? I’m just a fucking idiot like everybody else.