THE FOOL

I love being a fool.

Being so very unattached, despite knowing that my attitude is both salve and irritant, all at once. 

Maybe, I am a fool because I do not learn. 

I hurt myself in the same way and say “ouch” each time. 

Sometimes, concerned passerby will stare, casting their ice-cold or red-hot judgement, asking themselves with a typical smugness that comes doubly wrapped in concern and, if we’re being honest, a little contempt:

The Fool. Why does he not learn? 

Why does he not do as we do?

And, so battered by all that horrid morality- that judgement- I hid myself away. 

I went far and wide, in my daring escape. And in my self-imposed isolation, I discovered nihilism. But even that, I did not learn properly.

I, quite optimistically, set about making this optionally mandatory pantomime we call living, better for myself. 

Never stopping to ask myself first: better, according to whom?

I’ve been selfish and dishonest, and humans have a natural aversion to those who too readily admit to dishonesty and exceeding self-interest.

I mean, honestly… How could they trust me, armed with the knowledge that I have lied before?

But like most fools, like most writers, I lie about lying.

Much like anyone who finds themselves, unreadily, the subject of too much scrutiny- too much judgement, and poorly equipped to handle either. 

Self-defense becomes, as I suspect it was always meant to be, an instinctive, survival tactic. 

And how does one typically defend their ego?

It’s said that the wise learn from history, fools, from experience. 

I am learning to experience. To taste the different flavors and textures of life. 

I find pain and sorrow are among some of my more memorable, more bitter textures. 

I wonder, in my bleaker, more somber moments, why it hurts so differently, so uniquely, each time. 

Thus, I’ve become a creature of questions. 

I tell myself, as well as anyone and everyone who will read my writing, that it is in the pursuit of a “higher truth”.

A pull toward knowledge.

But surely I am lying. 

Self-deception is also self-defense, in a way. 

To spot the guilty, simply look at the justification. 

Truth is, I’ve always been ashamed of being thought of as a fool. To those who expected so much of me, and were oft disappointed. 

I still wear their disappointment like armor, you see. 

A badge of honor. 

Wielding “who cares” and “none of it matters” like sword and shield. 

In order to better arm myself, I read history, hoping to be wiser.

The page would be my whetstone, its content, the steel I would hide behind.

For what sharper- what blunter object exists, than an idea, dressed up in the fine, pristine vestments of truth?

It is how we tend to differentiate the wise from the foolish, after all.

Through history.