Too Stupid To Know

The more I learn, the brighter the spotlight is on my stupidity. At least once a day, but usually many times, I say, “I didn’t know that.” I read and try to keep up with the world around me, but it’s a losing battle. The fact I learn today has no relevance tomorrow, or so it seems most days.


Life was so easy during the teen years; I had many of the privileges of adulthood, yet possessed the wisdom of a gnat. You know the age, when we’re the most intelligent beings on the planet. During those years, we simply don’t know how much we don’t know. It’s such a blissful time.

The first giant step towards realizing the depth of our stupidity begins the day we commit to learning; for some that might be college; for others maybe later, much later. Unfortunately, I slipped into that latter category. And, I don’t believe we can include those years through twelfth grade at all. It’s the rare child indeed that consciously wants to know things about the world beyond personal purview; so rare, in fact, not worth mentioning (my apologies to the few true prodigies out there).

During my final year in high school, the only things worth knowing were what everyone was doing Saturday night, who would be doing them, and how I might fit into that scenario. For heaven’s sake; what else did I need to know? That’s why, that year, I was the most intelligent person on earth. I was convinced.

Some exceptional people discover early during the college years that learning is really sort of fun and not just a chore to be endured to pass the next exam. I wasn’t one of them. Therefore, I continued to be quite intelligent and smugly so.

The genuine slide into stupidity began with landing the job of a television news reporter. I quickly discovered that I wasn’t even smart enough to know what questions to ask during interviews. The day I tanked an important interview with Barefoot Sanders in 1972, during his campaign bid for the U-S Senate, was the very day I thought it might be beneficial to know a bit more about the world around me. Don’t try to find out what questions I asked the man, just believe they weren’t relevant to anything that had to do with the political landscape of the day. Suffice it to say, it put a huge crack in that self-imposed intelligence quotient I bestowed upon myself.

By the way, I lucked out on that fiasco. That was in the day we used 16mm film and I just told everyone that the interview was “lost in the soup”; in other words, the film processor ate it. I should have gotten an Oscar for my performance on how frustrated and disgusted I was over losing that jewel of television journalism.

From that day till now, 38 years later, I still cram like I’m expecting a pop quiz, yet I find myself saying, “Gee, I didn’t know that,” far too often anyhow. For every new thing I learn, it only creates a dozen questions in need of answers. So, you can see that the learning curve only gets steeper.

The day is fast approaching that I’ll stop trying to learn all there is to know and go back to being the most intelligent person on the planet.

Daniel (Danny) Lance Wright
Author of
"Paradise Flawed"/Dream Books LLC/2009
"Six Years' Worth"/Father's Press/2007
"Where Are You, Anne Bonny?"/Rogue Phoenix Press 2010/ ebook available
“Trouble”, short story/CrossTIME Science Fiction Anthology, Vol. IX
“Dancing Away”/short story/Untreed Reads

Coming Soon
“Defining Family”/Whiskey Creek Press/2012
“Annie’s World: Jake’s Legacy”
“The Last Radiant Heart” (re-release)
“Helping Hand for Ethan”
“Hackberry Corners, Texas 1934
“Phobia”