Nobody's Grading Me On This

I got my GED at nineteen, already working nights by then, and I never went back for anything past it. No community college, no night classes, nothing added since. So when somebody asks why a guy who runs a kitchen line six nights a week is sitting on the porch with a philosophy of mind book, I don’t have a clean answer. I just keep doing it.

Supersizing the Mind took me most of three weeks. Thinking, Fast and Slow took longer. Neither one was written for somebody like me, they were built for somebody who already had a degree in hand before they opened the cover, footnotes assuming you know what “enactive” means going in. I don’t. I look half the words up on my phone standing in the walk-in doorway, wherever I happen to be when I hit one. I already used the line once, in the review, prep-burned fingers and a GED don’t exactly prepare you for enactive externalism. Still true. Not walking it back.

For a long time I figured that meant I shouldn’t be reading them at all. Now I think it just means I read them slower, and slower isn’t the same as wrong. There’s a difference between not understanding a book and not carrying the same schooling as the guy who wrote it, and I used to fold those into one thing, figured if it was hard, it meant I didn’t belong in the room. Smart on paper and smart at what’s in front of you turned out to be two different tools, being clever is the original double-edged sword either way, and I only ever had the one edge handed to me.

The moment that actually moved something was in the Clark book, the part about the ticket rail basically doing my remembering for me, cognition happening out in the kitchen instead of just behind my eyes. I understood that sentence before I understood the ten pages of philosophy stacked in front of it, because I’d lived it for five years before I ever saw it written down. That’s not the same as being smart the way the book is smart. It’s not nothing either.

I don’t resent the books for being hard. What I resent, some nights, is how long it takes me to get through what somebody with the degree could read in an evening while I’m still on chapter four. Some weeks I’ve only managed the first chapter among the stack by the bed. There’s a particular kind of tired that comes from decoding a sentence three times before it lands, stacked on top of the tired already sitting in my legs from an eight hour shift, and there were nights I dragged myself through a chapter with my fingernails and still couldn’t tell you what it said in the morning.

But nobody’s grading me on it. I’m not writing a paper. If I skip the two chapters where Kahneman goes deep into the statistics and pick the thread back up a week later, nobody takes points off. That’s the actual upside of reading this stuff outside a classroom, I get to read it wrong, out of order, half understood, and still walk away with something real that’s mine to keep.

The regular who keeps handing me these, the one who freezes on the lunch special and turns every purchase into a seminar, didn’t hand them over because he thinks I’m becoming a philosopher. He hands them over at the bar two blocks from work because he likes talking about them after close and I’m the one still sitting there at midnight. That’s the actual reason I keep doing this to myself, somebody keeps handing them to me and I’m too stubborn to say a book’s above my pay grade. That’s one thing about me that hasn’t changed and I don’t expect it to. Doesn’t mean it stops being hard. Doesn’t mean some nights I don’t feel like I wandered into the wrong classroom and sat down anyway, GED in my back pocket, taking notes on a lecture nobody invited me to.