how to be a proper fool

First, write a how-to series on your blog. Be esoteric. Amuse yourself. Cry while you type, then snort-laugh, then cry again. You are a necessary fool. Now it’s time to be a proper one. You saw that coming, I know. Best accept your fate. Necessary, proper. Without you, the protagonists would have no one to keep their stories going. Protagonists need you to distract the audience, while they change costumes in the wings.

If you don’t have a blog, start one, eight years too late. No one reads blogs anymore. They’re too long, like books and marriages and recipes and your hair. Start a blog anyway. The key to being a proper fool is to begin everything too late, and to continue the endeavor long after everyone else has moved on. This applies to everything you do: technology, careers, running, love. Make a note of it.

Write only about what moves you. Write only about what you care about. Forget self-marketing. That’s for other people, the ones who are slick and smart and ambitious and of this era. You are not of this era. You don’t belong here, though the well-adjusted people you know will tell you that this is not true, that this is not possible. You’re here, aren’t you? You’re obviously supposed to be here, if you are here.

Their logic, you think, is lacking, but you’d be hard pressed to explain why. You are here, thus you are supposed to be here? No. They are missing the point, or you are. It’s quite possible that you are. You didn’t understand mathematical proofs, either. This, then blah blah blah, then that. See?

You did not see, not even when your father, a brilliant mathematician, patiently tried to explain proofs to you. You tried and tried and tried to understand (you understood, sort of, when he explained that the word calculus means little pebbles, for instance). But the gate in your mind that led to proof comprehension would not budge, would not give way. Everyone in your class understood proofs, even the girls who did not care. All around you, teenaged brains sloshing in one high, rough sea of bone and human hair and Aqua Net were proving proofs. Pencils scratched and stabbed at lily-white papers. Meanwhile, you stared at your blank page and felt miserable, knowing it would look like you hadn’t tried. Prove the proof. What could that mean? To this day, you still feel sick to your stomach, hearing the word proof. So many fiery hoops in this lifetime. Jump. Right through. Go. Prove it.

Congratulations, belatedly, by the way. The failure. That was the mark of a proper fool, then, already. You were ahead of your time. A proper fool labors to understand what she thinks she should understand, but fails, inevitably.

But you, now. Write your way. A necessary fool, a proper fool. Fly your fool flag. Write, write! Prove the proof that you existed, once, for someone who might care, might notice, when you no longer exist. There is no promising, of course, that there will be someone like that, in your future, besides your kids. A fool knows this, but writes anyway.

Your parents would care, but they will likely be gone by the time you are gone, as it should be. They should not have to notice when you depart the earth. That’s too much, for any parent. Anyway, you’ve already let them down, not understanding proofs, still needing grocery money, still having nightmares, and never being on Oprah, not even once, even though you had all those years to find your way to Oprah’s couch. Oprah was waiting for you. She would have retired years ago, if she’d realized you weren’t coming. No, don’t let your parents down by dying before they do. Get something right, for once.

Write only about what can be misconstrued and misunderstood. They will never think you are trying, that you have tried to win/to stop/to drop it/to love intelligently/to love yourself/to move forward/to learn from the past/to be in the present. A proper fool must never get her point across properly, to her own satisfaction, or anyone else’s. A proper fool must belabor every thought, dragging her feet and her pen through the mire of her own mind. A proper fool must weary her desired audience as she wearies herself: What, is she still going on about that? Jesus.

You know that you are tenacious because you have been cursed by the beauty you’ve seen, the beauty that you’ve touched. It’s poison, that stuff. One taste, and you’re a dead man. You know bliss—or rather, you did. Of course you’re going to keep tapping at the lever, frantic for pellets. Animals, yes, some of us. The fools, especially.

You’ve read the books; you know the approximate lifespan of a human being (which, for all intensive purposes, you are). This is a long, long life, made too long by an early taste of happiness, a too-soon stretch of contentment, a true but doomed connection to another homo sapiens. You say cave, they grunt and say cave. You point to the fire, they hand you another piece of bark and smile a broken grin that might as well be yours.

Write of this. Write of what you know. Let them, for once, be the ones who feel certain they are missing something, some crucial piece of information. Let them attempt to solve your proof, to find the blah blah blah that leads to you, straight to the heart you’d be delighted to share. They won’t, of course, the others. But be briefly optimistic. That’s the job of a proper fool: spurts of optimism, thinking that it matters, that someone, somewhere, is actually trying to figure you out, that someone might actually want to jump through those hoops you know so well. A proper fool sits in the empty circus tent, drawing equations in the sawdust, waiting for someone to come—to play with the hoops, to play with the fire.