Why I Am So Wise, Part 2

The second installment in my series of autobiographical writing (more to come soon)

My last post was a bit of a departure for me here on my Substack—I wrote about my life. It covered the last year or so, where I lived, and some of the challenges. Someone said it was like the diary of an overgrown rat, and that’s pretty fitting. That might be a good title, but I’m going with “Why I Am So Wise” for now. Like it? I just made that title up. Feedback has been good. I think I’m going to do some more of it.

My last post covered the last year or so—from October 2021 till June 2022. There’s a lot to say about June till now, but I think I’ll go back to 2017 and work my way up to the present from there instead.

2017 is when the wheels started to come off a bit. I had been living with a girlfriend for about two years at that point, and working as an adjunct professor at a bunch of different colleges. I spent all my time commuting—from Brooklyn to Long Island, Westchester, Jersey, Manhattan, all over. And the rest of my time preparing lectures. I taught philosophy, ethics, critical thinking, things like that.

I was very meticulous—I wanted to make sure I got every possible fact down, and thought of every possible argument and counterargument. The thing about philosophy is it’s so endless—you can never prepare enough. But the funny thing is, I usually just ended up winging it when I was in class. It’s much better that way. But to wing it in a good way you have to do a lot of preparation that you throw away, so when you wing it, you know what you’re talking about. There’s a fine line between winging it and just bullshitting. Winging it is the good form of bullshitting, and students can tell.

In 2017 I taught more classes than any other year. It was probably about 15, give or take. I taught a bunch of summer classes too so that made the total even higher. When you’re an adjunct professor, you don’t make much money, and work is never guaranteed, so you take whatever you can get. You never turn down work, even when the job is far away and you really need a day off in your schedule. You just take all the jobs you can, and you figure out how to deal with it. In 2017, this caught up with me. I started getting white hairs (I have a lot more now, after the pandemic, my Dad dying, and lots of other shit. But women seem to like the salt and pepper thing so it’s not too terrible).

I mostly taught ethics classes, and the way I did it was to always talk about current events and tie it into ethical theories. So I was a newshound, constantly looking for the worst possible stories to bring to class for discussion. I would always do it in a positive way— “Wow can you believe what a shitty world this is?” and students enjoyed it, I think. But that also caught up with me. There’s only so much negativity you can immerse yourself in before it starts to take a toll.

Our apartment in Brooklyn was extremely small. I don’t know the square footage, but I could never fully walk around without maneuvering and tip-toeing. I would often smash my big ass feet into things, and be mad about it for days on end. My girlfriend at the time, let’s call her Sara, had a lot of hobbies. She would paint, sew, collect vintage clothes and knickknacks that she wanted to sell. (Brooklyn hipsters call it “sourcing.”) So our tiny place was packed with all kinds of shit. And I had lots of books. It was a pretty insane place. I liked how she had hobbies and interests and shit. I never really did, just reading, smoking weed, going on walks, smoking cigarettes, watching the Celtics, and brooding. It’s nice to have a girlfriend who has hobbies and does things. Men should just brood, and women should do nice little things to fill their time.

She had a cool 1997 Ford XL Ranger pickup truck. It was black. It ran really well for a 20 year old car and I used it to drive to classes in Westchester and Long Island. It was a lot better than taking public transit to those faraway places, but driving anywhere in the NYC area is awful. So I would often get back home late at night, and she had dinner ready to go. There would be meat, vegetables, pasta, etc. Real food. Never ate that well before or since. Before I lived with her I would cook for myself, but then that stopped when she started doing it. Now I live alone and I don’t cook at all, I kind of got out of the habit, and it’s hard to get back into it.

It was great having dinner ready when I got home, and she was very happy to see me. She would go to bed earlier than me and I would stay up really late watching YouTube videos and smoking bowl after bowl of weed. Most of my classes were afternoon and evening so I could stay up late. I watched history lectures and philosophy lectures, and during those years I learned more than at any other time probably. In retrospect I probably shouldn’t have been staying up all night smoking weed and injecting endless content into my brain. Should’ve just had dinner, gone to bed with my chick, and gotten up early. A simple life is best, but the only thing I cared about was feeding my brain as much as possible. Also our bed was small—we shared a full sized bed—and I didn’t like being in it. Sara was a bit of a bed hog—she slept in a big question mark position, with her ass sticking out. I loved her big ass, but also hated fighting it for space in the bed. Perhaps this is dialectics.

I would fall asleep on the couch most nights, and then end up in bed later, somehow, in a weed-fueled haze. We probably should’ve gotten a bigger bed, but there wasn’t really enough room.

Most of my students didn’t want to be taking philosophy classes, but they usually ended up liking it more than they thought they would. Lots of days I didn’t want to be there, and they could probably pick up on that, and they didn’t get a lot out of those days. It depended on the content of the day. On days when we covered Nietzsche, I was really into it, and students who usually didn’t give a shit, would lean forward with big expectant faces, like some secret was going to be revealed. Those were good days. One student, an intense kid named Miking (pronounced like My King, like he was my king), actually got out of his seat and had to stand because it was all so intense. It was powerful. I remember it well. Those were the days I would go outside after the class and triumphantly smoke a cigarette, thinking that I had made some kind of impact on the world. (As opposed to most days, when I would dejectedly smoke a cigarette and just think about how I was wasting my life).

Eventually Sara’s habit of collecting old clothes that she wanted to sell started getting out of hand. There was barely any space in our place to walk around. I hated being there. She wanted to get married but I was fed up, and I wasn’t ready to just fuck one woman for the rest of my life. (Even though I was in my early 30s at the time).

Fall of 2017 I taught a ton of classes again, probably five or six. I taught out in Long Island again, a night class, about ethics, society, and technology. That was one of my favorite things I did. We got to talk about how self-driving cars pose lots of ethical problems, stuff like that. I still had a ton of energy at this point, but it was starting to fade. There was a Burger King across from the campus, so I would drive there right after class, smoking a cigarette in the drive through, and order a BBQ Bacon Whopper. It was just two nights a week so it wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t eat that shit every day. Sometimes Sara would have dinner waiting for me (it would be cold but she’d heat it up), but I’d tell her I already ate at Burger King. She didn’t like that.

I did a lot of driving in those days, but I never really got into podcasts, even though 2017 was like the peak podcast era. I would just listen to the same handful of Eminem songs over and over. That was probably not great for my brain. But I was running out of energy, and that gave me energy, so I did it. You have to do anything you can to increase your energy if you want to survive in this world.

Even though I taught about 15 classes in 2017, I only made about $33k that year. Maybe even less. I think realizing how futile it all was started to wear on me, and I got a lot of anxiety. Just knowing how much energy it took to make that tiny amount of money, most of which went to rent and other bullshit, and knowing that every year that went by I would have less energy, and it would be an awful struggle just to make $30k. Clawing to survive becomes less romantic and more hopeless with each passing year.

When 2018 rolled around, I knew that I was on a collision course with something. I could feel it in my bones. One of the classes I taught was just called “Critical Thinking,” and there wasn’t really any course content or syllabus. You could just talk about current events and model ways of thinking about it. Looking for media biases and so on. But in those days the news was nothing but Trump shit, and I hated being sucked into that vortex of idiocy. The only thing worse than Trump himself was how the media covered him. It was all bad. I had to find stories for every class and talk about how there was bias in them, and that was kind of easy, because they did not cover Trump in a fair way. But that became annoying and dumb because I was like arguing for Trump in a weird way, which none of the students wanted to hear, because they all instinctively hated Trump. I didn’t like him, but I didn’t hate him as much as a professor at a liberal institution in New York was supposed to. It was just annoying and dumb all around.

I did teach one class about modern philosophy that semester, at a different school, and that was fun, because I didn’t have to focus on the goddamn news. I had the students in that class choose any topic to do a final presentation on, and one student chose existentialism. His presentation was like five minutes long and he basically just said “I like existence-ism, because it means I don’t give a fuck!” I laughed really hard and I think gave him a B, for the balls.

Summer semester was coming up, and I was assigned a World Religions class to teach, at yet a different college. The students at this college were notoriously awful, and I didn’t know much about world religions, so I had to cram for it. I only had like a week to prepare. I needed to take the summer off—and I needed to get out of that apartment. But I accepted the job and started cramming all the information about Hinduism into my brain that I could find.

Sara was a nice girl, very funny, with a big smile. Her cooking was pretty good, and we had similar cultural tastes. She was easy to be with. But living in that tiny place for three years just made me sick of all of it. I needed a way out. The World Religions class started in June, and it went fine for the first two. But I stopped showing up, and got emails from the humanities department asking what was going on. I said I just needed a break, and I was sorry for flaking out. The head of the humanities department was a nice guy. He had some problems with his foot. He told me about it when he hired me. It was most likely from the anxiety of working too much—it can manifest in weird ways.

My sister came down to visit shortly after. She had friends in Brooklyn and was going to be there anyway. She lived in Detroit at the time. I told her I wanted to get out of the city for a bit, so I went to Detroit for a couple of weeks. Sara was sad, but I think she knew that I didn’t want to get married, and so it would be best if we stopped wasting time.

That’s when I started tweeting a lot. I didn’t have Sara around to hear all my bullshit ramblings, so I poured them into twitter instead. Bad mistake. Saying erratic things to people who don’t know you is intoxicating, but doesn’t lead anywhere good. They think they know you, but they don’t. Still, I did it pretty much nonstop for about four years, 2018-2022. I ended up collecting my best stuff into these books, if you’re interested: Underground Horizon and Another New Word.

Pretty soon after I started tweeting a lot, an insane woman slid into my DMs. She said she remembered me from Jewish camp. I’m not Jewish and had never been to Jewish camp. It was a weird pickup line for her to use, but I went with it. Bad mistake.