Where I last left off…. This took place two years ago. I was new to Paris, and I was lonely. I had just met Drusilla at a Paris Fashion Week party held at my work.
I suffer from a neurological condition that affects my ability to remember people’s faces. As a result, throughout my life, all of my friends and acquaintances have looked unusual in various ways. For example, I was friends with the gay black kid in my school who had dreadlocks. I was also friends with the one skinhead for the same reason. For obvious reasons, I didn’t hang out with both of them at the same time. And, I was friends with the kid who had a decomposing Kentucky Fried Chicken leg bone piercing his septum as jewelry. Conversely, I’m not able to remember and recognise people who have faces that look ordinary unless I’ve seen them every day for ten years.
It affects my ability interact in social situations. It’s hard to make friends and is sometimes embarrassing. The condition is called prosopagnosia.
In keeping with this tendency, Drusilla’s appearance was unusual. She bore a remarkable resemblance to the Red Priestess from a popular television show, the Game of Thrones. She is thin with scarlet hair. She wears a lot of red. Her features are somewhat aquiline. Her eyes are hard, and her lips are red.
I had met Drusilla at a fancy party a few months before. I had been spending time with her since then. We travelled to the Alps together to spend two weeks skiing.
One might think that such a ski trip would be romantic. Indeed, we had rented an apartment with a fireplace, bear skin rug, and a great view. We finished supper. We had wine and candles. In this atmosphere, we (mostly she) talked for two hours straight, and she had just gotten to the part where she told me that she is married and has a family. Listening to someone talk for two hours straight builds up an appetite.
So, I buttered a piece of bread and put it in the microwave oven. She went wild.
“What are you doing? What is this? You are using the microwave!” she exclaimed, getting out of her chair..
“Yeah, what about it?” I said.
She calmed down and stared at me for a moment.
Then, she spoke, “my 12 year old son has looked up microwave ovens online and found a website that said microwaves ruin the food. Microwaves destroy all of the nutrition and make it toxic. They cause nuclear reactions in the food and make it toxic and break it down.”
Her boy’s conspiracy theory about microwave ovens makes about as much sense as as a sack full of ass holes or even moon landing denial, and when confronted with shocking stupidity, I don’t know where to begin. Such stupidity is like black pudding or maybe haggis. No matter what you do short of eating it yourself, you can’t make it go away.
“Why are you taking dietary advice from your 12 year old?”
She continued, “Microwaves are a new ting, and they (scientists) don’t understand the harm they do to food. “
“I’m a scientist, and as I scientist, I can confirm that you are wrong. The physics of microwaving food is well understood. As long as you don’t over-cook the food, it’s as safe as food cooked in an ordinary oven, ” I said.
“No, it is true,” she insisted. “My son looked this up. There is a good website that explains how it makes the food toxic. Microwave ovens will give you cancer.”
“Which website? Alex Jones?” I said.
She looked blank, appearing not to understand the reference to a conspiracy theory website.
“The writers of that website are probably confusing ionizing radiation with heat-producing radiation,“ I said. “Ionizing radiation is the dangerous kind, and microwave ovens do not produce ionizing radiation. It’s physically impossible.”
She looked blank. She obviously didn’t know her physics. This is only highschool level physics. I could not believe a supposedly educated woman was saying this.
I realised what her problem was. Drusilla has an undergrad degree in mathematics and knows the insurance industry. Those are respectable accomplishments, but when they are the limit of one’s education forever, that’s not respectable at all. She had completely stopped learning after college, and that is what makes someone intellectually incompatible. It is not about what fancy schools someone attends and their degrees, but it is about their willingness to continue to learn. She knew just enough to be a corporate drone but not enough to realise how little she knew.
What helps make such people impossible is that she doesn’t even know enough basic knowledge to realise how little she knows about anything. The result is that she thinks she knows everything. Know-it-alls do not have any self-evaluation skills. She is not capable of recognising when she is wrong, and at home she is surrounded by people who know even less than she knows.
It’s possible to talk down somebody who is having a bad acid trip, but it’s not possible to talk down a crazy person. I cleaned up and went to bed.
After a full week of not having any, I took a large dose of morphine that night. I had been tired, but the stuff woke me up and gave me a lot of energy. I ended up reading late into the night. I read a story by Jack London and started reading Zadie Smith.
Finally, at around four am, I went to bed. Thanks to the morphine, I felt more relaxed than I had felt in a long time. I closed my eyes, and images and realistic scenery formed behind my closed eyelids. The first was an image of a kitten curled up on a chair. It was a brown and white tabby. I watched the kitten for a moment. It was sleeping contentedly. I could see its tiny chest rising and falling as it breathed. My dream hand reached down and pet the kitten. The kitten stretched its front legs and extended its toes. It yawned, showing the pink inside of its mouth, white teeth, and red tongue. It rolled over and settled again. The kitten look pleased.
I felt like I was watching Psychic Youtube kitten videos. The scene of the kitten faded away to be replaced by another kitten drinking milk. The milk was in a bowl on the floor of a kitchen. I did not recognise the kitchen. The kitten was black and white. It looked up at me. It looked happy. That kitten scene faded to be replaced by a series of scenes of kittens engaged in various activities. Some kitten were playing, some were sleepign, others were walking. Every kitten looked happy. Some were alone and some were with other kittens. Each was a different breed: orange tabbies, white Persians, multicolored cats, gray cats, calicos, tabbies, Russian blues, Burmese, Siamese, Abbysinians,and rag dolls.
That’s the kind of thing I often dream about while under the influence of morphine. Tonight it was smiling kittens. Other nights, it is adult cats.
Sometimes, it is elaborite sci fi stories, or often it’s watching the ocean waves breakign against cliffs, but most often, it’s cats.
I woke up around 8am the next morning and got ready to ski.
