It's Chess, It Ain't Checkers

There’s a saying that gets more and more true over time: Those that don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.

And this exists in basically all walks of life. Business, music, sports, politics, whatever you’re doing. Whatever you’re studying, or trying to figure out, or just trying to enjoy. There are good ways of doing things and there are not so good ways of doing those same things, and when you start trying something out for the first couple of times, rarely if ever have you already figured out the good ways to go about it. Which means we learn. We learn from ourselves and our own experiences, we learn from those around us, we learn from the world and animals and plants and Chinese proverbs and newspaper horoscopes and Snapple can tops and South Park. Stuff happens, we watch it or we listen to it or hear about it, but we gain perspective and we internalize it and hopefully, we can take note of what does and does not work out so well.

The way I see it, we know what we know from one of two ways: intelligence and wisdom.

There's only a few different ways to learn stuff in the world. From the time that we're born, we have to constantly adapt and change and develop our understanding the scope of what we remember, what we can do, and how we learn things going forward. It isn't as simple as, "Okay, I know everything I need to know, stop teaching me stuff now." Like, you never reach that point in life, and yet there will be several times in a person's early life, and probably the middle life, and probably near the end somewhere, that they just sit down and say that they know everything that they need to, and they don't want to hear another damn thing from anyone about what they don't know.

I'm absolutely positive that everyone reaches this stage at least once in their childhood or adolescence. If you're a kid, you think you know shit, and you almost certainly don't. We've all been there, and none of us wanted to hear it at the time we were there. And if you get old enough, I think your mind just literally shuts off, and you stop caring what you don't know because, you're old, how much could you really be in charge of anymore anyway? And if you get old enough, that’s your right to disregard planet earth past the date that you choose to go by. But for the rest of us, there’s intelligence, and there’s wisdom.

So intelligence. The smart way of doing things. The recommended path. This comes from reading the directions. From listening to others. From watching how something is done and trying to emulate it. This is the type of smarts that comes from, well, basically from being smart about things. Intelligence comes from studying for the test you are about to take. From building upon knowledge that has already been acquired. Largely, this involves observation and using patience, and accepting that you don't know about something and you would instead like to learn from another person. Here's what intelligence sounds like: Don't jump off that ledge! Scientific studies have shown that falling from that height into that creek will almost certainly break both of your legs and possibly knock you unconscious. Don't do it, that's a terrible idea. Take those stairs, or the ladder, or fling a rope down. Just be careful, don’t do anything you’re going to regret later.

Wisdom? Nah, wisdom comes from experience. It comes from eliminating the bad choices in life by trying them first, although not approaching it quite like that. Wisdom comes from doing things and learning firsthand why we don't do things certain ways. From hearing others but not really listening to what they say. From disregarding directions. From seeing how others do something but thinking, what if I switch this up and try this over here instead? And sometimes it works out, and it is innovative because you push past an idea that had limited others. And sometimes you do things that are really dumb, or are not seen as dumb at the time but you discover during the process why no one does it the way that you did. Wisdom sounds like this: Don't jump off that ledge! Johnny Legs jumped off that ledge two and a half years ago. Oh, he hit the water and basically got folded in half. It was brutal, blood everywhere, he was in a coma for a month, and he's been in that wheelchair ever since. You wanna end up like Johnny Legs? Get people to help you get bread from the upper shelves at the supermarket, have to use the ramp to get in and out of the strip club? Then by all means, go for it, jump for it kid. We'll watch, see how it goes.

That’s why any time I see something dumb about to happen, I can rationalize it that, “Well, at least some wisdom is on its way.” And wisdom does not come quickly. It comes with time, and pain, and usually a bunch of shit that will seem pretty obvious in retrospect. But just because you already knew something doesn't mean that you can't gain a valuable lesson from hearing it again under different circumstances. Wisdom, it's a drawn out process, like a chess match. And also like a chess match, there are lots of variations on how things can go, and stuff you could have done, and stuff that could have gone different based on what you could have done. So you start off and you suck at it, and you get your ass kicked a bunch, and then you start to do a little better every time. 

At my apartment in downtown Madison a few years ago, we had mice. Plural. We thought it was just one mouse that was really crafty at avoiding capture, but it turned out to be a few of them. This happened the 2^nd year that we lived there, an entire year of 4 guys that were pretty messy and threw more parties than they should have, didn’t always pick up after ourselves, and an old rickety apartment that may have already have had rodents living in it anyway. And I’m not gonna sit here and blame anyone specifically for why our apartment was quite as messy as it was, but there was much discussion of why the bathroom always had clothes in it and why the kitchen never got completely clean. It was discussed.

Anyway, one night we were just sitting in the living room, watching the Bucks play on TV, and one of the roommates, we’ll call him Chad for these purposes, Chad randomly jumps up and starts yelling and pointing to the ground over by the garbage. And it’s really out of nowhere and startling, so it was hard to tell what he was even saying at first, but finally I could understand “Meece!” which is Chad’s way of saying that he had seen a mouse. Now, it was dark, and we had all had a few beers, and I think we were also willing to ignore this for the time, so we all just told Chad that he was probably just high. Which, he could have been that too. And we didn’t see a mouse again that night. But a few nights later, there was another sighting in the same spot. Then a week later, I saw a blur shoot past in the same spot. So it wasn’t really something to ignore anymore, so we tried to decide what to do about it, rather than decide whether we had to do anything at all.

Now, there are obviously many ways to try to catch things that are hiding in your house. Traps, glue, lures, borrow someone’s cat, bunch of ways. But for god knows why, our first plan was to keep our household bat (like baseball bat) near the kitchen so that upon the next sighting, someone could grab it and bash the rodent to death on sight. Please take a moment to imagine all the ways that this could fail. Take a few moments, I’ll wait.

Okay, good. Nothing ridiculous happened from that approach, but I almost wish it had. I almost wish we had a story of one of us desperately swinging at a fleeing mouse and breaking the tv open. But no, nothing like that. It just wasn’t a good set up in general, because usually by the time we saw that the mouse was there, it was already too late to do anything about it that time. So, the first plan was not a good one. Lesson learned.

Next, we tried to set up a mousetrap with a little piece of cheese in the same corner that the mouse would pass through. We set it up, let it sit for a day or so, and we heard a THWAT come from the corner. But the mouse would never be there, no matter how many times we tried this. Nor would the cheese left as the decoy. For whatever reason, the trap was too sensitive or the mouse was too experienced or maybe this invention never actually works, because I’ve never seen or heard of any mousetrap actually catching one of these damn things myself. But whatever, maybe we had a shitty mousetrap, lesson learned.

Next we tried malt-o-meal. This I’ve seen work because we had a mouse in our garage at home when I was a kid. You give the mice something to eat that will make their stomach expand, to the point that the mouse basically overbloats and can’t move anymore, then it just keels over and dies. So we pour this food in the already dirty corners of our kitchen and wait. And wait, and wait. And nothing. Or at least we think nothing. Looking back, it’s possible that there were a tone of other mice that met their end because of this, I can’t be sure. But because we never saw those results, I still assume that it didn’t work. Maybe mice don’t eat malt-o-meal anymore. I know humans basically don’t. It took forever just to find malt-o-meal in the first place, so screw that. Lesson learned.

Finally, another roommate, who will be Anthony for this purpose, comes back with a glue trap, and that’s what finally got results. One morning we awoke to find this poor bastard just careened face down on the trap, not even breathing anymore. Did we assume it was the only one at the time? Of course. Did we end up using glue traps several more times in that corner? You bet. Is that the end of the story? Hell no.

The end finally came one night when I heard a shriek come from across the hall where my bedroom was. It wasn’t that late, but I had mostly chilled out for the night when the noise came. The room belonged to, well, we’ll call him Flea. Partially because his room was the dirtiest and partially because I’m using names of Red Hot Chili Peppers for aliases here. So Flea’s girlfriend at the time, she runs out of the room, freaking out, and after a bit of discussion, she reveals that she had seen yet another mouse and was disgusted. Well, we’re all a bit pissed off because we were certain that we had already gotten the last damn rat or mouse or whatever the hell. But we determine that we’ll take him down, right here and now, just to be done with it. Like it was personal now, like this mouse had invaded Flea’s bedroom, so any of us could be next if we let this go unchecked. Although again, filthy room, if I’m being honest here. So Anthony, Flea, and myself ran in the room and shut the door. Chad stayed in the hallway.

We started moving stuff around, trying to force the mouse out to run around, and then we laid a glue trap near a narrow space we thought we could force him to go. Then we started making noise and rummaging stuff around trying to provoke a reaction. Suddenly, out of a small pile of socks, the mouse darted forward, which shocked me enough to kind of jump up onto Anthony’s shoulders. I wasn’t scared, mind you, but startled enough to lose my composure for a second. But it didn’t quite work, the mouse went around the bed, so we tried it again, and he shot back around to the book case, and back, and forth, for like an hour. But then we finally get things moved around enough, and we got it to go the right way out of the closet and then around the TV and BAM, we got him on the trap!

We were so jacked that we had finally caught this little bastard, I and my roommates started exclaiming quotes from Alonzo from Training Day. I yelled out, “The shit’s chess, it ain’t checkers!” And then Anthony yelled out “You protect the sheep by killing the motha-fuckin’ wolf!” and then I think Chad yelled out from the hallway, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove!” Which really didn’t go along with what had happened, but it started us going around trying to quote pretty much everything Denzel Washington said in that movie. And then we decided to get drunk and watch the full movie. Oh, and we bashed the mouse’s head in and threw him in the trash, because screw that mouse and all of his free-loading friends.

Speaking of Training Day, did you know they’re trying to make that into a TV show? And that Denzel WON’T be involved? How could that possibly work? And unless the whole series is one long day, why even call it Training Day?

Sounds like some fresh wisdom on its way. Bye now.