so, you're an expert

I had a dream that a man and a woman came to look at the porsche and perhaps buy it. In the dream, the woman was very friendly but her husband was surly and stand-offish. I remember that they drove up to the house ( or did they fly in on magic wings, I don't remember clearly ) and they came over to say hi and the husband practically had to be dragged over to shake my hand. His interest was solely on the porsche which, you could tell, he was displeased with right away.

The porsche is a powder coat baby blue with a black removable top. It's a two seater that is only 4 inches off the ground where you sit. It has flip up headlights, a front and rear trunk and is just sexy as hell. As a porsche, it's a given that it's fast, but it also gets incredibly good gas mileage at something like 50 miles to the gallon. So it's a nice car, whether you are a porsche enthusiast or not.

When you buy a porsche, you know all about them before you buy it. For one, it's a fetish car. Not something you would buy unless you had another car and just wanted a project to work on or something to decorate your garage or driveway. It's a conversation piece and a cheap way to entertain visitors.

Porsches come in all kinds of shapes and styles and the year of each model can even make the difference in value ( think '68 mustang compared to a 82' mustang ). So when you come to "look" at a porsche, you know what to "look" for. Nothing should be a shock. You are there to assess what it needs and what it has. The overall shape and style should already be known.

In the dream, the man seemed put out and I couldn't figure out why. His wife was trying her best to deflect her husband's miserable attitude and create excuses for his frowns and moans. He looked over the car, sat inside and didn't ask one question. After ten minutes of watching this man look over the car, much the same way someone might look at a bad Christmas present that had just been unwrapped in front of the gift giver, I asked him, "what do you think?" Then the nit picking started. Rust here, ding there, not enough of this. But I could tell that these questions were not really the issue.

"Here came here thinking that this porsche was a different porsche." I thought. "He came all this way and found out he made a mistake."

There is always a kink in the expert mind that can't be distinguished until there is a monumental failure in their thinking. It's usually a small oversight that leads to a disaster, and as an expert to can not afford any knocks against you if you wish to remain an expert. In this case, he wouldn't admit he had made a mistake and was working hard to cover his mistake by making the car, myself and my home, the reason for this error. As if I had tricked him, or the car's model type was mislabeled on the car back in Germany, anything but him.

I don't remember the dream after that. There could have been sex, or food, or an apocalypse, I don't know. But I do know that I woke up today ready to kill that man.

Experts are experts for different reason. Some earn the title by education and loads of it. Others get the title from years and years of experience. And some are just born with it. Whatever the background, each one of them is prone to failure. Not something that they expect or we expect of them, but it does happen. Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess player of his time, lost a few games. I, a genius at all things prepared and eaten by me, have cut my fingers during preparation and bitten into burnt-on-the-outside-raw-on-the-inside food.

There is humor in these failures. You don't REALLY want to see a genius or an expert fail. Their success gives us hope that we can do it too but, their continued success makes us see our inabilities and inadequatecies, our laziness and our limits with more embarassing clarity, which feels like shit. They expose fears and anxieties that we carry that we didn't even know we had. So when an expert fails, we can all lose hope, we all lose faith, BUT, we do get to see someone, who makes us sick with all their perfection, become a humbled human again, just like all the rest of us imperfect fools. Maybe their success was just luck. Everyone has a good streak every now and then, perhaps their genius was a fluke. Or, that's what we tell ourselves, anyway.

I am not sure that I am great at any one thing, I know that I am not an expert at anything, but I do so enjoy being above average at almost everything. (notice I said, almost...) It allows me to fail and not have to spend time working to cover the mistake. It allows me to learn from it and it gives me room to improve, which is a great feeling. How awful it must feel to know that you could never have variety in life. To know that feeling, I play monopoly and when I own everything and I am ready to crush my renters in to bankruptcy, I get bored. There is no struggle and, therefore, no interest. How sad. ( I crush them anyway, just to watch them die).

You experts out there, keep a low profile. Pray I am not the one that sees you fail. Pray that I don't expose that chink in your armor. Or I will laugh my way into YOUR dreams.