This entire post is going to be about assumptions! Like the assumption of you not opening my other articles. That’s right! No..wait.. Don’t exit the article girl, relax. I’m not going to hate on the female gender. Even though the whole world knows who are the champions of assumptions (Still not pointing fingers). I’m going to be specific about the whole assumptions thingy but not gender specific. I’ve noticed we have a tendency to turn everything into a gender war. I guess it’s that male – female rivalry that had us pouting whenever we were assigned a deskmate of the opposite sex back in our childhood years.

Childhood.. That’s the perfect place to start this whole piece about assumptions.. Childhood, back when our brains were young and soft and all we cared about were cartoons and toys. Odd how those innocent cares have morphed into hentai porn and sex toys during our adult years. But that’s not the point of this article so don’t start thinking about whether or not I’m going to address your cartoon porn addiction or how your girlfriend owning a sex toy is low key hurting your fragile masculinity.. Relax boy, don’t exit the article.. Don’t assume.

It appears somewhere in your childhood you assumed something and it actually came to pass. You could have been going home late due to excess play all the while thinking “My mom’s definitely going to beat the crap out of me with the red slipper for going home late.” A simple assumption born out of experience. And sure enough, the red slipper came landing immediately you entered the house, you didn’t even have time to wonder how to reply to the rhetoric question your parent posed “Is now the time to be coming home?” before the red slipper was thrown at your dust ridden childhood body.

When you were getting your ass beat with the red slipper, there was a part of you that was nonchalant concerning the pain or the amount of energy it was taking to wail at the top of your lungs in order to draw mercy out of your punisher.. That part of you was instead saying to you, “Look, you said you were going to get the shit beaten out of you with a red slipper and here you are getting your ass beat with a red slipper! You must be a prophet of some kind.”

You do know your mind never really forgets the self affirmations you make, right? .. It just compounds them into your subconscious, piling all those things you believed are true since your childhood, forming your character. You react to anything outside your being according to your character and there you were, in your childhood years, pounding the fact that you’re a prophet of some kind into your being.

You’re probably like ‘This guy is reacting to his girlfriend assuming something in the only way a writer can react, by writing about it.’ Jokes on you chap.. I don’t have a girlfriend!..wait..don’t feel sorry for me, single people still have sex so don’t assume I’m sex starved and miserable .. Though I haven’t had sex in a while either and I am sort of miserable but aren’t we all? .. I’m not doing much to lessen your pitty am I? But the point of this wasn’t to have you trying to assume the reason for my challenging of your view of yourself as an all knowing being who is always right. Instead of having you assume a non-existent girlfriend or my blue-balls.. I’d better just tell you the problem with thinking of yourself as all knowing.

I was walking home one day when I bumped into this guy who reeked of weed.. You know.. The Devils lettuce? Ganja? Mary Jane? Marijuana? Mariwana? Maiwana? I don’t know what you call it but I know you’re familiar with the smell.. I know a guy who releases endorphins whenever the smell of weed touches his nostrils.. That guy is not me mind you, it’s my neighbor from house number 15…I doubt I even have endorphins with the way I’m miserable but then again that might be because of the dryspell.

Anyway, the guy passing me while carrying the stench of weed caused me for some reason to have this insane urge to exchange words with him, so I said. “Nice, I smell that you’re a man of culture as well.” It was an abrupt yet light compliment aimed at a stranger, he could have acknowledged it and chuckled or failed to do so and just went on with his journey without a bother in the world. Instead the stranger stopped and started a conversation with me.

“Bro I’m a mechanic.” The stranger started. He was smaller than me, that’s probably why I didn’t feel threatened by him despite his state of mind being on an elevated level. If he was larger than me and reeking of weed I’d not have started a conversation or continued one. But for a brief moment, I panicked.. His statement was so out of the blue, I wondered if I had to reply with my profession too as if we were back in the 1700s where your identity is your profession.. .. What is my profession even? I call myself a writer yet I watch anime more than I write.. I’m an expert weeb. Can weebing be a profession? Or should I make a profession up and be like “Bro I’m a horse breeder.”? So many questions leading to panic.

I didn’t reply to the guy in my panic but he went on either way “I want to give you advice about mechanics bro.” the dude kept referring to me as his brother, that’s the thing about weed, every guy becomes a bro and every girl becomes a hoe when you’re on it. “Tell me bro.” I expected him to start babbling nonsense about car parts like the exhaust pipe or the steering wheel (lol, I don’t know much about car parts) but the high mechanic did more than babble about parts, he did the equivalent of opening my mouth and shoving knowledge down my throat, hard stiff knowledge . Ps: The knowledge being metaphorically shoved into my mouth wasn’t cylindrical in nature.. It was triangular or square, any shape really other than cylindrical.

With the knowledge I’d received from the high mechanic, why don’t we use it in the somewhat almost accurate hypothetical universe I’d created for you up there 👆. Let’s fast forward from the childhood where you foretold a beating by the use of a red slipper, fast forward it all right into your adult hood where you’re legally able to drive. We’ll skip right over the boring stuff that comes with adulthood, like the relationships you got into, studies, your well paying job, early depression, alcoholism, late depression ..yadayadayada.. Let’s skip all that to you taking your car to a mechanic because you believe something is wrong with the car’s bearing.

Now, that belief you have about your car’s bearing is similar to the belief you had as a child concerning the red slipper.. You believed a beating was coming and right now as you head to the mechanic you believe your car’s bearing is the problem. I want you to see the relation between the two, as you grew older you made more assumptions that turned out true, building up on the part of you that believes you’re a prophet.. With the slow march of time that self imposed prophetic part of yourself grows stronger by remembering the times when your assumptions were right and forgetting the times when your assumptions were wrong.. Thus the mind tricks itself into believing its validity in all you do. Because it’s the mind of a prophet right? Someone who can foretell the future.. Who wouldn’t want to see themselves as all knowing?

Never will your mind say to itself “No.. Wait.. What if I’m just assuming this, what if I’m wrong, shouldn’t I get more facts?” … Nope.. Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you doubt your prophetic powers? That’ll suck the fun out of being right! So you pull up at the mechanic’s and tell him that the car’s bearing has a problem.. The mechanic will nod at you.. It’s practiced nod, it’s a nod that says “Oh my God, I’ve worked here as a mechanic all my life, literally being inside cars more than my penis has been inside women, but in all my years here I’ve never encountered someone with such a clean well tailored suit who has such deep knowledge about cars! I’m in awe of you!” The nod serves its purpose, it massages the part of you that loves being right.

Now the mechanic is the one who’ll go under the car.. Not you obviously, we can’t risk your well tailored suit getting dirty… Underneath the car, the mechanic will discover the problem with the car isn’t the bearing.. Surprisingly, its something else.. Just a bolt that needs tightening.. A really easy thing to do.. You could do it yourself if you weren’t busy playing the prophet.. Will he tell you this? No.. It’s a dog eat dog world.

“You’re right, the bearing is messed up, you need new bearings.” The mechanic will tell you. There it goes again, that part of you that’s nonchalant, this time the part is uncaring about the price of buying new bearings, instead it’s saying “Hah.. Look.. Look how omniscient I am! I’m definitely a prophet, I wonder how long it’ll be before my powers kick in and I start parting seas?” You don’t want to confront that part of you because it feels so good to be right! Even though you’re wrong.

The mechanic is a smart man, sure he smokes weed on his way home but that doesn’t mean he is dumb. That’s just on of your assumptions. It just means that on top of being smarter than you he also knows how to unwind. You give him cash to buy the bearings but what you don’t know is that the mechanic would take out your car’s bearing and then clean it, make it spotless and sparkling, after all, it’s just metal, and then sell the bearing back to you saying it’s brand new.

Of course you’ll believe it’s new, it’s sparkling right? Something that’s sparkling can’t be old! The mechanic will go back under your car, return the cleaned bearing back in place.. Tighten the part that was loose, the part that was the actual problem.. Then charge you for his services. You’d go home with a fixed car and he’d go home high off his service fee plus the cash gained from selling you back your car part .. Does everybody win here? No.. You lose oh all knowing one.

“Never tell a mechanic what you think the problem with your car is. Never make assumptions with a mechanic.” The high mechanic was concluding his advice, “Sometimes a client can come and say there’s a problem with the car’s switch, I’ll go handle the car with an already ruined switch hidden in my overalls, I’ll find the problem is a wire that’s touching another wire, easy to separate really, but I’ll come out with the fake switch and claim that it was indeed the problem and that a new switch is required, never assume with a mechanic.”

Now you’re a little tense.. You’re wondering.. Is this guy telling me not to trust myself? It’s a valid question really, of course you should trust yourself, trust your gut, trust your instincts but are assumptions something that stems from self or from a belief that you are always right? Does that question answer your question or should I pose an even better one…. Are you always right?