One of the very many exercises in futility that I occasionally engage in is painting these 'what if' scenarios in my mind and see how much I can delude myself into thinking that any of them could have ever been a possibility. These are usually thought experiments along the lines of what could I have done to make a relationship work, of what could I have done differently in my life, whatever. Stuff like that. But I rarely think about how my life would have been had I been born with different skills. Whenever I think about the other 'what if' stuff, I'm never changed at all from how I've always been, it's just me pondering about this choice or that choice. But what if I had been born with a different set of skills? The inherent problem is that I don't even know what skills could have proven to be life-changing for me. I do know, though, of certain skills I wasn't born with, could never hope to acquire - and this because of how my brain is wired, some things I just can't wrap my head around - and that I do wish I had been born with. And maybe not all of them, but at least one of them would have been gone. And at least one of them I've always known to be a determining factor for one of other skills I do not possess, but wish I did, to be an impossibility for me.
Now, about two of these I am sure I've written about before. So I'll just touch briefly on them, and none of these are in any particular order, if I'm honest. Any of these three skills would have been a boon, and maybe I do have a preference for the second I'll be writing of, for reasons that I think are blatantly obvious. Months back, when I started jotting down the sad little story of my life, I mentioned how I never could get numbers. Maths were always difficult for me, and fairly early on I just gave up. I couldn't understand any of it, I couldn't even begin to attempt understanding when letters and other arcane symbols were thrown in the mix, so I've lived my life safe in the blissful ignorance of that particular realm. But the truth is that I wish I could've gotten numbers, I really do. There are so many things I've watched or read or saw in person where I felt that a fairly deep knowledge of mathematics could have helped enjoy whatever it was I was doing even more. I remember a bunch of years ago I met this kid who was big into maths and video games, and one day he shows me the most complex equation I'd ever seen. I thought this was some kind of maths conundrum that had never been solved, or something like that, and he just said that it was the very simple and basic algorithm for the random enemy encounters in a Pokémon game. To his eyes, it was basic and simple, aye? To mine it might as well have been the formula for the atom bomb. And not knowing, getting, understanding maths... directly leads to the second skill, the one I might have had a slight bias towards. And it really does break my heart that I, a music lover, was born without any music in me. I've tried playing a bunch of instruments, none with any skill. I was terribly terrible with a flute, atrocious whenever I turned on an old electronic piano thingy we used to have when I was a kid, the acoustic guitar my brother used to have was no more than an outlet for noise making, my bass playing - the one instrument I really wanted to play - was beyond the pale, I once sat behind a drum kit and couldn't play anything, it was just too much. And I ascribe this lack of ability to play music to my inability to understand numbers and not being that great either at detecting and memorizing patterns. It's just too mathematical a problem for me to overcome.
Last, but not least, is something that I maybe I've always associated with me not really being savvy with numbers, because in a sense it is. It's something I've been accused of for a long while - decades, even - and I never denied it. I'm not great at thinking visually. Look, it comes as no surprise that I always hated visual arts classes. I've always sucked so bad at drawing, even my stick figures are horrible. The way I associate it with me not being a numbers guy is that I've never been any good at things like proportions, perspective and I've always well and truly disliked using a compass. These things have always baffled me beyond reason, but I'd be lying if I said that this extends just to drawing on paper. It does not - it extends to so much else. Some months back I tried to learn how to edit videos for youtube, and if I did understand the gist of the thing, in terms of stringing bits of audio and video together, there were so many other visual elements I could never think of, and I often watch videos with fancy editing and effects and I always wonder where people get those ideas. Even when it comes to writing, I'm not thinking visually - what I'm doing is thinking about the words, and only after do images come to me. Back in 1995, me and my friend S. set out to create a story together, though originally it was meant to be done by him alone. For some reason lost to the mists of time, I got involved with the story - meant to be called 'Of birds & real people', I think - and we were both still riding high on our Sandman devotion . S.'s art was, at the time, highly influenced by that of Dave McKean's and I fancied myself a Neil Gaiman wannabe, and we wanted to create something that would be along those veins, and we were both getting into 'Cages' as well, and one feverish night I had while on service in the Air Force, I came up with what I thought was a pretty good story, all the cast of characters, most of their individual arcs, pretty much all the beats, and I wrote a little bit of the script, and when I presented it for S. to read, he found it awful, and indeed, it truly was. But there was that underlying note of disappointment in him when he told me just how much I sucked at thinking visually. And right then and there I realized I did. That's not where my strengths lie. I will never be great at translating images into words, but plucking words from the ether and make them manifest images afterwards? I ain't too shabby at that. Not brilliant, mind, but compared to any of the other skills I lack and just numbered, I'm a fucking goddman genius.
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