Smicklefritz

I think the urge to become something great begins with the feeling that there is something inside you worth showing the world.

Something beautiful and profound that you haven’t quite figured out how to make visible.

Your soul, maybe.

That strange string of processed thoughts, threaded through a timeline nobody else has lived. Everything you’ve witnessed, misunderstood, loved, lost, and finally learned to name—gathering into a mind that can make something of its own.

You create the thought, but look at everything that helped you get there.

Time. Genetics. Atmosphere. Environment. Social influences.

Even a name.

Smicklefritz got caught on a wounded fragment of time. I secretly hate it. Still, I’ve dragged it far enough from its origin that it has collected a life of its own.

A faithful companion. A stubborn mule. An increasingly questionable witness.

It has watched me become people I thought I would remain forever, then watched those people disappear into the next version. I can look back and recognize all of them without knowing quite how to explain that they were all me.

Do I cringe? Often.

Usually at the distance between what I understood then and what I’m willing to admit now. I want to say I didn’t know any better. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s an awfully convenient place to hide something heavy.

I’ve left impressions on people I may never hear about. They’ve left things in me they probably wouldn’t recognize. We keep bonking into one another at inconvenient stages of development, handing each other material for thoughts we won’t finish processing until years later.

Then, occasionally, something comes together.

A sentence. A discovery. A piece of art. Some beautiful little arrangement of everything that happened to a person, made visible enough for another person to recognize something of themselves.

That’s the part I want to preserve.

And lately, I worry about our ability to preserve it. We can produce so much, so quickly, that the trail from an idea back to the mind and circumstances that shaped it starts to disappear beneath random scatterings of AI slop. A convincing account of an event can travel farther than an accurate one. An imitation can arrive without any of the history that gave the original its meaning.

There is something unnerving about trying to document a life—or a civilization—while the ink keeps multiplying on its own.

Maybe that’s my conspiracy theory: that we could become so occupied with producing the appearance of thought that we lose track of the brilliant minds, major events, patient discoveries, and strange works of art that actually move us forward.

I don’t know that it requires a mastermind. We seem perfectly capable of scattering the pieces ourselves.

But I want to be able to follow the thread. To see who was there, what happened, what they made of it, and where somebody else picked it up. Even when the story is uncomfortable. Especially when a later version would be easier to live with.

I suppose that’s why I’ve kept Smicklefritz.

The name still carries something I’d rather forget, but it also carries everything I’ve done with it since. A small, stubborn record of a person who keeps changing her dictionary entry.

And there she is, behind me again, playfully mocking my most significant moments.

Bless her stupid, carefree heart.