There was once a man who pursued a full education in decoy theory in order to rob a bank. This was around the time governments shed their intelligence agencies away in an effort to control the fiscal-demographic problem. Such agencies began issuing non-accredited but nevertheless respected Associate Degrees in aspects of intelligence gathering. Joe — we'll call him Joe, because I'm making up this story to illustrate a point — expected that by making a high-concept, sprawling mess out of his "exit strategy" he would be remembered not as a timewasting suicide-by-cop but as a sophisticated con man who went down on his luck.

Joe's demented three-year detour through his original self-destruction plan wasn't, of course, sophisticated. It was just inefficient.

I have often thought that there is a kind of symmetry about knowledge. I'm not, of course, spewing folk epistemology here. People have often thought that knowledge is compression, which I don't buy: computers have made the proverbial 1:1 map possible, and it's much too paradoxical to say that knowing more means not knowing certain things. But as far as the outcome of finite human lives goes, it's clear that Joe's story is not a mere flight of fancy. We've all known people like that.

I once knew a college professor named Rube. That's also not his real name, but we'll adopt it because his story is semi-autobiographical and I wouldn't want to compromise third parties. Rube had the kind of intermittent animal magnetism that puzzles men who spend great deals of effort honing their peacock skills. A burger joint waitress once stalked Rube — mostly online — and went to a lecture by him on some foundational problems plaguing the then-current Markov multifractal models of the economy.

The waitress thought she had prepared questions by reading up exercises at the end of textbooks, but it was clear that eigenvalue conditions on discrete Markov chains had nothing to do with what Rube had talked about. So she just walked up to Rube after the conference, introduced herself as a graduate student from Penn and undid the top button in her blouse while playing with her hair.

It's a historical curiosity that in a society that had already recognized homosexuality, polyamory and even sibling incest as acceptable modes of coupling, sexual involvement between educational classes was still such a taboo. It was, after all, a simple affair: Rube was turned on by green-eyed blondes on green blouses, and the waitress was turned on by the kind of aloof self-confidence that professors accustomed to bed 20-year-olds have.

So yes, Rube did fuck the waitress. She never sought him again, cherishing the dirty thought of having been used and discarded by a superior man. Rube, however, thought she had merely returned to her home school. Would it really have been different if the waitress had just told Rube that she longed to be ravaged and thrown away by an aloof professor when he first went to the burger place? What if Rube had merely pretended to be a college professor because he had become attracted to a young woman far from his own age bracket? Fucking is fucking.

Now, there was never any Rube, and this whole tale is more of a fantasy than a real story (hence the "semi" in "semi-autobiographical"). I dropped out of graduate school before I became a professor, and while I was attracted to a scorching hot blonde waitress at a burger joint once, I eventually married an educated, neurotic and slightly overweight (not enough to be unattractive) brunette not unlike my educated, neurotic and slightly overweight mother.

You may have noticed I told most of Rube's story from the point of view of the waitress, whose real-life counterpart is just an anchor for imagination. But having married and committed not to fuck other women, knowledge on whether the hot looks the real-life waitress shot at me meant mutual attraction is irrelevant now, particularly because the burger joint closed since.

There is a critical moment where such knowledge (or, if you want to be nitpicky and general, probability estimates) would have meant something — when I was a bachelor and the burger joint was open — but I couldn't possibly know then what I know now. There is, thus, a symmetry around that quantity of knowledge. More is the same as less, as far as human life is concerned.

All this is of particular importance because life being finite and time being irreversible, we inevitably come to regret many decisions taken in ignorance and haste. But short of degenerative neurological diseases, it's also inevitable that we know more than we knew yesterday, and that tomorrow you'll come to know things you wish you knew right now. And if as a philosophical point this seems to make this whole preface a shaggy dog story, it's because you wish you knew back at the first paragraph that Joe and Rube were metafictional characters.

But if you have decided to stay with me so far, let me tell you about Egmont. (Having tricked you twice already, rest assured that he's real, at least in the fictional world of this story). Egmont had a craving for adventure and violence, which made him a terrible investment banker who always took risks in excess of what the computer models dictated. Realizing this, Egmont hatched a plan that involved a medical license with just the right duration for a campaign in the french Foreign Legion, for which he had applied during a business trip.

Egmont's campaign — one of those post-colonial skirmishes that make up the actual white man's burden — left him with one deaf ear and a few missing toes, but six months later he had returned to the bank and commanded his division with strength and valor to record profit amidst a system-wide bear market. Since the doctor who faked Egmont's illness records had died of aggravated assault during his Legion period, Egmont was either a war veteran — a hero, at that — or a successful master of finance. No one but Egmont himself knew he was both.

After succesful campaigns in the sands of Africa and the op rooms of Wall Street, Egmont went off his bleeding rocker. He started missing each other day of work, made up two different names for his different personas and eventually became a cross-dresser in his Wall Street banker character. By then he had been fired and was flying solo from his home computer where he eventually starved to death — he was, after all, living as two men but eating as one.

This is why I quit graduate school. Degree inflation had attracted many people who wanted further distinction and legs ahead in the job market race to graduate programs, and that was part of the reason I was there. But I was also interested in academia in se et per se, partly cherishing the "ivory tower" dream of stability and distinguished irrelevance. As time went by, I was becoming Egmont. Eventually, I had a colorful mental breakdown after fucking a woman quite below my educational level, whom I had randomly meant online.

After quite some time stark raving mad, having moved back with my parents and rarely leaving my room — making an exception for clubbing after 2AM — I started to blog the stream of disturbing thoughts. That proved quite therapeutical, and taking a job with a friend, I was able to find a spouse sufficiently lovable and attractive to marry.

Notice how the irrelevance of the previous three stories is what makes them so relevant. Joe pursued advanced education for futile purposes, and Rube fucked a woman of inferior educational achievement, despite them being emphatically not like me in any meaningful sense. Rube is older, taller and has a full bush of grey hair over his head. Joe has, as far as I can recall, green eyes. (Maybe Joe is an unconscious reinvention of the waitress I never fucked.) You could have skipped everything until the previous paragraph and still know about as much about me (partly because even this is fiction, but that's besides the point). Knowing isn't much better than not knowing. And vice-versa.

You see, now that you got to the end of the story, what have you gained, really? Maybe you'll regain courage and get inside the metaphorical pants of your metaphorical blonde waitress, but it's more likely that you'll take a turn for the apathetic instead. And that's the whole point: fucking is fucking, whether you understand Markov multifractal models or not. And "fucking" is a free variable here.