At the Lie-Nielsen Open House in 2017, Peter Galbert and I were talking amongst a bunch of woodworkers when the topic of his “archnemesis” came up.
“Oh yeah,” Peter said, casually. “Everyone needs an archnemesis. You should get one.”
I couldn’t tell if Peter was joking. I laughed and waited to see if someone would make it clear that this was an inside joke among his friends (which I think it is). But it was too late. The idea had infected my head meat. Weeks after Peter’s offhand remark, I found myself saying, “Yes, I do need an archnemesis.”
So, I went and got one. This is the story of how it went.
Now before I tell the story, I ask that you don’t guess who it was. First off, that’s unkind, and you could hurt someone’s feeling. Second, no one will ever see your comment because I’ll squash that sucker flat.
Finding an archnemesis was difficult because I am (surprise) on the autism spectrum. I don’t have a lot of strong negative or positive feelings about people. It’s always been difficult for me to get furious (or happy) about people. (Side note: Objects are different. The hottest anger I have ever felt was toward an electric paper-folding machine. My second-hottest anger? A malfunctioning CD player.)
Eventually I chose my nemesis: a woodworker who made me mildly roll my eyes at times. We’ll call him Dr. Orbo. My beef with Dr. Orbo was admittedly minor – as most beefs are. We both love woodworking. We both enjoy writing. We both use a mix of hand tools and power tools.
We should be best friends!
But, Christopher Schwarz whispered darkly, Dr. Orbo doesn’t think that his farts stink. (To be fair, I’ve never smelled Dr. Orbo’s below-the-belt-emissions. They might smell like Lagarostrobos franklinii for all I know.)
So with the nemesis chosen, what’s next? Do I challenge Dr. Orbo to a feat of strength? A game of wits? Should we go to the pain?
Well before I did any of that, I thought I should first discover Dr. Orbo’s weaknesses. So I read nearly every word Dr. Orbo had written. I watched the doctor’s videos. I read all the Reddit comments I could find about Dr. Orbo. I spent long nights wondering about him.
Where did this guy come from? How did he get to his station in life? Do I smell huon pine?
Eventually, I had done so much research that I found that I could write and talk like Dr. Orbo. Late at night, I wrote (unpublished) tool reviews in his voice. I penned entire magazine articles where I was the personification of Dr. Orbo.
I started a blog (unpublished) where I pretended to be Dr. Orbo. I answered woodworking questions from fans and critics in his voice. I fed all his writings into an early AI model where I could ask Dr. Orbo questions, and the AI would answer in Dr. Orbo's voice.
I started to question who I was.
I was descending into madness.
One day I woke up and cut the string. I deleted Dr. Orbo from my browser.
<the screen goes black>
<the curtain rises; birds chirp as the light reveals a corn field>
A few years later I encountered the good doctor on the internet quite by accident. It was like running into an old girlfriend at the mall in the town where you both grew up. Lucky for me, emotions are like tiny grains of sand in my bathing suit liner. They are slightly irritating, but they’re nothing like a pissed-off Alaskan king crab dropped into your bathing suit liner.
And that’s when I saw Dr. Orbo for who he was. He was just another human with insecurities that he covered up with <insert personality trait here>. I do the same thing with vulgar humor, shitposting and a couple beers.
I couldn’t call Dr. Orbo my archnemesis anymore. We’re too much alike. And at that moment I found I could make that same statement – “we’re too much alike” – about almost every human being.
And that’s when it all made sense.
Everyone needs an archnemesis. You should get one.
Thanks Chris, Love your writting. I find that it is hard to truly dislike anyone, once you see through the bulshit armour that people wear to defend themselves against the world they fear and see the normal vulnerable human underneath. Our opinions about others say more about us thatn them. Yes, we are all the same messed up sacks of meat trying to make sense of the world we were born into.
So il tu nome!
Il suo nome è...Amor!
(Or maybe just a fellow man)