There is, inside my skull, a committee.
I do not mean this in the elegant poetic sense, like Whitman containing multitudes, or some tasteful therapeutic inner family system with soft lighting and herbal tea. I mean a real committee. A municipal committee. A seasoned subcommittee of psychic bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits, all of them chain-smoking in a windowless conference room somewhere behind my eyes, slamming folders on a folding table and demanding action.
Their only item of business, apparently, is this: tell them. Tell them you were right. Tell them again. Tell them louder. Tell them with the exhausted dignity of a prophet who is also, somehow, a guy standing in line at Walgreens.
This has been going on my entire life.
The committee and I have had our differences over the years. There were periods of low trust. Seasons of mutual exasperation. Entire administrations defined by bad communication, internal coups, and the occasional spiritual filibuster. But time, as it tends to do, has sanded us into something like collaboration. We know each other now. We have history. We have minutes. We have learned, at last, how to function as a unit.
And the committee, for all its flaws, has never once had a new idea. It has exactly one motion, and it passes unanimously every single session: that I should inform the public, in no uncertain terms, that events have unfolded in a manner deeply favorable to my prior suspicions.
Not even specific suspicions, mind you. The committee is not interested in the details. They don’t care about evidence packets or timelines or which exact apocalyptic hunch, social intuition, interpersonal read, cultural diagnosis, or low-grade psychic itch eventually waddled into objective reality wearing a fake mustache. No, specifics are for weaker men. The committee deals in essence.
Their position is philosophical. Their position is spiritual. Their position is, in its purest form, you see?
And now, after 401 essays—four hundred and one—I have to admit the bastards have a little swagger to them.
Because there they sit, those smug little interior legislators, surrounded by a mountain of old notes, half-deranged intuitions, suspiciously accurate vibes, and enough written evidence to make a district attorney nervous. They are insufferable now. Absolutely drunk on precedent. You can’t even call a meeting to discuss groceries without one of them clearing his throat and noting, for the record, that we have been correct a statistically offensive amount of the time.
This is not always useful.
It does not make me wise. It does not make me serene. If anything, it makes me harder to live with internally. I would love to be one of those noble creatures who has a quiet insight, releases it into the universe like a lantern on a lake, and then moves on with grace. I would love to possess the kind of spiritual maturity that does not keep receipts.
But that is not what has happened here.
What has happened here is that I built, over many years, an archive of preemptive annoyance. A cathedral of documented dread. A museum of “just wait.” And now the committee, with all the composure of a body that has been waiting through forty years of public misunderstanding, would like a word.
They do not want revenge exactly. Revenge is too theatrical, too cinematic. No, what they want is something far pettier and therefore far more human. They want acknowledgment. They want a national holiday. They want one clean moment in the town square where I stand under a bronze bell and announce, to no one in particular and everyone at once, that the weird little internal weather system I have been living under for decades may have, in fact, been onto something.
Not that I’m taking pleasure in it.
I’m not.
I’m taking artisanal satisfaction in it. Small-batch vindication. Locally sourced confirmation.
There’s a difference.
And yet even as the committee screams for the floor, I find myself embarrassed by the whole impulse. Because “I told you so” is among the ugliest phrases in the language. It has the moral fragrance of cold soup. No one has ever heard it and felt expanded. It is the victory cry of the aggrieved ego, the last cigarette of the spiritually dehydrated. It is a phrase made entirely of pointed fingers.
Which is exactly why the committee loves it.
They love its tackiness. Its lack of enlightenment. Its cheap polyester spite. They do not want me to say that certain previously articulated intuitions have found corroboration in unfolding reality. They want me kicking open the saloon doors of history and yelling the verbal equivalent of a receipt thrown across a diner counter.
And to be fair, they make a compelling case.
Their argument, as always, is simple: if a man spends years publicly arranging his instincts into sentences, turning inner static into essays, bottling dread and absurdity and recognition into little glass containers and setting them on the porch for anyone who cares to inspect them—if he does this over and over and over again—then surely he has earned at least one lap around the yard muttering, well well well.
Not because he is superior. Not because he is special. But because being right is one of the few remaining pleasures in a collapsing civilization that still costs less than twelve dollars.
So yes, the committee has become louder lately.
They rise earlier. They are better organized. They have charts now. And every time the world lurches, every time some old atmosphere becomes present-tense fact, every time reality stumbles drunkenly into a shape I recognize, they begin pounding the table again like tiny enraged senators of the soul.
Tell them. Tell them you saw the outline. Tell them you felt it coming. Tell them your nervous system has been writing memos from the future in a tone of increasing irritation.
But here is the humiliating truth: they are not shouting because they want to dominate. They are shouting because they want relief.
Because maybe “I told you so” is not always arrogance. Maybe sometimes it is exhaustion wearing a party hat.
Maybe it is what comes out of a person who has spent years feeling the floorboards creak before anyone else hears the house settling. Maybe it is the cracked little hymn of those who are tired of translating their intuition into acceptable language for people who only trust a thing once it has already bitten them.
Maybe the committee isn’t asking for applause. Maybe they’re asking to stop being treated like lunatics for accurately describing the smell of smoke.
Still, their enthusiasm can be a lot.
No one needs this much internal pageantry. No one benefits from a psychic staff meeting in which twelve versions of myself argue over whether the public deserves a gentle essay or a full marching band of vindication. It is grotesque. It is funny. It is, if I’m being honest, probably the engine under half of what I write.
And so I have reached a compromise with the committee.
I will let them speak today, but only in principle. No exhibits. No examples. No itemized list of fulfilled intuitions. No pointing at the horizon with a trembling prophetic finger while muttering, “Interesting.”
Just this:
To the world, to history, to the great shrugging machinery of human denial, to every person, institution, vibe, and unfolding catastrophe that once made me feel dramatic for noticing its shape too early—
respectfully, with only a moderate amount of insufferable satisfaction,
I told you so.