I’m not smart every day. Or even 85% of days. I’d lay the odds at around 5/6ths. Maybe that’s being generous.

I’ve learned to accept this, after countless mornings spent poring through WebMD to see if there’s some way my brain cells could have evaporated overnight. Writers love to flounder in self-created dramas about “the lost gift,” wrapping themselves in the absurd but easily-digestible story, “I’ve lost it! It’s gone! I’ll never write anything decent again!” But my mental lapses take it to an entirely new level — forget compelling sentences, I’m lucky if I can write down a phone number with all the digits intact.

Other days, everything just gels — the neurotransmitters are firing, the blood vessels are flowing, and all those curly little gray matter cells are slurping their chemical cocktails and pumping out lucid thoughts. Things seem easy — the day breezes by. Sometimes I’ll even write something that seems reasonably intelligent (at least, for the few seconds it takes for someone on the Internet to inform me otherwise, often employing one of the many synonyms for “suck”).

But on lapse days, it’s like the universe has conspired against any attempt at smarts. I can’t finish a sentence. Words on the page/screen may as well be backwards hieroglyphics. Doing laundry is an act of high-impact cognition. I try to come up with reasons for the sudden loss — I’m in shock from hitting my head on the coffee table last night; I’m anemic; I’ve unknowingly ingested some brain-feeding parasite. But the truth is that there’s really no clear explanation.

The problem is that I, like most people in the technologized white collardom of the modern work force, make a living by getting up every morning and putting on some semblance of smartness. Write cogent e-mails, type something clever, make some obscure connection, turn some phrase, all in the (often vain) hope of being taken seriously as a useful member of society. As such, waking up to find that I’m on the brink of special needs is a pretty major issue.

So I’ve started calling these “dumb days” — partly as a comforting reminder that it’s only temporary, and also because it helps stave off panic over whether those “substance awareness” lectures in high school were true, and that second screwdriver last night actually did kill off my final remaining brain cell.

But there is consolation to be had: Even on the dumbest days, when the English language feels like a Sisyphean rock, I can rest assured that, at that very moment, other people far smarter and infinitely more successful than me are saying really stupid shit, too.