Several people have asked me on the library tour about my education, and I have to say I don’t have much. I lurked and loitered my way through public education and was booted out of the two colleges I attended for failure to participate in much of anything. I never had a teacher who liked me much, and I returned the favor. It might be differnt now.

I am an uabashed fan of Beavis & Butthead and their credo: because I am stupid, I am free. Because I don’t know what I am supposed to think, I am free to think.

I respect education and would still like to go and get some. I’d love to go back to college one day, but I’d ever make it through the paperwork I feel it’s my role to be outside the tent pissing in. It gives me a worldview that is certainly not noble or superior, but it is my own. Walking through Brown today with Maria, I fairly bristled at a sort of nameless rage  about my own life outside the gates of the mind. I always wanted in. Then I learned not to want what you don’t have, and celebrate what you do.

Life is a powerful teacher, and I wonder sometimes how my life might have evolved if I had gone to a college like Brown, which I desperately wanted to do as a kid. Today I stood outside of the same gates I often looked through when I was young, and I did not feel that yearning or wish to be on the other side. One day I might like to go back to college and learn something I don’t know, perhaps even teach something. But my guess is that I have found my place, and I know which side of the fence I ought to be living in.