School

[Alex Colter]

Dave, what you said really "hits home" for me. I graduated high school and
promptly decided I wanted nothing to do with Academia, drunk on Whitman no
doubt, and somewhat on fire with Blakean Notions and prone to Pynchonian
Paranoia. I spent a bit of time homeless, consuming large amounts of
marijuana, ended up in jail (for said marijuana), began working on various
organic farms... finally, at 23 I can say that I am looking to continue my
education in the formal sense (continuing my "true" and personal Education
was never a question) and will start school in the fall. One of the folks
on the farm here, upon seeing what I read (I believe it was Frank Kermode
at the time) insisted very strongly, under threat of mock-violence, that I
needed to go back to school. I suppose he saw a bit of himself in me...
If it's any hope my Aunt recently acquired her nursing degree at age 54,
having no previous college credit or anything like that... best not to give
up hope, though I do not know, or I know only very little, when it comes to
that feeling of the Crushing Burden of years...

As for Borges, Keith, I am tempted to wax poetic and say something along
the lines that what I dig about Borges is he seems to write what has
already been written... or no, like his Pierre Menard,  Borges writes
fragments of Homer, Second Century Gnostic exegesis, imbues writers who
wrote centuries before him with strictly Borgesian qualities... but really
I love Borges because he was one of the first writers I read that made me
feel *intoxicated* simply by encountering them and in turn encountering
myself. I recall coming home from the library, I must have been 16 or 17,
walking through the Nature Preserve nearby and, having never been
intoxicated on even a drop of beer in my life, feeling *high.*

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 1:20 AM, Alex Colter <recoignishon at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Having graduated about five years ago I cannot say I learned anything
> from
> > High School...
>
> ... having graduated a long, long time ago, from a high school even
> closer down the street now than it was when I went there, I learned,
> stay in school as long as possible afterward (which I DIDN'T do, so
> ...) ...
>
> .. I woke up shaking thinking this this morning: do @ LEAST something
> worth doing, maybe something yo actually enjoy, even, each and every
> day (if not each and every second). DON'T live every day as if it
> might be yr last (i.e., rifling through Kubler-Ross's stages of dying
> as if they're a Rolodex, or an animation flipbook), but as if yr gonna
> have to relive it on yr deathbed.  This, I suppose, is my take on
> Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, not so much as to affirm whatever the
> hell it is you do, but to do whatever it is you can affirm in the end
> (I'm Catholic, but I also can't help but think that "do unto others"
> is, pace Gilles Deleuze, the kind of logic that makes sadists out of
> masochists, so ...).
>
> Do what I say, not what I do.  I make mistakes so y'all don't have to.
>  Trust me, y'all don't want to end up like me, much less like how I'm
> going to end up, so ...
>
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