I’m thinking truly nothing today, so I’m going to have to defer to some more Walden up in here. I was reading that some people think Thoreau was a buffoon with stupid ideas. Well I guess people think that about everyone. At least Robert Frost liked him. I don’t know anything about him except this book and what I wrote in my first post. But the book seems worthwhile to me.

There has been a lot of talk about sitting on pumpkins and well, nothing bad can come of that.

I guess I left off on “It is never to late to give up our prejudices.” Well, that’s a comforting thought. Most of the time I think I don’t have a choice in life. He writes “…it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left.” That’s worth thinking about.

“What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.” Thoreau apparently has this thing about old people not being necessarily wise. If he stopped there I would agree that being old is not a sufficient condition for wisdom. But he also thinks that people know more about life when they are younger, and forget and become set in their ways as they get older. I don’t know how I feel about that. I can see it, especially in the Picasso sense of every child being an artist. But old people usually know what’s up. I guess they just collect a lot of prejudices and that can be a problem.

It’s funny that he wrote this like two hundred years ago and he talks about fuel in the same way that Kurt Vonnegut does in Man Without a Country. He writes “…people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled around the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people…”

Which is like Vonnegut’s quote that I’ve quoted probably twice here before, about gasoline, “Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor’s dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens.”

So that’s a funny parallel.

Well. Shit I’m not feeling very enthusiastic right now, even with this coffee. It’s almost time to go to work. I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee the last few days and it just hasn’t been doing me any good. It’s like the first time I drink a lot of it after not drinking any for a few days, that’s awesome. But then I’m like, man I’ve got to keep doing this, this is great! And then it just gets worse and worse and I just get all nervous and shit. Anxious and not even very awake. And my eyes start tearing up. I don’t know, shit’s weird.

But anyway, I’m trying to post every day just to keep in practice. Tomorrow I’m going to a Cinco de Mayo brunch and I’m bringing a lot of tequila and limes so I don’t know if I will post.