There’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s fascinating concept of “Flow” (or as I like to call it, Flow420) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Re: We Don’t Need No Education.

As for being naturally intelligent and hating school, well damn.. that’s probably 99% of all kids who have ever had to attend that miserable arthritic dinosaur of an institution (’Deschooling Society’ by Ivan Illich has many good many things to say about this – available online!)

There was one woman at school who ‘taught’ (or rather ‘imposed’) Chemistry, that me and my friends liked to call “Jabba” after the obese slug-shaped space trader. A small part of me still hopes that fat b1tch is dead *ahem* sorry.)

Just to say, I’m from a paltry little island called Endland and over here “Deliberately under-funded public education”, “Every day like Sunday” and “The standard sub-standard” are the norm.

Makes me think of tragic anti-hero Henry Rollins and his own experiences growing up in a society which treats children as fodder for the Great Machine.

Thing is – it is always we humans which (initially, at least) create these Processing machines and then become slaves and victims to them. An old, old story..

Take it easy

Frank

Don’t like the white on black text? Over-ride it in your browser! In FireFox you’ll find it under Tools/Options/Content/Fonts & [sic]Colors/[sic]Colors. De-select “Allow pages to choose their own [sic]colors, instead of my selections above”, click OK twice and reload the page. Vo’la!

It’s for this reason that I find it a pleasure to watch good bartenders. They move with a fluid grace that is never hurried, but somehow they’re able to make drinks and pull beers faster than I could ever do it.

Over time, I’ve come to predict that type of experience I’ll have at an establishment by how efficiently the bar operates. Is the bartender in a panic, or the bar laid out poorly? It will probably be a bad night. On the other hand, if the bar patron’s needs are served expediently with no wasted motion, the evening will usually turn out well.

Perhaps this shows that I spend too much time in bars.

“It began in Kentucky in the early ‘60s: I was a ham radio operator known as WN4KSW, a skinny burr-headed prisoner of school, isolated in the cultural drought of the Midwest. I was theoretically a smart little bugger, according to test scores, yet I kept hearing that I had attitude problems and wasn’t working up to my potential. With the exception of science fairs, my academic performance was apparently disappointing to authority figures.

“Oh well. I didn’t care: I had a secret life.”

Thanks for the excellent essay, Jason…
Steve

Forreals.