Paul Theroux is a pessimist...

Wrote this over at Taps:

Makes for a great warm up to the blog writing back in the office later: a pint of California Gold, a BLATT sandwich, and writing at the bar. Great escape from the slow morning of the office. Those break-room type lunches, where we all sit around and discuss something other than what's been playing on my mind for a few hours before heading back to our desks just seem so trivial. A whole lot of discussion about nothing. Somtimes I feel like I don't fit in with anyone outside of the university type academics.
As though those type of academics don't exist outside of a university setting, but instead are some sort of wierd genotype that exists only within a predetermined radius of academic environs. Delving into philosophic discussion aside from that radius is futile - no one is interested. Their views are ossified, rigid, reinforced by only what they choose to hear and never challenged. Entrenched in a narrow cleft, berift of the ability to meander and braid, to jump channels. Interesting analogy - witness the Mississippi, the Colorado; compare them to that prevalent body of thinking in this culture. I invite criticism of that. We are a nation of canyons, not deltas. Become so deeply entrenched that the surface can no longer be sighted from the deepened banks, and the ability to even slightly change course is lost, save for cataclysm. Even then, while oxbows and goosenecks can be plown through, destroyed, and lost, the only drastic change comes from the abandonment of a channel entirely. Jumping the bank into a new, quickly down-cutting material. Easily erodable, malleable, friable, pliant. Beds shifting under the newfound load, lost and reformed, redeposited inverted downstream, barely recognizable. Not lost in entirety, but irrevocably altered via upheval and cataclysm, not choice.

...so yeah, that was my lunchtime ramblings over a beer and a sandwich. I like the analogy in there though, the nation of canyons vs. deltas. I'm sure I can put that to use as an alliteration somewhere in the future.