"You're wasting your time," the man of the retired couple from Florida in for dinner last night tells my coworker J.  (Or maybe it was, "you're running out of time," blunt enough.)  As people in from out of town, the man and his wife had engaged their server over the course of dinner, and J told them of his plans to go teach history eventually.  To a restaurant worker in his forties, J early, me late, there is a point, no doubt.  The couple was amicable, jovial, not unfun, so, let them be.  A little prod never hurts.  It's not lost, in the folds of the mind.  This is why one shares, in the course of his profession, only that which cannot be avoided to share.  Little hope that it will be understood as more than folly, but so be it.

And yet, I cannot help but feel that I've just witnessed the difference, the change perhaps, in consciousness, without which great works of art and science and philosophy, history, etc., cannot be born.  A new consciousness does not tend to come out of comfortable suburban retired Florida life, at least in stereotype.  (Though it's true that Kerouac settled and died in Florida.)  Consciousness emanates from 'certified government ink pissers' like Einstein.  It comes from degenerate ex-pat writers like Hemingway.  It comes from the drop-out sector of life.  It comes from the oddly called upon.  It may not, on the other hand, come from folks who sit too long in front of commercial television.

Well, thanks for the tip.  Enjoy your visit.