Your body isn't anymore, doesn't ask for much. A little music and a soft touch. Why don't you let it out to play?

Your heart isn't a birdcage, singing in your chest. You want to shut it up and give it a rest. You're going to die one day.

As I explained in the last episode, my dad convinced me to go back to Hobart and finish school my senior year, which I was very much against because the student handbook very clearly stipulated that I had to be on campus senior year.

I was done. I was fucking done man. The way I looked at it, a BA in literature and English and American literature says, you've read a bunch of shit, you know how to read, you know how to write, you know how to analyze what you've read.

I had proved that, you know I had read a lot of stuff, I had impressed my professors, I was hanging out with the professors, I honestly, you know was spending more time getting high with my professors than I was with students.

And so it was pretty clear that in their opinion, I had jumped through the necessary hoops, but because of technicalities, I had to do another year on campus. And I was emotionally really ready to go as I explained earlier in earlier episodes, I'd had this sort of epiphany where I realized I didn't really want to be an academic anyway.

So what the hell does any of this matter, you know I wanted the knowledge that I was getting from reading a lot of these, this literature, but I wasn't really interested in becoming a professor as I thought I was going to be.

So, so what the hell is the point, but my dad thought it was very important for me to go back and finish school and I had a great deal of respect for him. So I did, I went back.

And as I, I think I explained in the last episode, I was living in a tent out behind the art museum and a patch of woods.

And I was taking showers in the gym and then my, my tent got stolen and then I started sleeping on my professor's office floor, which was interesting.

Except for the times I overslept and he walked in with a student for office hours and I was lying there in my sleeping bag, you know, under his desk, which was kind of awkward.

And about this time I was hanging out with my professor and one of the deans of the school who was an anthropologist. I won't say his name because it's possible he's working somewhere still today and I don't want to cause any awkwardness form.

But because he was a really good guy, but he was trained as an anthropologist. And at this point he was working as a dean. I never took a class with him, which I regret because I really liked him as a person.

But at that time I didn't understand how interested I would be in anthropology. I didn't get it. And looking back, you know, I guess it's the curse of age, but there's so many things I didn't get.

So many things you can't possibly get when you're 20, 21, 22. There's just there hasn't been time and there's too much information and there's it's not the time to be making lifelong decisions.

Thank God I was smart enough to get that. I mean that that's the key to this whole thing that I guess the, you know, the turning point was, you know, going from thinking I was smart and new a lot.

To realizing that I really didn't know anything or very little. And that is the most important thing to know. If you know how little you know, if you have a sense of how limited your vision is, that opens your vision. That knowledge itself opens your vision incredibly, you know, we're, we're all walking through darkness with our little flashlights and most of the time we're walking through darkness with our little flashlights.

And most of us think that what we see is all that there is we don't realize we're looking with we've got a flashlight, you know, we don't, we don't understand how limited our vision is.

But recognizing how narrow your vision is, how narrow your knowledge is and your experience and so on, especially when you're young, is so important because it just opens up the world of possibility to you.

It's intimidating and freaky and all that, but it's very important. And I that's one of the reasons I regret not studying anthropology as an undergrad because I think that's what a lot of anthropology is about. It's about understanding the multiple realities that cultures create and how quickly we fall into thinking that our reality, whether a cultural personal religious historical whatever chemical.

Is reality itself as opposed to a single limited perspective on reality.

Anyway, so I'm hanging out one night with my professor Eric, whose office I was sleeping in and this Dean, whose name I'm not going to use.

...