The Clairvoyant Zoopraxiscope

One of the people I was having coffee with the other night, one of the two lost friends from high school, mentioned to me that I'd told him, "Whatever you do, don't go to ___________ Junior College." And then he reminded me that in fact he had gone to ____________ Junior College. The things we think we know. Or the things I thought I knew. That quality doesn't really go away, that knowingness, although life rises up continually to remind you that you know nothing, and the things you thought you knew, or held dear, are meaningless. Schooling, for instance. To have a career in the arts, your school makes no difference. All that matters is the will. I don't regard myself, at this point in my life, as "a poet who went to Columbia University." I see myself as someone who has written what he's written because he wanted to. Perhaps some of it was in reaction to my academic surroundings, but most of it wasn't. Who we are, and what we become, is ultimately traceable back to the innermost core of our selves, blah dee blah dee blah.

Having coffee tonight with two people I have not seen in seventeen years, one of whom is an art director for Law and Order: SVU, the other of whom is a practicing roboticist. One of these folks lives 5 blocks away from me. Another person I went to high school with, also a roboticist, lives one block away from me. I know they say life is like high school, but...

I suppose it should be no surprise to me that many people I went to high school with ended up here. I went to Arts Magnet H.S. in Dallas, which used to be Booker T. Washington H.S., one of the more prominent and accredited all-black high schools in the nation. Sometime in the mid-seventies, the artists took over. They promptly turned it into a wonderful, ramshackle, intellectually advanced, academically shady spot that, were I (god forbid) living in Dallas as a father, would not think twice about choosing as a high school for my children. Good enough for Norah Jones, Erykah Badu, and Edie Brickell? Good enough for me. The place encouraged productive lassitude in a way most American schools do not, and it gave me a better intellectual education than I could have possibly expected at the high school where I served for one unpleasant, academically charged year--a place whose football fans once cheered, at a game against a black Dallas high school, "We're all white,/ But that's all right!"

In any case.