12.16.2025

The pleasures of associative thinking. Some of us, especially me, like to argue that this is the essence of human cognition. You can't fly a plane on analogies but you can generally get pretty far comparing things to each other. When I took a break from college to follow a girlfriend to D.C. the great solace I found was in focusing my study skills on reading whatever I wanted. I did this instead of seriously looking for a job after my hours were cut at the coffee shop, a situation I later discovered was a result of the Iago-like machinations of a jealous Nepalese coworker. Try running that through your AI detector. She worked at a book store so there were plenty of samples lying around and there are piles of free literature all over that city anyway, what with all the concentrated overeducated brains consuming ideas and spitting them out like pits when they're done, as I rediscovered a few years ago when I followed a different girlfriend to D.C. and found the closest I got to inner peace was on long walks around Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights, weaving in and out of Rock Creek Park and often lost, coming across little free libraries full of esoteric biographies on playwrights I forgot about twenty years ago.