6 March 2026

As I sit in my course, waiting to break down the Daodejing, also known to me when I was younger as the Tao Te Ching. I’m here early, and that afforded me an opportunity to daydream while the two music nerds near me crank the music they made and loudly break it down. Something, something, drop B button.

Anyway, back to the Dao. As a young teenager, before my parents’ deaths, I read the Dao and thought of myself as a little Daoist. Boy howdy was I embarrassing, but at the time, I fancied myself a philosopher. Yeah, I’m not.

I vividly remember hanging out on a playground roasting fatties with the boys while I swung around on a swing set, talking out of my ass about The Way. As a grown man, I look at Chinese philosophy through a more academic perspective now. 

Speaking of Chinese thought, look up The School of Names and read about the white horse. Basically, this one asshole is like “A horse is a horse, but a WHITE horse is not a horse. It is a white horse, which makes it different from a horse.” Reading this honestly agitated me a little, but the person responding to this nonsense also lost his cool, so I feel alright about it. We spent an entire class talking about see-through horses because of this jerk.

While hanging out waiting, I am revisiting my thoughts on the drive.

I take the back way to school every day. It adds about ten minutes, but it’s totally worth it. I have to drive through two old milltowns that were bustling around 100 years ago. These two cities hold about 40,000 people each and are adjacent, so it’s a respectable metro by New England standards.

Anyway, there is a local mountain that splits the two towns, and each city has its reservoirs right against each other as well. This means that I spend a big portion of my trip driving through a little mountain pass, enjoying some natural beauty. The mountain breaks up two cities with a really nice and really large number of old buildings with awesome architecture between them.

I’m not playing up this pass. It’s small. People who have been through the Sierra Nevadas would mock it for even being called such. Nonetheless, when it snows badly enough, they close the damn thing, just like in California. I also slid off the road on the way to school once, which was all I needed to now drive like a grandpa through that part of town. 

I live for danger.

The Professor has arrived, and with that, I’m off!

Drugs and hugs,

JTC