It started when they noticed my catfish po’ boy…

I made the mistake of napping after work. Or perhaps the mistake was not setting my alarm for only 45 minutes. Instead, I slept ’til about 10:30pm, which meant that there wasn’t a whole lot for me to look forward to in terms of grub and entertainment. My coworker at the Reporter, David Alire Garcia, has been going on and on about the late-night fare at the Atomic Grill, and so I figured that was the best option.

At the table beside mine sat a quartet of manic UC Davis students attending this weekend’s Cognitive Development conference. You know the type of conference-goers I’m talking about: young and so damned up on themselves because they’re “professionals” traveling on someone else’s dime, they get loud, obnoxious and amuse themselves by teasing the locals. First they hounded me about my food. Then they hounded me about the book I was reading (Rick Moody’s The Diviners). When they learned I was not only a journalist, but the guy who wrote the would-dogs-vote-for-Richardson piece, they went nuts. They made me pose between them holding this week’s Reporter. Then they made me stand on a booth-seat so they could take my picture in front of the Tupac Shakur painting. They said I was famous.

After a month and a half, I’ve already achieved third-tier local celebrity status. The Stone Roses were playing. Very appropriate. Who doesn’t want to be adored? Still … I kinda just wanted to read my book in peace.

When I first got to the Reporter, I was encouraged to decorate my walls quickly and colorfully. No problem, no problem at all. Especially if I’ve got access to a color printer. Up went pages from my favorite comic book series, Transmetropolitan. Up went stickers and my sheriff’s hat (next to a photo signed by Sheriff Greg Solano). Up went some quotes on writing and journalism that continue inspire me.

Yesterday I put up a new quote and I thought, in lieu of any other ponderings, I’d share it with you. Strictly speaking it’s now the oldest quote on my wall. It’s the climactic finish to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The American Scholar, often referred to as “America’s Literary Declaration of Independence.” I first heard it read by Garrison Keillor on his daily literary spot on KBAQ in Phoenix. So, imagine it read by the voice of Prairie Home Companion. I’ve broken it up a bit since it’s extremely dense, but it is normally one long curtain of words:

We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.

See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides.

What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Patience,— patience; with the shades of all the good and the great for company; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. It is not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;—not to be reckoned one character;—not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?

Not so brothers and friends—please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Q: What’s the best thing about being a self-supported bachelor with high metabolism in Autumn?

A: I can eat a whole pumpkin pie in one sitting if I want to.