Sub-heading: Blinkered Philistine Pig Ignorance

When I was about 13, I was trying to show off by convincing the kids around me (I won’t call them friends, since when I was 13 I had only about three friends) that I was an intellectual powerhouse. (As the tests of time have revealed, even if I had succeeded, this wouldn’t have impressed 13-year-olds anyway.) I told one of them that I read a lot of Nietzsche. He said, “Ralph Nietzsche or Friedrich Nietzsche?” He was calling my bluff! Crap!

I think I actually said Ralph. What an idiot, all the way around.

In the years between then and now I have read a lot of Nietzsche, and I have discovered that he was not named Ralph.

As I drove around thinking about this, and writing “Rlf Ntze” on my hand so I would remember to blog about it, I saw the “Road Closed” sign at the end of 10th street. This sign has been in place since 1991, when the new Science Hall at ECU opened, and that part of 10th street became a parking lot. It always bothered me because the sign isn’t accurate, and no one ever bothered to change it in any way. No one planted a shrub or erected a lamp or built a wall. They just left the old construction sign in place. How un-creative.

“Maybe in the end, the idea was not to expect too much out of life.” -Woody Allen, Husbands and Wives