Mostly I love school. But this last slurp at the trough of learning has been a long swallow. It coincided with an ugly rotator cuff tear on my left shoulder which eventually required surgery. Yep, it's as painful as you've heard. And very instructive on how much humans depend on being symmetrical.I spent the winter in the mistaken belief that I had a small tear that could be overcome by exercise. Exercise,
San Rafael Swell to Wasatch Plateau
though, had the effect of making things worse. Eventually I got the message and opted for surgery. The doc said hey, that was way worse than we thought! Not at all like it looked on the MRI. Just more confirmation that medicine and car mechanics are the same line of work separated only by the color of grease on your fingers.
My classwork is online from the University of Missouri. In some explosion of short-sightedness I decided a Masters degree in Media Management would be just right for me. That was a few years ago when I thought I would always own newspapers and just drift into fewer hours of work for retirement. Hell, I thought, if James Russell Wiggins could do it so can I. But - like I didn't know - there is no forward track less known than your own.
My business partner, who was always healthier and carried a tenth of the body fat I do, gets Lou Gehrig's Disease. And declines. And dies. We barely get our papers sold before his ability to communicate pretty much stops. Unlike many business partners this one was a gem, probably because we seemed to compliment each other's missing pieces. You know, what I lacked he had and vice versa. We weren't alike at all, really. The only thing we shared was an abiding respect for the other guy's strengths and some discretion about weaknesses.
So anyway, I was talking about school. My experience has been to learn about stuff I've been doing all my life with a whole bunch of people who have done it better than I did and who are mostly a hell of a lot younger. It is damn depressing when you think about it. I feel like Max Evans, who wrote The Rounders and a handfull of some of the best books about the real West you can find. I've had some beers with Max and here is what he'll tell you: It's all a con game. The whole thing. Them that learn the con and do it well have a measure of luck more than those who don't. But the con ain't being run by the folks around you, or by people at all. Nope. And even if you figger out what or who IS running the con it won't matter a spit or a lick.
I've got one more paper to trim up to end this semester and two days to do it. After that, by god, I'm not playing for a while.
