or in the pub down the street, or in our squalid little shacks in the student ghetto, my college days were dominated by talk. We talked about everything, over wine, beer, coffee, pot, whatever. There was always a pack of cigarettes and a legal pad and a ballpoint pen, and when we weren't talking about physics, scribbling equations and sketching diagrams furiously, we went on to art, philosophy, religion, gossip, and sometimes even politics. We talked about everything except sports.

I miss those days, I had to give them up after I left school, and after I lost track of the few friends that I kept from that time. That's what this place provides, an exposure to working minds that I need to make contact with. The people at work and my present aquaintances don't seem to want to talk about anything except their suburban lives and their shared domestic melodramas.

It's not because they lack interests or intelligence, it almost as if it's no longer considered "cool" or adult to exhibit a curiosity about anything that doesn't concern your immediate everyday existence. That is so sad, so sterile. And that is why I can't help but come here and shoot my mouth off, sometimes making an ass of myself, and sometimes boring everyone to tears. I need to see other minds working, it's my own form of domestic SETI, and it's why I sometimes get so short-tempered with people who only want to talk about one thing all the time.