I just re-finished Bill Bryson's Neither here nor There (the 're'-finished thing isn't worth the explanation). Anyway, it is an awesome read. Bryson is a brilliant writer, a very approachable sorta brilliance. He's the type of brilliant fellow who is perfectly at home drinking in a sports bar or fishing in an out-of-sight river. He doesn't get off on overly-poetic diction. He never tries to be too cute or too edgy. He just tells the truth.

Since I've removed myself from the future-lawyer/doctor/businessman/professional club it seems that being some sort of unpaid intellectual will be my future. Definitely soon to call that one, but I'm working under that assumption for the following thought(s). In my pursuit of becoming a well-paid quasi-thinker I have no hopes of being brilliant in the most typical sense. I don't hope to be what Zinn is to history, or Bloom to literature, or Talese to writing. My most earnest hope is to be a man who provides the truth, hopefully in an insightful and interesting manner. I hope to do this in whatever field I end up in, even if my field happens to be the wild and crazy world of food service. In this way I hope to be exactly the man Bill Bryson is.

Little quote that I, and probably you, can really relate to, at least the second half: "I was tired of the daily drudgery of keeping myself fed and bedded, tired of trains and buses, tired of existing in a world of strangers, tired of being forever perplexed and lost, tired above all of my own dull company. How many times in recent days had I sat trapped on buses or trains listening to my idly prattling mind and wished that I could just get up and walk on myself?"