cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I Thank The Wall Street Journal I think I was about 15 years old when I was on a plane trip to Miami by myself to visit friends. At an airport en route, I picked up an abandoned copy of The Wall Street Journal in a waiting area and start reading it for lack of anything else going. Everything seemed fascinating. I read damn near that entire newspaper on the plane and in the airports. The top story was that they had just killed a notorious drug kingpin named Pablo Escobar. From that day onward, I became obsessed with not only news and journalism but all sorts of history. I all but stopped reading fiction. Each and every day I bought a copy of the Wall Street Journal and usually the Washington Post as well. I went to a nearby University library often and wandered the stacks, pulling out volumes more or less at random and usually reading them through. I discovered military histories and manuals, contemporary accounts of nuclear weapons testing, 80 year old copies of the Saturday Evening Post, autobiographies of totally random people like John Waters and Wavy Gravy. Somehow I got onto studying Egyptian Hieroglyphics the following year. This was where I got my real education in high school. Reading newspapers and stack after stack of books from the University libraries. My ability to retain a stunning amount of the information that passed in front of my eyes during that period served me very well. I wonder where I would be today if I had never picked up that newspaper in the airport? 5:46 p.m. - 2008-08-14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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