last month i wrote about eddie west, the guy who owns the shop in my town and how he's crazy an funny.#

last thursday i woke up and rode my bike to work, as i have been doing recently. my idea is that if i ride around without my shirt on enough eventually some beautiful women will ask me for my seven digits. anyways, i was planning on going to Dave Winer's thursday meeting that night so when i went home i was kind of upset to see a flat tire on my car.#

because i was raised inside a computer i don't know how to change my tire. this is very hard for me to admit. i know what to do, i could write it down, but i don't have the confidence to do it alone. so i get ed to come down to my house, do that up and then we go down to the shop so i can wait around while they get a new tire and put it on.#

every time a customer came in Ed would explain to them that I was his psychiatrist and that anything that they wanted to ask him they would have to whisper to me first because he was feeling unstable at the moment and needed a buffer. keep in mind that eddie is like 70, nearly. so this really caught me off guard the first time he said it but i felt that i caught only quickly and we had them all confused. he was telling everyone that he found me through Dr. Bill - who as i mentioned in the last episode is this great Doctor of Psychology who works there fixing cars because he likes doing it - apparently i was bill's star pupil in a class he was taking and when i graduated (i was the youngest psychiatrist in massachusetts) he fixed me up with some money for a practice.#

so then ed and i talked about money, public funding, and education. ed is really involved in town politics and right now there's a big deal about how much money is being spent on new schools for the town. the core of our conversation was that we thought public schools did a poor job doing what they do and that we would both prefer obligatory attendance of private schools of your choice with the government spending money on accreditation programs, scholarships, and breadth of knowledge testing. he liked this idea because it relieves some of the tax burden from people without kids in school, creates better schools, and creates a real quality control system similar to that of colleges and universities - without destroying the chances of people without "means" of getting educations. Bill (who's ex-wife is the head school administrator of the towns) and I thought that his idea was pretty valid but of course no one would really stand for it, the only way to implement it would be to start putting kids in private schools by the thousands.#

the conversation then moved to whether or not people are "really" better off with education and ed talked about when he was a kid in our poor poor farm town. ignorance it seemed was bliss.#

it was a nice time, then i went to the meeting and met Dave Winer and some people. very interesting discussions, i plan on going more often. #