@alison@burningboard.net @vnikolov@ieji.de The final time I reread Pirsig, I lightly annotated it and wrote a short index for my annotations (on an empty page in the back), which I intended as a barebones essay to myself. Fortunately that worked, and seemed to kill off any later temptations to read it again. Sounds like I should look into Laurence Gonzales and "Surviving Survival". I see that it gets a very respectable 4.21 stars on goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17573683-surviving-survival It's worth emphasizing one point that is often taken for granted by all of us currently present cognoscenti 😉 but not by General Audiences: there's "crazy" in the psychiatric sense (where they prefer avoiding that term in favor of more neutral and more specific terms), and "crazy" in the much looser sense meant in nontechnical common usage. In the latter, "crazy" can mean *many* things, typically including a figurative square peg idiosyncratic individual being hammered into a too-small round hole in society demanding a perfect fit without regard for wider context of contributions to aforesaid completely ungrateful society. (not to imply any *criticism*, of course!) It obviously also can mean someone widely misunderstood and widely under-appreciated, who hears a siren song inaudible to everyone else, but irresistible as a powerfully insightful Muse on subjects that others may not appreciate even exist. That's the way that I think that van Gogh, and certain other people, are "crazy". It doesn't always also mean "genius", but when we're lucky, it does.