It's just as futile, but you don't end up with any bruises.

He didn't remember my name, but I'll forgive him that- he had a lot of students. He knew me and that's all that matters. Asked if I wanted to go down the street and grab a beer. I told him I don't drink, but that I'd be happy to buy him one.

Conversations with me always get political, or at the very least sociological, and you can't go there with a tipsy teacher without risking an explosion of the sort of insecurities that plague people that actually care about what they do and have done. Did I think he was good teacher? I told him, honestly, that if I learned anything he was trying to teach us, I sure as hell didn't remember. But in a dense, suffocating mass of intolerable stupidity he provided a vacuum that we could expand in and fill. And above all things he himself was an invaluable lesson, a lesson of what bureaucracy and unrelenting indifference can do to a good, passionate person. He agreed, said he was so much worse for the wear of years spent banging his head against the wall, but that he didn't know what else to do. I told him to try writing on it.

He thought it was funny that I managed to pragmatically answer a figure of speech with another figure of speech. I always had a flair for teacher humor. And just like the old days, making the teacher laugh got me out of responsibilities- he wouldn’t let me pay for any of his drinks. I'll tell you, you can take the teacher out of the class, but you can't take the class out of a teacher. Except, maybe, with alcohol. Witness a couple slurry stumbling recitations of Keats (or maybe it was Yeats?) and you'll know what I'm talking about when I say truth isn't necessarily beauty, and that is definitely something I learned on earth.