Half a lifetime ago I left home, drove 800-plus miles and went to college. Okay, my mom drove me 800-plus miles to college, but it wasn't exactly my fault that I didn't have my own car. No matter. Me and my glam metal-permed hair planned to study broadcast journalism and become a TV reporter.

Seventeen-year-olds--even supposedly bright ones--don't know shit.

Anyway, I took a computer (one of those suitcase-sized Compaq "portables") and a daisy-wheel printer at a time when all of my classmates preferred those fancy word-processors. You know, the machines that showed two or three lines of type in a tiny window. The latest in modern technology, and all that.

I didn't have a TV, and neither did most students in the dorms at the University of Missouri. We didn't really need a TV, of course, what with the abundance of drinking and whoring and all the other fun things that come with college. We surely didn't have video games, what with 1987 being the era of "Dragon's Lair" and "Space Ace" and the general death of the video arcade.

About a week into school I spent a Thursday night--the entire night--cruising from party to party with a couple of girls. We drank, we talked, we drank, we talked some more, no one had sex--an unfortunate sequence of events that would plague my early college years--and then it was time to go to breakfast and go to class. I remember sitting in statistics at 8:40 in the morning feeling remarkably refreshed and untired. An entire new world opened up to me. I really could stay up all night, and I'd never have to pay for it.

See my comment on 17-year-olds above.

I spent this last week hanging out at the beach with my parents, my brothers, some college friends and my own nascent family. We had a few beers, cooked some seafood on the grill and watched my son Max splash in the ocean. It was a good time. One of the good things about the passage of time is the ability to bring together your various families--the ones you inherit and the ones you choose--and see how your life fits together. We got along well, which was cool.

But that happens to me more often than not. I'm not one of those people who rejected my family--despite traveling the better part of a thousand miles to go to school, I wasn't fleeing the people as much as the place where they lived. It's always good to get together with the old folks. We had the occasional set-to way back when, but nothing irreparable. Just the usual teenage bullshit. I figure Max (and his impending little brother) will pull the same sorts of stunts and plague Barbara and I with the usual sorts of attitude. If you don't go through that stuff, you can't really become a complete person.

I think it's fair to say that my life has been better and much more interesting since I went to college. I hated Clovis, N.M., so much that I resolved not to date--at all--so that I wouldn't form any attachment to the place. This devotion to insane self-inspired dogma plagued my high school years, though I do think that it's safe to say that even without such a pledge, my high school love life didn't have much of a chance of going anywhere.

But being a teenager sucks, at least until you leave home. And since I skipped second grade, I graduated from high school a couple weeks after I turned 17. I got a whole extra year of teenage emancipation, and I have to say that I mostly enjoyed it. Beer was easy to come by (any college student who can't score beer should be flunked out on principle), and I was a decent enough student to eventually recognize that I couldn't stay awake all the time. I finally realized that the way to take advantage of college was to not worry so much about the classes and engage myself in the life of the school itself. I worked at the student paper (and gave up on that TV nonsense), DJed at the college radio station (starting my slow descent into the madness that remains Aiding & Abetting) and dabbled in scores of other activities.

A lot of my friends are people that I knew in college. But a lot of my friends are people that I met after school. I can count my high school friends on one hand. While it's safe to say that the most enjoyable time--judging solely on hedonistic merit, of course--of my life was college, it's also safe to say that the most rewarding times of my life are yet to come. Just as wisdom must follow knowledge, satisfaction must follow pleasure. Happiness, like love, exists on many levels. And it seems to me that I've only begun to discover those layers.

In another 17 years, I'll have one son in college and another just about ready to flee. And my life will, once again, change irreparably. That's cool. Life without change isn't really life. It's just a sitcom without the jokes.

Jon Worley walked to South Carolina on the last night of his beach vacation, about a six-mile round trip from his rented house in Sunset Beach, N.C. He set out on this journey at 11 p.m., thus proving that 34-year-olds--even supposedly bright ones--don't know shit.