That's George Orwell, not Jack London.

I threw myself on the world's pretty sporadic mercies as a kid -- left home and went to a distant city, and for a short period I walked if I wanted to go, smoked other people's left-overs if I wanted to smoke, and ate what I could. I did have friends, and I could have fallen back on family back East; but at that stage of my youth it was a welcome adventure. It never occurred to me that if I messed up badly enough it could become a permanent state of affairs; that's how naive and ill-suited for survival I really was. Read "dumb".

Fortunately I gradually came to my senses and made a decent life for myself, by normal standards. Except for my bizarre obsession about folk music ;>)

A