Johnny Cash: "Did you start this fire?"

In country music history John R. Cash's life and music are as monumental as the craggy features that glared out of countless albums and photos that now form his legacy. It's as if he grew into the role out of the life he led, without much pretense to the whims of record charts and a music industry that seemed somehow indifferent to his career. Record labels didn't know how to "package" his careening personality fueled by drugs and alcohol as he banged from rockabilly to country to gospel on his way to becoming, simply as he had been all along, The Man in Black.

But his life story always made good copy in the press, and along with Jerry Lee Lewis, Cash really created the outlaw image in country music. Elvis broke the rules under the watchful eye of Col. Parker, but in real life Cash trashed them without anyone's help at every turn. His fifty-year career proved you can become your own monument, if you live long enough to tell the tales. And though Jerry Lee may now be "The Last Man Standing" out of a million-dollar-quartet, Johnny Cash was the baddest of them all.

His Harper Collins autobiography, simply titled Cash, is a train-jumper of a life story and the reader is advised to hang on from the start:

I remember Daddy telling me about a time when he'd been riding the rods -- clinging to the crossbars under a moving boxcar, a terribly dangerous way of riding unobserved. When the train stopped in Pine Bluff and he crawled out, he found a railroad detective standing right there. He suffered a beating and a cussing-out, which he just had to stand there and take if he didn't want jail or worse. But when the train started moving again and the detective began moving away as the caboose came by, Daddy jumped on and hung there, cursing that railroad bull until he was out of sight. He laughed about that; he got in a few licks of his own and he got to ride in style out from under those boxcars.

That same bull, by the way, picked on another hobo a while later. It wasn't his lucky day; the hobo pulled a gun and shot him dead. My name is John R. Cash. I was born on February 26, 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas. ...

Cash's battles with booze and pills and powders are stuff of legend (and movies too), but what may be surprising are the difficulties he faced after his particular style of religious conversion got him into trouble: "When I spoke out I simply made my statement. I never said, 'You need what I've got because you're wrong and I'm right' and after I declared myself I didn't set out to prove myself: I didn't start acting any differently ... There was never any dividing line between Johnny Cash the Christian and plain old Johnny Cash."

He wasn't always this self-effacing. "Did you start this fire?" Cash is asked after one early incident that left the woods ablaze. Full of "amphetamines and arrogance," he's not willing to cooperate: "No. My truck did and it's dead, so you can't question it." The judge goes on: "Do you feel bad about what you did?" Cash: "Well, I feel pretty good right now."

The popularity of the Carter and Cash family name is stronger than ever, thanks to the efforts of many musicians who have revived the tradition and kept it alive. The music of succeeding family members themselves has shown an amazing versatility: Johnny and June Carter Cash, Carlene Carter, Rosanne Cash, as well as the members of the Carter Family III, have all carried on in the family tradition, and each with a unique approach.

The Winding Stream documentary -- its name is taken from a song written by A.P. Carter in 1930 -- traces this history not just for country music fans but for a wider audience, who may not recognize the Carters' impact on folk and rock music as well. Carter Family songs have been covered in an array of styles from Dylan to Jeff Buckley, The Black Crowes to John Lee Hooker.

The Winding Stream 90-minute documentary being produced by Beth Harrington is still in need of money to complete the project. In January a successful Kickstarter benefit went a good way to raise funding. The Winding Stream website includes current updates on the documentary as well a link where contributions can be made through Paypal or by mail to the fiscal sponsor, Center for Independent Documentary, 680 South Main Street. Sharon, MA 02067.

"You Can't Win" (1926): Winner take nothing

"Jack Black calls his book You Can't Win. Well, who can? Winner take nothing."
-- William Burroughs, 1988

This autobiography of the outlaw and convict Jack Black, which Burroughs recalls from memory as "the Good Red Book," is a real-life story of life lived against the grain. It came as a shock and a revelation when it was originally published in 1926, during F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age of The Great Gatsby -- and in some ways the scuffling figure of Jack Black was a carny-mirror reflection of Jay Gatz himself.

Originally published in serial form in The San Francisco Call, the book became a best-seller, going through five printings and gaining the attention of social reformers like Lincoln Steffens. Its success propelled Black into a brief literary career that included a play based on his experiences and then a film contract at MGM writing screenplays for $150 a week.
The easy picture of Black as a literary figure and upright citizen is too simple, though. Those who found the Folsom Prison ex-con extremely well-read probably didn't know he had used his prison years to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica three separate times learning "to play Society's game." Or that he got his 25-year sentence by shooting a man in a botched hold-up in Golden Gate Park in what one biographer calls "a one-man San Francisco reign of terror." His prison years were spent developing a network for survival, a patchwork of favors done for favors received, that extended years after his release. This underworld had its cast of prison"yeggs" and, just as important, people whom Black calls "the Johnsons" --those who are as good as their word, and keep their promises.

"Some of my debts had to be paid in kind, and no one could help me. I owe my life to a thief who risked his life to get me out of jail. He smuggled me saws to open my cell, then came in the night to cut the bars out of the window and lifted me through the hole when I was so weak from tuberculosis I could barely walk. ... Years afterward, when I had cured myself of the dope habit and served my sentence, won immunity from the law, and was just beginning to feel a little secure in my respectability, my telephone rang in the small hours of the night. A woman's voice asked if I was 'Mr. Black,' and said 'I have a message from Eddie ... of course, you know I can't give it over the phone. Hurry.' I didn't know what had happened but I knew another debt was due."

Once he got out of prison Black seems determined never to go back, and this is where You Can't Win develops its themes of reform and resurrection. Though he found a respectable life full of "too much hypocrisy" and said he never cared for it, for a short time Black became a police reporter and then circulation manager of The San Francisco Bulletin. He was befriended by members of the Progressive movement who urged him to write about his hardscrabble life and prison experiences in order to promote prison reform, and You Can't Win -- first serialized as Breaking the Shackles -- was the result, a modern pilgrim's progress of crime and punishment -- and redemption.

"I am sure but of one thing -- I failed as a thief and I am luckier than most of them. I quit with my health and liberty. What price larceny, burglary and robbery? Half my thirty years in the underworld was spent in prison. Say I handled $50,000 in the fifteen years I spent outside; that's about nine dollars a day... 'what chance have you now?' I would ask any young man, 'with shotgun squads, strong-arm squads, and crime-crushers cruising the highways and byways; with the deadly fingerprinting, central identification bureau, and telephotoing of pictures; and soon every police station broadcasting ahead of you your description and record?' Then consider the accidents and snitches -- what chance have you? Figure it out yourself. I can't."

"I was fascinated," Burroughs writes in his foreword to the 2000 reissue of You Can't Win, "by this glimpse of an underworld of seedy rooming-houses, pool-parlors, cat-houses and opium dens, of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles." The book made such an impression on Burroughs that he used some of Black's characters like Salt Chunk Mary, and even his language word for word. "When you can remember a passage of prose after fifty years it has to be good," he writes. Here's a passage from Burroughs's late novel Place of Dead Roads:

"A two-story red-brick house down by the tracks in Junction City, Idaho. Salt Chunk Mary, mother of the Johnson Family ... train whistles cross a distant sky. Mary keeps a pot of pork and beans and a blue porcelain coffee pot always on the stove. You eat first, then you talk business, rings and watches slopped out on the kitchen table. She names a price. She doesn't name another. Mary could say "No" quicker than any woman Kim ever knew, and none of her no's ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar, but nobody thought about that. Her cold gray eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens by, or John Citizen comes up with a load of double-zero into your soft and tenders."

The fame, and the money, was fleeting. Jack gave his talks on crime and prisons under the auspices of the League to Abolish Capital Punishment, which Clarence Darrow had started. Only his lecture fees were "keeping him out of the soup kitchens and breadlines," he wrote. His pride, or something like it, would not let him seek the charity that was becoming part of the Depression of the 1930s. Speaking engagements became fewer, and the royalties from You Can't Win dried up.

He had once told friends that if life got too grim he would tie weights to his feet, row into New York Harbor and drop overboard. This seems to be precisely what he did in 1932: Black vanished. His watch was found in a pawnshop pledged for eight dollars; it had been his prize possession, a gift from an ex-con he had helped. For his friends this became definite proof that he had been as good as his word to the end.

"On the Road" ( ... again ... )

Garrett Hedlund, Stellar, and Sam Riley at The Beat Museum, San Francisco

After decades of dream-casting games (Brando and Dean and Hopper and Fonda and Depp and ... ), and generations of fans and film directors sitting around talking about it, a film version of On The Road will be completed this year for arrival in theaters this December.

The Beat Museum's webpage carries some coverage, with photos, of the film's final shooting days last December, complete with a bit of old-school Hollywood gushing by young star-struck fans ("we just saw Kirsten Dunst at City Lights ..."). The excitement there seems all very heart-felt and genuine -- as genuine as a film fifty years in development nearing completion can be -- and in the midst of the latest Beat boom, one can only imagine Neal and Jack and Allen and Bill ( ... and ... ) asking each other "gee, what took ya so long?"

Maybe it's just been long enough now to forget George Peppard and Leslie Caron in The Subterraneans (1960). For the record: On The Road is directed by Walter Salles, the screenplay is by Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries). Featuring Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen.

There's probably a behind-the-scenes book about the entire fifty-year On The Road movie-making legend that would make a final volume to the whole Vanity of Duluoz saga. In any event, here's an excerpt from Joey Cimino's attempt at channeling Hedda Hopper. As they used to say, from on-the-scene reports in San Francisco:

It started three weeks ago when we got an unexpected email from the director of On the Road, Walter Salles. He mentioned the cast and crew would be in San Francisco for the final filming of On The Road in December. After a 68-day shooting schedule and 50,000 miles of travel they'd be wrapping up the final scenes here in the city.

In the email, Walter explained how everything had come together for this movie very quickly. As many of you know, Francis Coppola gave the green light to Walter and screenwriter Jose Rivera six years ago. I have already related previously how John Allen Cassady and I met Jose Rivera in 2005 in LA and then again at John's house in 2006. And then in 2007, we discovered Garrett Hedlund was the first person to be cast (as Neal Cassady) for the film when he stopped into The Beat Museum.

Garret Hedlund and Sam Riley ... and '41 Pontiac Torpedo

Walter explained how, as they shopped the project around in 2008 and 2009 to secure funding for production, they were simply unable to obtain any commitments. The economic climate had obviously changed with the recession and even with a modest budget request for $25M (a pretty small budget for a high profile story like On the Road) the project was going nowhere. Finally, a French company named MK2 made the commitment and Walter and company were off to the races! ...

It was a rainy week in San Francisco. We knew the relatively small crew team and cast for On the Road would be arriving any day. We didn't know how the weather might affect their shooting schedule or if they were doing interior or exterior shots. Plus, Walter had mentioned how the weather had not been cooperating in Montreal and things were taking longer than they'd planned.

We first got wind something was about to happen on Tuesday, 12/7/10 when we hosted a group of 70 students from Windsor High School. After explaining how The Beats became The Beatniks and then The Beatniks became The Hippies, we talked a little about "Howl" and the obscenity trial and then On the Road and Neal Cassady. A couple of the kids spoke up: "They're making a movie out of On the Road now, right? Are they shooting in San Francisco this week?" "Yeah, how did you know?" "Because we just saw Kirsten Dunst at City Lights." ...

(Photographs from The Beat Museum, San Francisco)

"Personal Website" (a poem by "pen name")

Personal Website

(pen name)

The fire in their hearts went out;

as I read about Ancient Greeks

and an extinct Regime

And crowds in Libya cheer

when I gave up beer.

I saw me and the whole world changing

and I wanted to relight a fire

lonely on the island of Lesbos

And recalled my love of Catulus

with his constantly changing moods

and his love of someone he could never accept

And W.H. Auden

whose lovers were not ever meet in intelligence or age

Whole pantheons of Gods

big and small

And I was so happy

to get an email

from Levi

because it ain't history unless it is written

Sending forlorn love letters,

in fountain pen ink

wondering how the paper will age

and I think of a neighborhood

in Denver

my fifth home

I don't know Thomas Wolfe

I just keep traveling

a character from a John Barth

novel

I want to think I am rogue

and I bet I'd love reading a book about myself

the numerous suicide attempts

substance abuse

hard traveling

with a pocket full of classics

and I'm drinking a Mexican Coke

eating a taco somewhere

and all these roads all leading to some town in Germany

my grandfather visited

all those shrines for heroes of wars

and I smell my mothers cooking

what does separate poetry from prose

thinking I shouldn't send a letter

but what harm could come from a letter-

it sounds so romantic

Lord Byron

with ever changing moods

and I read the buses of my mind

from my own Spandau Prison

but I'm not going to die young

I decided

Will someone please send some Nivea

I can't get it from the commissary

talk about jail time

little fat

but still able to go for long walks, do pull ups

the mystery of my own body

with so many broken bones

and that pea jacket

mad mad mad

St. Stephen

thanks for giving me a song I can sing...

("Personal Website" originally appeared on Literary Kicks' Action Poetry page, February 22, 2011.)

"The Sheikh's Batmobile" (2009): the freedom to trash-talk

In America where so much of culture is a commodity (here today, gone tomorrow, resurrected weekly: Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen), many of us hardly pay attention any more to its impact. At the local check-out counter of U.S. consumerism, "culture" with quotation marks included just seems another come-on along with the gum and candy -- all sticky-sweet and really, really bad for you. Forget regulating the holistic vitamin-supplements in the Nature's Garden aisle: would it be possible to put a FDA ratings-system grade on, say, the National Enquirer? The Globe? Soap Opera Digest?

Of course trash culture is fleeting. Thank goodness. (The newsprint-brick of The Sunday New York Times, on the other hand, seems to clutter up floor-space indefinitely. That's how you can tell it's serious about culture.) Beyond the admirable political yearnings in their respective countries, what's happening now in Egypt, Algeria, Libya and elsewhere is, not surprisingly, becoming about media control and what is done with it by various factions. Here's a thought: Is it possible to think that ideas of democracy and freedom may hinge on free access to America's trash culture?

Inexorably, people with internet connections and twitter accounts in Cairo and elsewhere learn the United States, and the Western world in general, is not "an enemy of the people," no matter how many times a day the mantra is repeated in state-supported news broadcasts and officially-sanctioned government decrees. Wikileaks show that state departments and government leaders are still playing cautious tag-you're-it games with each other, mostly about the serious issue of who controls the oil, while the crowds of people in Tahrir Square are demanding freedom of access to the equally-serious ephemera of Western culture.

To be fair, the system is working in reverse here in the U.S.: we have our own, opposite, and commercially-funded fear-of-Muslim-culture machine going, which seems just as trash-culture driven. Democracy, it appears, will only happen when the Bagdad Galleria opens and there are Coke machines at President Ahmadinejad's headquarters. That may take a while: a recent Wikileaks report indicated the Iranian Prime Minister was slapped by the head of the Revolutionary Guard for suggesting in January -- well, just a bit more freedom in the press:

"Ahmadinejad claimed that 'people feel suffocated,' and mused that to defuse the situation it may be necessary to allow more personal and social freedoms, including more freedom of the press ... Ahmadinejad's statements infuriated Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari, who exclaimed 'You are wrong! [In fact] it is YOU who created this mess! And now you say give more freedom to the press?!' Sources said that Jafari then slapped Ahmadinejad in the face, causing an uproar."

Since WWII American culture has always been a viable commodity to the rest of the world: there are Pepsi logo T-shirts on the crowded streets of Mumbai. it may not be long before the streets of Cairo flutter with the blue globe of AT&T. Not to be underestimated: the impact of Al Shamsoons, an Arabic version of America's favorite dysfunctional family, The Simpsons, already a hit in Egypt.

Here's an excerpt from The Sheikh's Batmobile: in Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World, by Richard Poplak (Soft Skull Press, 2009). The corporate branding in Muslim countries is already underway. And like it or not beyond the wishes of Donald Rumsfeld, the winning of hearts-and-minds in Muslim countries may be accomplished by unimpeded access to the lyrics of that great American ambassador, Eminem.

Her English was as perfect as it could be . . . but what surprised me was her popular culture lexicon, which was missing only one or two elements.

“No,” she said. “I have never heard of this Borat.”

She gave a lengthy encomium on the Porsche Cayenne, spoke passionately about the work of action film stars Jean-Claude Van Damme and Vin Diesel, and ran through some Eminem lyrics. Child of an isolated ex-gulag, resident of a town populated mostly by kids in third-hand Nike tracksuits, old Manchester United swag and Michael Jordan–era Chicago Bulls T-shirts — refugees from Planet Nineties all — Misha was surprisingly erudite when it came to Western junk-culture.

Which is perhaps, why she seemed so at home in the bowling alley. I, on the other hand, was struggling with a particular condition of the twenty-first century. With “Smells Like Teen Spirit” blaring, I was hit with a profound disorientation, the feeling that I’d slipped through time and space and landed in the middle of a nowhere/everywhere land ...

[Misha] was playing a dancing arcade game—a version of what I remembered as Bust-a-Groove ... What struck me was the expression on her face — one of fierce concentration and unmitigated joy. I knew precisely where Misha was: She existed within the song, inside that moment — and I knew the feeling well. I understood that her liberation — however momentary — burst forth from the range of popular culture she had borrowed from a land that was, at least ideologically, the enemy.

Guy Davenport on Walt Whitman: "he will shame us into becoming Americans again"

Walt Whitman, photographed by Thomas Eakins,
in his room, Camden NJ (1886)

" 'Have you read the American poems by Whitman?' Van Gogh wrote to his sister-in-law in September 1888. 'I am sure Theo has them, and I strongly advise you to read them, because to begin with they are very fine, and the English speak about them a good deal. He sees in the future, and even in the present, a world of healthy, carnal love, strong and frank -- of friendship -- of work -- under the great starlit vault of heaven ... At first it makes you smile, it is all so candid and pure; but it sets you thinking for the same reason.' "

-- from a letter by Vincent Van Gogh, quoted from the essay "Walt Whitman" by Guy Davenport, in The Geography of the Imagination.

This May 31 is the 192th anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth. He remains the singular American poetic invention even as the world he inhabited fades further from view. When Leaves of Grass was originally published in 1855, the United States was largely an agrarian country building toward civil war whose image of itself was still mostly Calvinist in its outlook, and a land where "the future" was filled with unprecedented change. He lived from the age of buckboard to railroad; Robert Fulton invented the steamboat the year Whitman was born, and he died the year Ellis Island accepted its first immigrants. Thomas Edison had invented the incandescent light bulb 13 years before. Imagine that.

Guy Davenport, in his book of essays The Geography of the Imagination, calls Whitman a symbol of American idealism "as bright and in many ways more articulate than Jefferson or Jackson." Yet his reputation these days seems more dim and more remote than ever. In some ways, Davenport suggests, this is because Whitman's poetic stride, the multitudes his poems contain, makes him a difficult figure to measure in full. Even the poets in the generation immediately following Whitman found his multifaceted catalogues too inclusive:

"Whitman, Yeats complained, was bad for the American spirit because it seemed to him that we indulged all too naturally in what Whitman urged us to wallow. (Max) Beerbohm caricatured this view of Whitman ('... inciting the American eagle to soar'), and the young Ezra Pound in his Pre-Raphaelite suit thought Whitman much too much, while intelligently suspecting that there was something there that that the critics weren't seeing."

Whitman and friend Robert Doyle, 1865

More to the point, Whitman -- for all he has become in the American imagination, an almost mythological figure -- is still unmeasured because he changes form for each successive generation. He was not a poet of identifiable school -- no Transcendentalist, no singular Romantic strain, no Theosophist (he celebrated the triumphs of Man as much as the wonders of God). As Davenport writes,

"Young admirers fancied him an American Socrates, but of course he is the exact opposite. He was like those Greeks in love with the immediate, the caressable (always with the eye) and the delicious, who to St. Paul's distress, worshipped each other when free from placating and begging from a confusion of gods."

And there's the problem with Whitman these days: his disappearing wilderness (and his all-encompassing wildness) overwhelms the current American earnestness. The same free-spirited attitudes and easygoing American approaches that are hallmarks of his poems (and which are admired by readers around the world as essentially American) make Whitman a difficult oracle. As his country was displaced by industry, oil, and the railroad -- the very ingenuity he celebrated -- it became ever harder to see the country Whitman himself had seen, if it had indeed existed at all:

"In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there;
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows;
And the city at hand, with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life, and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning."

(from "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd")

The national fracture that was the Civil War only escalated the end of agrarian America, and brought an end to the poet's bucolic vision of the country as essentially pure and even innocent, if not cohesive. If Whitman is read in schools these days it is most likely his rhyming trope of the Lincoln assassination, "O Captain! My Captain!" that resounds, rather than the far darker and more epic "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and his Calamus poems -- with the intent "to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment" -- remain the Apocrypha of American poetry.

Still there is essentially a feeling that something irretrievable has passed in Whitman's poetry, a national ease of spirit that industrial America can not recover. Davenport again: "Of the delights mentioned in 'A Song of Joys' most are accessible now only to the very rich, some are obsolete, some are so exploited by commerce as to be no longer joys for anybody except the stockbroker, two are against the law (swimming naked, sleeping with 'grown and part-grown boys'), and one is lethal ('the solitary walk.')"

Against such a catalogue of the currently lost and the forbidden in America, it hardly seems that we could be the same country, and indeed Whitman is as much suspect now as he was in the nineteenth century. (Emerson took pains to say he was not a close friend of Whitman's). Many disassociated themselves with the poet and his poetry even as they read his words, and civic pride had repeatedly to be adjusted in the naming of bridges and monuments in his honor over the objections of hometown patriots that his morals were "un-American."

Yet Walt Whitman remains inextricably, exuberantly American. In the rhyme and breath of his poetry the country he imagined still lives, and a good-natured democracy is possible; that is the power of his words. The nation he saw is yet building, and his country remains ours as well, difficult as it may be to discern. "Eventually," Mr. Davenport writes in his essay, "he will shame us into becoming Americans again." We have only to listen.

"And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

(from Leaves of Grass, 1855)

W.S. Merwin: "the natural world that includes us is sacred"

W.S. Merwin, now 83, is the poet laureate of the United States and twice recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. His neighbors in Hawaii are more likely to know the unassuming poet as the resident on his property near Haiku. As Rick Chatenever reports in a lengthy interview with Merwin in today's edition of the Maui News, that's fine. "Nobody knows who I am," the poet says. "They just know I'm a guy who plants trees."

Merwin recently spoke to a group as part of a new exhibit at Maui's Schaefer International Gallery, "The Legacy of Land." Chatenever's article reports how Merwin's childhood reading, enhanced by the poems his mother read to him, helped create in him a respect for the mystery of nature. "When we were kids, everyone wanted to grow up to be a fireman," he told the audience. "I wanted to grow up to be an Indian."

The interview is a gentle tracing of Merwin's path to self-discovery, from the poems of Longfellow to the Diamond Sutra, a journey from discovering the visions of William Blake to a meeting with Roshi Robert Aitken at the Maui Zendo in 1969. Here is an excerpt from the interview, which also includes several poems from Merwin's books The Rain in the Trees (1988) and The River Sound (1999). His most recent collection is The Shadow of Sirius (2009).

"There is a feeling in which the natural world that includes us is sacred ... Because we know, if there's anything sacred, that's it. You go out and spend two hours with the other forms of life around us, and you come back elated, feeling a great charge because this is basically what you wnt to be doing. Not to be cut off from it, but to be part of it." ...

"... We have made unnatural circumstances for ourselves, which are not good for us in the long run. The result is feeling cut off and superior. The way you justify feeling cut off is by saying, well, you're better than what you're cut off from. You think you have a right to treat it in any way you want." ...

"We've been doing that basically since the beginning of agriculture, when you start really disrupting the face of the earth ... Convenience is the bitch goddess of the modern world ... what people don't realize is, the faster you go, the less time you have."

"Hand tools were the beginning, and they're still part of us. ... Other tools replaced parts of our bodies, and they atrophied. Now they're replacing parts of our minds. We're becoming dependent on virtual reality, and that's dangerous."

(photo by Tom Sewell, Merwin Conservancy, from the Maui News)