In the dream all my clothes are on, the tasks complete, and there is no need to speak; I am right where I need to be in a moment I needed to be there.

I will be honest:
I wish I were Arawak
And God never was.

Beyond the mistakes and the fog and the indulgence and the selfishness, I have spent most of my life looking for stories. I found early on that something in me is filled when I join with them. It is a thing hard to describe, but it has something to do with feeling less alone, less incomplete, less scared, less un-knowing. It is like something you only know by its opposite. This morning in a warm flood of tears I finished “Tenth of December,” the final short story in the recently published short story collection of the same title by George Saunders. The tears were unexpected, but huge, quaking; so welcome, so necessary. A state of seeing.

I always felt disconnect with much of American popular culture, and as I age this feeling has only become more pronounced. The movies, the televised products, the endless unnecessary entertainments and diversions—most all of it leaves me empty, forgetful, unaware and untouched. Filler between dawn and dawn. It is such a common feeling that it almost comes to feel that this is the way that not only everything is, but the way everything is supposed to be. Like a deep resignation, a sentence about which you can do nothing, so whatever, you know, f*ck it. Until you experience this phenomenon’s opposite. “Tenth of December” is that. It is what most everything else today, product-wise, is not. It is an immersion in compassion, connectivity, craft, and the truly funny. It is an immersion in lift, awareness, curiosity, subversive weirdness and necessary questioning.

The good work is out there, as it has always been, helping us help one another, helping us know one another, helping make each of us feel a little less incomplete. This is what humans do. When we wish to be, when we think and focus, we are remarkably adept at it. But the good work so often gets lost, buried, ignored. One really has to compel oneself toward it, to the finding, the digging. I always have to remind myself to keep looking, to keep trying to know. For those tears this morning felt so good. So, so, so good. To release, to reach. To want to be better. I am crying again now even just thinking about it all, thinking about the story. So pure and real and wondrous.

Thank you, George.

Did you know Public Enemy is still best? Prolific, pertinent, powerful. Revelatory. Doing it themselves, doing it for others. Each classic album is still classic, and each of the so many recent albums is even more classic. This is a plant that grows. A seed, not a diamond. Seek these albums out. It astounds me how little attention seems to be paid. Somebody said Public Enemy is always 100%. That somebody is correct.

Case in point: this beautiful song "Everything" and the beautiful video by HWIC Filmworks. Just doing it. Independent distribution, independent means, independent thoughts. Support these activist artists. Check out the official Public Enemy website. See more great videos at Public Enemy's youtube page. (I am really digging "Harder Than You Think", (or as used to promote the UK Paralympics.))

Thank you, friends. Thank you, Chuck.

We walked along the arroyo. Ahead of us was the mountain. Behind and below us, stretched across a wide valley, the city. The sun was overhead and there were no shadows.

My friend stopped and picked up a large, flat rock. Turning to me he said, “Here. I got you an iPhone.”

“I don’t know how to use those things.”

“It’s okay. You can’t afford it.”

I laughed and then so did he. Gravel crunched rhythmically beneath each of our footsteps as we continued on our slow walk. Every single thing as far as I could see—every rock, every small tree and bush, every discarded thing—was lit, crisp. The air itself seemed bright, illuminated somewhere deep within. It felt good to be in it.

He shook his head. “You can’t call somebody who cares with these things anyway.” He discarded the rock and it landed with a sharp clink among the other rocks. Then quieter, “The tech support is terrible.”

Again we laughed. “Let’s sit here in the sun a while. You mind?”

We sat down in the old dry creekbed. The rocks shifted just so below me, absorbing me in their settled dense pack, and I felt like I too was a rock, a rock that was supposed to be sitting right there among all of the other rocks.

“It is beautiful out here,” I said.

My friend nodded his head. He sucked in a breath then, looked up at the sky. I could see that his eyes had moistened. He shook his head. He was quiet. I waited. Finally he said, “You know that feeling where you wish you could breathe deeper. Like, breathe in the whole world all at once. Breathe in through your mouth and ears and eyes and every part of your skin. You need it so much.”

“But you don’t have enough room for it inside.”

“Or the mechanism, even though it’s like right around the corner from where you are in your mind, you don’t engage it, and it is very much like you cannot engage it, even though you could. You just cannot. You don’t. It feels almost perilous. And then this confrontation with the need for release just kind of becomes something else.”

“And the moment passes for another long time.”

A breeze down from the mountain lifted the desert plants and the ends of our hair. I smiled.

“What are you doing all that time?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

This life owes to none more than my sister. Dear Lindsay, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. I love your family. I could never truly say. Thank you. Thank you for catching me always one thousand times. This life is beautiful and so are you.

With great joy I say the thing is figuring itself out.

Once you complete your answer statement turn to the short anxious part of the test Once your statement is complete Once you complete your statement you will turn to the short anxious part of the test