I think now how lucky I was
to do this work, to know these people.
I was learning how capitalism worked.
Any society, really. I suspect socialism
was the same, or worse. Whatever it was,
I could take it. The search for social justice
goes on forever. Progress is usually an illusion.
You make two steps forward and one step back.
The business cycle gets us. Beware when you’re getting’
all you want. A fattenin’ hog ain’t in luck. I learned
the gallows humor of the low person on the totem pole.
The bottom animal in the pecking order.
Don’t change a word, Henry Miller said.
They’ll shit on you anyway—you might as well
have your say. Go tell it on the mountain.
Shout it from the rooftops.
Midas has ass’s ears.
Lucky’s speech in
Waiting for Godot.
I was a reader.
I read Dylan Thomas in America.
I read Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
I read Generation of Vipers and The True Believer.
I read Catcher in the Rye and On the Road.