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Excerpts
First and Then (excerpt)
Frankly, I just don't know where to begin to save the world. Maybe if I could locate some small corner of it, some small problem, one that was manageable. But, if it was manageable then it wouldn't really be a problem and there's no point saving anything unless there is a problem, a substantial problem—one I could measure, one I could control. But if I could control it, would it be such a problem? I mean isn't the biggest problem the fact that things are out of control? How do you begin controlling things that are out of control? You've got to get some control of it before you get it under control. I need to find some small out of control part that I can control. You wouldn't blame me for wanting to control some small out of control part. I mean you wouldn't think I was a control freak or anything. I'm just trying to save the world.
And I've been trying to save it all along for as long as I can remember. First, as an infant actor...
Premature?
Once I thought I could save the world with a song but that was just too much pressure so I wrote a couple hundred of them and went to LA. It was 1977. I took a small apartment near Sunset and La Brea and began to look around. I ran into an ex-playboy bunny from Massachusetts who was living with a phone systems executive who was paying her tuition at a Hollywood acting school. He donned blue leisure suits. She wore white leotards.
They came over to my apartment to listen to me play my guitar and sing. Kenny Rogers had just ordered a phone system. That was my in, he said. I played them another song and thought about saving the world through the cooperative graces of a white-haired Las Vegas act.
But I wound up in Tom Waits' agent's office—a curly-haired lawyer with a southwestern-style full liquor bar telling me I was ahead of my time and he couldn't deal with it. But the world has always needed saving—how could this pudgy guy with a knowing smile think me premature?
After two years of songwriter's business workshops in dark basement bars with red lighting, after recording music in the valley until two in the morning, cocaine up my nose, police helicopters overhead and a six-foot, two-inch Dutch girl from the east coast harmonizing in my ear, after bar-hopping with a blond Adonis trying desperately to come out of the closet to his parents in Petaluma, after dating a two-timing, bi-wannabe Jewish lawyer from Beverly Hills, after screaming to my mother on the phone, asking her if she was trying to kill me, after being woken up at four in the morning from a tidal wave in my head, I decided to board a different dream and head to where the world might be more amenable to being saved.
A Better Crack
I was going to save the world today but my husband has gas and I'm afraid to leave him alone with it.
"What, you don't have gas?" he bellowed.
"My mother didn't die from it at age 62."
"My mother didn't die from gas," he clipped.
"Take it easy," I cautioned. "You're going to give yourself gas."
It's just like him to ignore the symptomatic details. "Why wait for a crisis? Get yourself checked out."
"You want me to go to a doctor for gas?" he queried.
"Don't make a federal case out of it," I said, "just tell him about your childhood."
"Your childhood's worse than mine and your father died at fifty-two," he gloated.
"My father didn't die from gas," I insisted, "only the dog had gas in my family."
"And angels fly out of your butt," he contested. "Deal with your own gas!"
"I'm trying to help you," I pleaded. "Can't you see that?"
"There's nothing wrong with my gas," he self-advocated.
"I didn't say there was anything wrong with it; it's doing the best it can under the circumstances."
"What circumstances?" he quaked.
"Never mind. It's none of my business," I barked. "If you want to disavow your gas, don't let me stand in your way."
"Are you implying I'm not responsible for my own gas?" he rebuked.
"No I'm not, it's your father's fault."
"Are you suggesting I hold my father responsible for my gas?"
"If I can't inspire you to make a little change, to speak out to your father, how am I going to save the world?"
I was going to save the world today but my husband has digestive difficulties and I can't stop thinking about it. The minute he writes his father a letter, I'm going to take a better crack at saving the world.
When People Say (excerpt)
After I save the world, there will be some confusion at first because I am going to alter the entire language, that is to say I will incite a gargantuan semantical overhaul.
When people say they make lots of profits, they'll really mean they make eye-to-eye contact with everybody they see on the bus, in the streets and on the freeway and upon making that contact, they understand the roots of each individual's personality, including their own, what makes them tick, how different each individual is one from the other and yet how much the same and they'll really mean they feel a primal connection to themselves and every man, woman, child creature that walks the earth, swims the waters and flies the air.
When people say they are successful, they'll really mean they understand how to see through to the heart of every matter, no matter what the matter, and their communication to the heart is from the heart, for the heart, by the heart taking all of the heart into full consideration, with the utmost of their conjunctive mind, first and before other more obvious matters.
When people say they are the best, they'll really mean they resist competing with anyone ever because they know that all competing is really a divisive act cooked up by none other than those two feuding hemispheres of the brain who never did get along and are, nonetheless, perpetually in search of one another.
When people say they love you, they'll really mean...
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