My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way.
I think the '60s were an extraordinary time. I feel bad for the kids today who missed this wonderful confluence, which was simultaneously a confluence of the global and the mythological.
We spend all this energy keeping our lives normal and safe and predictable, and the result is that our approved cultural safety valve is the movies. So in films, anyway, the hero is obliged to represent the continuance of social values and institutions, and his permission to act is much more seriously limited than the villain's.
Young people, for whom I should have been a role model and an uncle, duplicated my worst habits and died as a result.
Business is a subset of the environment, not the other way around. You can't have a healthy economy, you can't have a healthy anything in a degraded environment.
It came home to me indelibly that I was never going to change anything in America by walking around carrying a sign. It was a great revelation. It saved me a lot of anxiety and a lot of wasted energy.
When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.
In 2001, Texaco was bought by Chevron, and during deliberations concerning that sale, an 800 page document listing the problems and liabilities connected to Texaco was brought forward at their stockholder meeting by Amazon Watch, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the Amazon.
In 1972, Texaco Oil Company, in partnership with PetroEcuador, the state-run oil company of Ecuador, began to drill for oil in the jungles of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964.
When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers.
