What’s hard for you? Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My reality needs imagination like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German. What’s wrong with the world? We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made 12 million last year…and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns. Favorite scenes in movies? R. DeNiro in the ring in Raging Bull. Julie Christie’s face in Heaven Can Wait when she said, “Would you like to get a cup of coffee?” James Dean in East of Eden telling the nurse to get out when his dad has had a stroke and he’s sitting by his bed. Marlena Dietrich in Touch of Evil saying “He was some kind of man.” Scout saying “Hey Mr. Cunningham” in the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. Nic Cage falling apart in the drug store in Matchstick Men…and eating a cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss. The last scene in Chinatown. Can you tell me an odd thing that happened in an odd place? A Japanese freighter had been torpedoed during WWII and it’s at the bottom of Tokyo Harbor with a large hole in her hull. A team of engineers was called together to solve the problem of raising the wounded vessel to the surface. One of the engineers tackling this puzzle said he remembered seeing a Donald Duck cartoon when he was a boy where there was a boat at the bottom of the ocean with a hole in its hull, and they injected it with ping-pong balls and it floated up. The skeptical group laughed but one of the experts was willing to give it a try. Of course, where in the world would you find twenty million ping-pong balls but in Tokyo? It turned out to be the perfect solution. The balls were injected into the hull and it floated to the surface. The engineer was altered. Moral: solutions to problems are always found at an entirely different level; also, believe in yourself in the face of impossible odds.