In 1976 I was working in the Gulf Country around Cape York, in an aboriginal community of about 300 people. The Health Department sent around a team and vaccinated about 100 of them against flu. Six were dead within 24 hours or so and they weren’t all old people, one man being in his early twenties. They threw the bodies in trucks to take to the coast where autopsies were done. It appeared they had died from heart attacks.

I don’t think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans

Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that’s over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world’s people.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions – all my own, I might add – I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.

Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it’s a better subject for a comic novel than a column…. On one coast the cops are busting sex workers on Eighth Avenue, dragging them downtown to night court where they pay the fine and go right back to their corner; on another they’re charging Heidi Fleiss with pandering in a town in which the verb is an art form.

It is easy to coast through life rather than find the will to continually reach out into the world. To reach out is to risk. There is little grace in a life that never extends out beyond the boundaries of self