"Eh, I'm an old man, so don't listen to me anyway.

"We all watch the same television, eat the same things, use the same phrases when we talk, have the same ideas for vacations and most everything else.  The ego of a city, the martini, the big wines, sauvignon blanc for the wives...  The same conversations, the same laughs, all as if we had invented it ourselves.  You get tired serving all that, making it reappear every day, feeding the big egos of DC egos in all their varieties...  the amorphous urban and Euro-trash of clubs on Connecticut Avenue... all that sad stuff, Mara, suffering, trying to cure their suffering through more poison...

"Poor shy Hemingway moved to Paris, where they accepted artistes and flaneurs, creative wine bibbers not adding much but by spending in cafes.  Perhaps he identified with the waiters as much as anyone else.

"Oh, I'm an old man.  Don't listen to me.

"We don't choose to be the strange saints we are, we're just made that way.  And I am for the 'holiness' of the individual, someone who gets the human condition, fallen people who can sing about the grit and alienation of a Saturday night.

"What's that line of MacGowan's...  'And the birds were whistling in the trees, where the winds were gently laughing, and I thought about a pair of brown eyes, that waited once for me,' and this is when he's drunk and down on a Saturday night from listening to some old bloke talk about the reality of war, and he remembers the natural part of the world that's even here in this city setting...

"I'd almost rather be that sort of down and out drunk thinking about it all, remembering the metaphors of nature, the things that save us in our fall...

"But people can't be that sensitive, generally, because that calls for someone to be very attuned, and this makes them shy and look weird to the rest.  They'd say, 'now, why the hell are you singing about the Old Main Drag, it's not that bad.'

"Well, maybe not shy and weird, just that when you make art you tend to be separated from the ego, the selfish view that you are an entity separate from the world, at battle with it.  Most artists and musicians, it doesn't occur to them to go build an oil pipeline.  Wood you use carefully and with great respect to build a musical instrument.  You--I know it sounds stereotypical but--you become attuned to nature, make scientific observations about life in all its forms, sense the intelligence behind it all.

"So art takes us back to nature and all the things we lose touch with.  And so I don't think we'll ever solve all the ecological disasters we're creating.  It will take some great change of attitude, child-like, perhaps, organic, acknowledging the soul in all things, the opposite of building military might.  Militarize and it takes over the soul, co-opts it with the genies of destruction.  Problem is, we all look around and say, 'oh, there are too many bad guys out there; you have to arm yourself...'  Kind of a shitty view on human nature.

"Saints, really, these are the only kinds of being who will save us from burning the planet...  They at least teach us an environmentally appropriate attitude.  It's not just 'go help lepers and poor people,' it's a show of respect to nature, the nature which created the world and all the living things in it.  The emphasis on good works is just a part of an ego-free attitude.  Not many, I suppose, are ready to take up that attitude because it equates to being defenseless, out of the cycle of the logic of self-preservation, an assumption that we can't trust anyone.

"And that's what art is, anyway, the leap, the trust in something beyond, a willingness and a desire to go for a walk in the woods and feed your subconscious.  As often happens when you're cooking;  you relax, you begin to combine ingredients, take tradition, discover it yourself like, how nice pesto is, or zucchini with tomato, onion, herbs, olive oil baked with a crusty grain like breadcrumb or quinoa.  And, strangely, enough, this is where we get our vitality, our vitamins from, fresh stuff from farmer's markets.  Yes, farming is an art, I'm sure.

"Art is tiring.  It takes a lot of energy, a willingness to step into something you're not sure about, a willingness to be wrong.  Perhaps it can be depressing, like when there is not sudden approval but just the same robotic response of cars on a road driving past you obliviously as you walk along with the radio blaring ego stuff.  But who knows, maybe the Universe is reaching out through you somehow, as it were part of the slow grind of the plates moving continents around, you just being on top, going along for the ride, but sensing the movement.  I mean, our senses are very subtle as far as their sensitivity...

"It takes a lot of faith.  Maybe that's the bottom line.  Faith is leading you somewhere, so that eventually by doing you will achieve some confidence in what you're doing.

"Yes, but I'm a folk artist.  I don't get paid for what I do, so I work here."