David Sims

Transcription

[ Silence ] >> Sarah: Good evening. Welcome to the 2010 David London, My Last Words lecture series. As I heard a guest tonight comment, I hope it's as exciting as the Stall Wall made it sound. So I hope that you all saw our publicity out. We're so glad to have you. The My Last Words lecture series started at Penn College in 2006 and renamed in 2008 to honor former Professor David London who was appreciated in his community and has many friends and colleagues still at the college today and is a great honor to him to continue the series in his name. I'm very excited about tonight's lecture. We're glad to have you. And I'd like to bring to the stage Sandy Grafius who is our student nominator this year, and she'll be introducing our speaker. [ Applause ] >> Sandy: Thank you, Sarah. >> Sarah: You're welcome. >> Sandy: There's an ironic feeling to this night. I've been asked to give a short address to introduce Dave Sims, the Professor that I nominated for the David London, My Last Words lecture series. The lecture renamed posthumously to honor the gentleman who was not only my advisor for my first two semesters here at Penn College, but also my speech professor and a wonderful instructor. I know Dr. London's spirit is here with me tonight, his grading pen in his hand. When I received Sarah's e-mail telling me that Dave Sims had been selected to give this lecture, I was so happy to see him acknowledged in this manner, because he really deserves it. Then I read further into the e-mail and discovered that I was to provide the lead-in to his presentation, and thought, uh-oh. Since coming to Penn College in the fall of 2005, as a very nontraditional student, returning to my roots thirty-six years after graduating from this same building, when it was Williamsport High School, I've met many wonderful professors, all were good teachers. Dave, however, surpasses most of the others in his enthusiasm for his discipline and his ability to inspire his students to go far beyond anything they believed themselves capable of producing. Dave Sims is very down-to-earth in his approach to literature and brings -- and makes every effort to instill his enthusiasm and a sense of wonder into every class in literature genre. From poetry to drama, he brings it all to life and takes his students on the journey as well. Sims is who he is, an authentic person without pretense. He goes outside the box, as many of you already recognize. Anything else you may want to know about him you may found -- find in his Bio, which he may or may not be referencing tonight during his presentation. Now, I want to invite you into Sims' world. He says, it's a curious place to visit, as for living there, it's up to you to decide. He asked me to ask you to just center yourselves, watch and listen for the next five minutes. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] [ Music ] [ Silence ] >> David Sims: If you haven't figured it out by now, this isn't a lecture. It seems to me that -- [ Pause ] -- when you talk about death, when you talk about life, when you talk about beauty, when you talk about people who have come before us and people who are coming after us, the last thing I would want to do, if I took the trope of this particular exhibit or this particular lecture series, would be to have a piece of paper in my hand. Let's to assume that we have it written down; that we have it all figured out; that we have it all wired, it seems to me that, that's not the way this works. It's not business as usual. And I thank you all for coming. I look out there and I see students from the past, one of eleven students. I see colleagues. I see people here who saved my life, literally. I see people who I could call as my boss. I see people here as I call as my friend. We call things and we name things and that's always been a struggle for me. I've never quite, all my life, never quite fit in anywhere, but I made it here. My fifteen minutes of fame. Stall Wall Weekly [Applause]. It's all downhill from here. [ Pause ] I have a lot to say. And my students kind of know this about me. If we don't have it on a sheet of paper -- and I love to read things -- I'm going to read one thing [Inaudible] tonight to sort of set in your mind the distinction between when we open ourselves up to the world -- and I think when we open ourselves up to the world, suddenly, it's coming at us all the time, bounces into my head, strikes me with its beauty and its terror and its incredible wonder. [ Pause ] When you talk about death -- [ Pause ] -- and you struggle with it. When I was informed I was nominated, I sat back for a second. And I said, man, do I really want to do this? Do I want to stand up there in front of people and say, hey, I'm going to give you my personal read on this stuff? But I thought, there's a trust that goes on in education, and there's a trust that goes on between students and teachers, and as much as I try to evade the system, evade the hierarchies, evade the administration, evade the rules, I never violate that trust between the students and myself. I try not to. That's one piece that's floating up there, and the other piece Sandy mentioned in the intro about Dave London. Death is not an abstract thing. For those of us in the English Department, and I think that in addition to -- I'm sorry, the communication composition in Literature Department, because as my friend Walker used to say, you damn fascist. [ Pause ] Paper and the power of paper. Sentences that we could craft. So I'll tell you what I know about death. I struck the ground hard and an explosion of white filled my skull. I didn't blackout, just winced and rolled. My glasses, lost somewhere in the wet spring darkness. I sprawled on the cold earth watching some light slowly diminishing inside my head. Blips from my breathing, making jagged waves, dipping and rising, thinning out at the edges. My heart beats, suddenly growing loud, until at last, I knew I was still alive. The white light whirled away into nothing, and my usual inner monologue returned. Shit, I'm hurt. That was a bad one. I'm hurt. I should have been more concerned, alone and far up in the mountains. I wasn't sure of anything except, that, once again, I'd fallen, this time from the porch railing. And there was pain and the ground was wet and cold beneath my back. How was I to know that I'd broken my neck. I'd never done that before. I don't know how long I lay there, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes. The yard in front of the porch sloped down toward the south, my head uphill toward the north. It had been raining for a week straight, and the dampness seeping into my spine wasn't good. I had to find out if my body still worked. The yellow bug light, that illuminated the ground around me; but without my glasses, I couldn't see a damn thing. I reached out and clawed around it until my fingers found a chokecherry branch about a half inch thick. Without giving it a second thought, I brought it up to my mouth and jammed it far back, stretching the edges of my lips and clamping my molars down upon the bitter wood. I chomped down for all I was worth and forced myself up and over, until I was kneeling. What can I say? I watched too many Westerns as a kid. I did what I had to do. It hurt. I bit through the branch in two places, the ends falling loose. What words were in my head then? I'm still alive. I still seem to work. I was facing the porch, chin nearly touching my chest, and dimly, I could see scars in the soft mud from my impact. I still have the middle piece of the branch in my mouth, and I ran my tongue across the splintered edges. My knees grew cold. My neck was stiff. I couldn't raise my head up without feeling jolts of pain, but I sure as hell wasn't going to remain that way, always looking down. That was the instant of decision. Centimeters from death, my surgeon later said, it could have gone either way. If I'm crippled, I thought, I refused to spend the rest of my life looking at people's feet. I need to look the world in the eyes. This is going to hurt. Then I willed my head up. My cervical bones ratcheted back into place. I heard them moving together vicious and loud inside my skull. The whirling light returned for one quick explosion and then passed. My head was level and I was staring up at the porch. When I raised my eyes to the top of their sockets, I could see the braided, gold strings of my Arctic guitar shining in the yellow light. That's far enough, I said to myself, and spat out the last piece of branch; that will do for now. [ Pause ] A rendition of an experience crafted, brought to a particular sensibility, something that comes close, but it's not the thing itself. That's always troubled me about this journey that we all take. My students -- some of you in here have seen variations of this -- I've been here for twenty years teaching a variation of this. I call it the Wawa Baby. It's the givance [Phonetic]. Sometimes I launch into this cartoon analogies. And as I get older, people don't really remember the cartoons. Obviously, I grew up with cartoons too, a lot of them. And I always loved the Warner Brothers cartoon with that big goofy ass stork comes floating around, and he's carrying this baby, right, and it's an alligator baby, and he drops it off in the sheep family. Everyone's looking around going. So I say, okay. We end up on this patch of earth. We get this sign wave in which those tips of it, those glorious experiences. I look sometimes in the classroom, and I say, people have you not had those experience which have lifted you up out of yourself that makes you reach up and say, yeah, Arigah! Arigah was a Inupiaq word. Hard to translate. But I was walking down the streets of Point Hope, one of the Western most villages up on the North Slope, and a beautiful woman named Tuzzy [Assumed spelling], she later died of cancer not long after that experience. There's a myth, that six months of darkness in the Arctic, but when you go to the Arctic, its closer to about four. And it was in February, and the sun comes up just over the horizon a little bit, and Tuzzy looked at that. It was cold, about forty below, and she says, Arigah! What's it mean? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. [Varoom Sound]. And then as those moments, you just want to slash your wrists. Times you want to just say, that's it, to hell with all this stuff. And in the middle, getting up in the morning, putting your pants on, going to work, feeding the dog, and then you die. When you start talking about that -- my little notes there -- and I tell my students I really don't care too much about what happens outside that parameter. Everyone has their belief systems. They're yours. [ Pause ] I'm interested, obviously, a lot of my concern about where these little Wawa Babies show up, but I'm interested most, I think, in that journey and how we navigate those highs and those lows. Students seen variations of this one too. It's the other framework. It's sort of walk it. People walk into my Com II classes, and they say, oh, it's going to be about literature. And I says, this is all about literature, just because it doesn't look like it. I think with all of us, particularly in Western societies, have this thing in our heads, our minds that we say, I, me, my. I see the world. I fall off the porch. I'm hurt. Outward, inside that circle, is our friends, our family, our children, our intimates. Further out you go, we get into communities; one more out, all those communities gather. We call ourselves this Nation. Right? A Nation of a lot of communities. Further out, the world; further out again, the cosmos. I don't know about you, but, sometimes when you sit there and you think about all those particular lives, human lives operating at any one second, any one instant, man, it hits me in the gut. It baffles me with its wonderment, with its joy, with its terror. What do you do with it? [ Pause ] N. Scott Momaday, a major significant influence in my life. Never met the man personally, but that's the power of the written word. I did see him back in the -- back in the days, the students say. The 1970's, I was in eighth grade, hopped on a bus, went down to the University of Pittsburgh. Now you have to kind of understand 1970's, right, there're some people here that are very well aware of the '70's, and other people, man, that's ancient history, Sims. We're talking today in my Indian perspectives class about the activism going on, 1968, Alcatraz Takeover; 1971, Wounded Knee II. My friend and office partner, Charlie, told me a story. He went to the University of Alaska, was in the dorms, and one day his roommate left a note. Said, [Inaudible] guns. Get on the supply train, gone. Those days of activism in which people said, you know, there's something, you know, come on, it's Nixon, you know, there's something wrong with the society here. There's something wrong. We can still have the ability to change it, to change it as a group. So I'm on the bus, get down there, walk into an auditorium, Bendheim Hall, a little bit bigger than this -- Momaday's book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, it just came out. -- And he took the stage and in this deep baritone, I knew suddenly, even though I was only in eighth grade, that I was in the presence of someone who is tapping into the source, as the surfers say. My buddy John grew up in California, and he says, when you get inside that golden wave and you catch it just right, he goes, that's tapping the source. [ Pause ] I think it's a profound quote. It's probably something that goes on in my head in one variation or another, pretty much every day of my life, because I think about it, and I say, okay. A word gives origin to all things. Is that true? [ Pause ] I pulled that out of my garden. I didn't want to be alone up here. Look at that sucker. [ Pause ] Helianthus, the seed's growing, what's known as the Fibonacci Sequence; zero, one, one, two, three, you add the preceding number of five. It's amazing. I think they're just amazing, because one of these little guys, one of these guys, put it in the ground, ninety days it turns into this. Man, if we could grow like that. And I look at the Momaday quote, and I say, well, so I call it a Sunflower. I call it Helianthus. I look at the patterns of these seeds, and I call it the Fibonacci Sequence. Did the words give origin to it? [ Pause ] Gorzovinski [Assumed Spelling], a Russian linguist, always said, you got to be careful about words, because words by their nature are the maps. The map is not the territory. When I think about that, and I say, well, if we have all these experiences coming at us all the time, we need words to explain it. [ Pause ] Make sure I'm on here. [ Pause ] So anyone's going to talk to you about death and the spirit world, if they tell you there, I wouldn't trust them for a second. Sitting in the audience, right, someone's going to tell you they've got the secrets, the treats. I don't have them, man. Oops. When it comes to what, you know, what is this thing inside people? Soul seems to laden a word. Energy, to tame. But spirit, I like. I like spirits and how -- I like spirits when they come in bottles. Right? We like spirits, like Casper the Ghost. We like spirits, you know. I think that it's used, you know, -- think about a kid that plays a really good game of softball or something, and you see it in their eye, you see it in music, you know, that someone has that oomph, that essence, that thing, that it. The minute you wrap words around it, then you get into religion, then you get into dogma, then you get into explanations. And I'm always concerned about how those explanations and those words and those answers that other people give you, suddenly eliminate and isolate and don't necessarily, for me, ever quite explain just the beauty and the tragedy and the incredible wonder of that little guy. Every spring I put -- or I got speakers on my porch and these birds come in and they -- I'd say the past five, six years they've been building a nest right behind the speaker. So I kind of watch -- and I think they listen to a lot of Randy Newman that year. It looks like a Randy Newman bird. I had Robbins who listen to a lot of Monk and, you know, Coltrane and they -- I had these hooded eyes and walked around like this. I listened to Junior Kimbrough, a blues player, and, you know, Nuthatches, real big fat Nuthatches sitting there, just going. I love stuff like that, you know. Watch how birds are grown by music. Look at that guy. It was weird. They were up there singing and there were about eight of them. It got so bad trying to lie in my hammock and read a book and it's like racket and it's, come on. The parents are going back and forth, back and forth. They're beat to hell. Finally, they kick this little guy out, lands on the porch. I pick him up and he bonded with me. I think he thought I was his mom. [ Pause ] What's neat about it, he came back. And I think that so often people come to -- I want to say college alone, but I think people come to every day with the sad static, this is who I am. I'm going to bitch about technology here in a minute in the modern world, but, you know, part of this whole idea of headphones on, right, big screen TVs. Yes, I'm in [Inaudible], and proud of it. Right? But the whole sense is it's all happening if you pay attention. [ Pause ] Two questions, maybe three, I have found to be very useful tools in my life; that's one of them. There's the other one. So what? I break my neck. So what? A child is born with Down Syndrome. So what? A service man or woman dies in combat. So what? I've been accused of cynicism. I've been accused of being too harsh by asking that question, but I think of its incredibly open-ended question. It's one which calls out for answers, it means a lot. Every one of those things I just said, and the more you can think about it -- I know there's people in the audience that have lost their mates, people that have lost their children, people that have lost compassion. It's not so what? It's like, answer that. Answer it. Tell me. And if you're going to tell me that, why do you use it? Words. But words can never capture it, back to that one. Until you answer the first question, whenever you face tragedy, whenever you face despair, whenever you're on the low end of the Wawa Babies sign wave, you can't answer that one. [ Pause ] So it takes some work to do that and it takes linguistic work, I think, toying and testing and understanding whether a word has the power that you want. That was the third question. It's a pool table conversation. I was doing some of that hitchhiking, that I referred to in my biography, spent a lot of time actually, made enough money to eat some days. And anyone who shoots pool, sometimes can witness some impossible geometric and physical miracles, if you've ever seen any of those, you know, one of those three rail two ball combination bank shot, the guy doesn't even look at, you know. There goes my five bucks, you know. Metaphorically, it extends outward. And that's another one of linguist. Which would you rather be, lucky or good? I'm a lucky man. I think we're all lucky. [ Pause ] Now, to death. [ Pause ] Some day, somewhere, some one will utter a sentence about us that will begin with the phrase, yeah, last time I saw dot, dot, dot. It will become a memory. So -- [ Pause ] -- The last time I saw Dick Eustis [Phonetic], he was an adjunct professor, a beautiful man. He was standing at the East door of the ACC building. And his daughter was a piano player and she had just nailed a major concert. The next thing I knew he wasn't there, died of cancer. That was the last time I saw him. The last time I saw Pete Dumanis [Assumed spelling] he was crouched on the west side of the building by the light pole, tired, those Apache crouches, like an old Masood, sniper, and he was tired, nodded Pete. Pete taught me a lot. [ Pause ] The last time I saw David London I was sitting in his office. He was telling me about how he had it all wired. I would step out and move into retirement. I was telling him about my friend, blood brother Musinski [Phonetic], who just died at fifty-four. London, I always love London's quotes that came out of nowhere at the right time. Dr. Pangloss, this is the best of all possible worlds. The last time I saw Jack Quinn -- another great mind -- he was limping across from the parking lot. I stopped him, and I said, hey, what's up Jack? He said, I banged my foot. He goes, I'm still old enough where things just kind of fix themselves. [ Pause ] The last time I saw Jim Logue, when he was Jim Logue. These are names that I know a lot of you don't know, but if their presence is here, it's one of the reasons I'm doing this, to honor those who have come before. He'd been playing a game of tennis, and he said, my elbows a little stiff. I said, you'll be all right, Jim. Now whenever it rains, I think of Jim Logue. Jim Logue always said, I love it when it rains. And don't ask me and don't tell me have a nice day. Nobody tells me what to do. Have a nice day. The hell with that. And the last time I saw my deep friend Thomas J. Edward Walker the Third, Thomas, not Tom, hated it when people called him Tom. You could only call him Tommy when he was drunk. [ Pause ] He was sitting in his office, and we were going to go get that last beer, that final, final at the end of the semester. Something came up for him and me both, never got it. I have more to say about Tommy in a minute here. [ Pause ] It comes together somehow. I don't know how, these forces, these presences, My Last Words. [ Pause ] That's four and a half pounds of Jerry, my friend. [ Pause ] His sister entrusted his remains with me, maybe a bad idea who -- except he would love it -- I was talking to my cowboy friend Scott, and he said, yeah, well, you've got Jerry's ashes. He goes, let me give my old man a call. And he picks up the phone, and he says, hey, dad, you still got that cremation gun? I said, a cremation gun? He goes, yeah, I built one for my friend. I had to shoot his ashes out of a helicopter. It's kind of like a potato gun we were imagining. It was a great phone call to listen to. Right? Dad, got that cremation gun? Well, I guess that one worked. Okay. We're still thinking of sending Jerry up with some rockets someday here. [ Pause ] There's no getting around that. [ Pause ] There's no getting around that either. [ Pause ] Salsa. [ Pause ] Just ask the Pecan King. Putting Ned's coats up there, because I think Ned was the last to get out of the department alive, and I want to follow his path. [ Pause ] Ned's given me a lot including a couple of classes, a lot of lessons about staying sane, I guess, in a world which rapidly shifts out of that. Thinking of a lot of people. I got to thank Keith Vanderlin [Assumed Spelling] sitting up here in the front row. I never did that for you. But when I was lying there with my broken neck, Keith Vanderlin came up and he stuck a tablet under me. It was inverted like this, waiting for my neck to fall into place. Vanderlin comes up, draw. Draw. Draw. Okay. Five minutes later they said, oh, his neck wasn't up. Take him in. Put a screw in, a three inch screw, cool. Enough of that. So what? Now what? Lucky or good. Death. Harvest. I think we should really watch this and these roles that we have. I love my craft, but my craft isn't just me. I think institutions have a way of, as they say on the screen there, somehow bypasses individuals and it has to happen, no doubt about it. We can't avoid them entirely, but what we can do is monitor how deeply they come into us. That's a piece of advice for young and old, old alike, I guess, if you want it. [ Pause ] If you saw the opening clips, that's a Blue Spruce, /Users/tspeiche/Desktop/Photo Reduction for FCP HD Droplet 606 00:41:04,556 --> 00:41:06,366 used to be ninety feet tall. A wind storm comes in and knocks off the third -- the top thirty feet of the tree right into the roof. I just put the roof on too. Years pass, get the other thirty feet knocked down. My buddy Larry, my main man, chainsaw guy, goes up, and he says, yeah, I've got this crew and they're going to come in with a bucket, and we can take the whole damn thing down. Larry doesn't like trees. He's a logger, you know, so it's like, take them down. I said, Larry, leave me about 30 feet. What the hell do you want thirty feet for? I said, I'm going to turn it into a totem pole. So you've got processes going at -- a story in itself. We live in a world now when people say, there's something in our DNA, that basically says, okay, who we are, it's already carved into stone, right, it's just no getting around that. That's my grandfather Joseph Nemeth [Assumed spelling]. Joseph Nemeth was born in 1903 in a little town outside of Budapest Hungary. He's a classic. And I say this with no negative connotations intended, old school honkey. He was a machinist. It used to drive him nuts. He came over to this country in 1917, the classic immigrant experience. He had learned his trade as a machinist in metrics. He had to learn to shift it over to American. He didn't say much. But he taught me one of the things about life and death when I was three years -- about four years old. I was pre-kindergarten. We had this cat named Sparky. I got her on the Fourth of July, and we also had a goldfish. [Inaudible] going. Right? So there I am four years old. I go down in the basement, look at the goldfish bowl. The goldfish is floating on the top of the water. I said, pap, the goldfish is dead. Pap looks at me, and he says, I'll get the spoon. So I go over to the set tubs by the washing machine, grab a spoon, get the goldfish, give it to pap. He says, don't give it to me. Take it outside by the clothesline pole. This little baby, he takes it out by the clothesline pole. He says, wait. Sure enough, here comes Sparky. Sniffs the fish, bites it, eats its eyeball. Pap says, see how that is? Yeah. Good. Now go put the spoon back. Lessons. Right? I always sometimes ask people what's their first memory. Walker's first memory -- he says, I remember being a little kid on a tricycle, and it started to rain, and I was trying to dive in between the raindrops so I wouldn't get hit. If you want to know something about a person, ask them what that first memory is. And again, how does it linger? Does it linger in words? Were they told that? Can you test it? How else would they know? Is it something that they saw on video, pictures, photographs? Or is it real? [ Pause ] He knew that. One story he told me before he came over -- born in 1903, I always try to stitch out of the map of time for him. He said, he was about ten, eleven, which would have matched about all that Eastern European conflict. He said, he was walking across the field and he was -- I came across a whole bunch of dead bodies covered with lime. And this guy pointed a rifle at him, and said, help dig the ditches. And so he did. We have nothing to complain about. That's my daughter. You may have seen her at the beginning climbing that rope. She's a feisty young thing there. That's my gram. I called her Nonny [Assumed Spelling]. Nonny taught me something very useful about stories. Again, I was on my way to first grade, and back in those days, they called them the products of a broken home. Right? My mom shows back up at this old hunky house, two kids in tow. She should have never married that Irishman. I should have never married him. So I'm on my way to school and Nonny leans down. She was a hard-working woman. She used to spend a lot of time in the basement. She'd be sewing and I'd be playing with clay, but she leans down [Inaudible], and says, you know, if anyone asks you about your dad, tell him he's dead. [Inaudible], because it wasn't true, as far as I knew. But I liked what she armed me with that young, to be armed with the story, to recognize that suddenly people are going to be asking you questions, you know. She telling me to lie? What is the truth? What is the lie at some point? I want them all. This is my third born son. I love that photograph. That Pit Bull, Dino. It's up by the house, big rocks. He's a courageous young man. That dog was a little testy. [ Pause ] I think we're more than this skin, more than those genetics. That's where my -- I think it's Georgia Moloch's [Phonetic] whale from up in Barrow. He's talking about whaling today with my Indian class. And the whole sense of the earth, there's something pretty magical about -- for me, at least, witnessing traditions, and people that come from traditions in which there is connectedness. I think one of the things about American society is that we are -- all of us feel an absence, maybe I just speak for myself what that absence is, I'm not sure. It's nice to feel it and see it, taste it. [ Pause ] I don't know what that more is. Like I said, that's something you can wrap names around. That's my daughter again, oddly enough, she's in Alaska. She's got a neat gig. I talked to her a couple of times this summer, living out of her backpack, doing trail work, running chainsaws. I said, Case [Phonetic], what are you going to do? She says, I don't know. I'm not worried about her. I think that's a lot of it and people forget that. You know, finding it out on the journey. You've heard it all before. [ Pause ] Now I get to bitch. I think things get lost, and perhaps, I'm wrong. One of the things that's vanishing here, you know, some of these constructs, people don't quest anymore. You even think about GPS's. We just got one for our granddaughter. We have a beautiful blended family now. She just turned sixteen. I'm glad to get to say this now, because each day goes past, and say, I got to say something about that. A student walks by, and says, you know, leaves are the only thing that smell good when they decay. I said, man, that's a great line. I try to think of something else that smells good when it decays. I got to get that in there. A colleague of mine says, well, you don't know life, until you know death. I said, you know, yep. Because I would want to stand up there. He says, why? It's part of my life. I don't want anybody to know. Questing. Anyway, back to my granddaughter. We got her a GPS and the last thing I told her, I said, nothing like that is going to take the place of eight directions. And whether you have them or not, some of the best times in my life I got, because I got lost. Will. what is that thing? Necessary; more and more necessary. Choice. Like I told my kids growing up, turn off the damn TV, unplug the phone. Do you need to put the computer on today? It's getting harder and harder to do anymore, always that weight, it's supposed to make our life easier. Right? Concentration; harder and harder. See it in research papers. Right? Oh, yeah, boom, information from every channel. How do we discern? How do we discern what's good anymore? [ Pause ] I don't have the answers. I just say these are particular human activities that need to be nurtured. That one. [ Pause ] Classic old school philosophy. [ Pause ] Chop wood. Hall water. No matter what happens, when it comes down to it, metaphorically speaking, that's what we need to survive. I think water, by its nature, is a resource which we tend to take for granted up here, until you get those droughts. Certainly, if you go out West, it's a hell of a lot more significant. Science fiction scenarios suggests that someday Wars will be fought over water. I respect water. I have an old farmhouse that kind of keep -- kept me alive over these years and has a hand dug -- twenty -- well, it's about a thirty foot deep stone-lined well. Never gets much water, unless it rains. One of the ways I try to stay honest. [ Pause ] Last one. Everywhere you look, if you listen close, there's a story there. Some are better than others. I don't think literature is this abstract thing that sits in a book that people study and take classes. I was leaving a class today. An older student comes in, and he goes, what class is this? I think we're talking about Little Red Riding Hood and sexuality. He goes, man, I'm glad I took my English class twenty years ago and my credits transferred, don't have to do that one. I think one of the things that makes some stories better than others is that classic E. Cummings line. [ Pause ] I tell students in many ways, whether they listen or whether they get it or not, I'll just keep telling it, if you don't work to make meaning for yourself, guess what? It doesn't matter, because someone's always waiting to serve it to you on a silver platter. [ Pause ] It's all about making meaning for yourself. [ Pause ] [Inaudible] me, the little Martian kid. It's funny. I look at these photographs when I was a kid and I'm always looking off screen or off, you know, what the hell is going on here? [ Pause ] That's when we got the ducks. We learned that ducks could shit a lot. That's my wife making cookies at about three or four, a great cookie baker. That's a coconut shell, 1955 Evanna. There's a story in that one. I go down -- I spend a lot of time at the thrift store. You might have gotten that together. In fact, I have kind of a song, Another Good Day at the Thrift Store. It kind of makes my life feel good. Well, a lot of these images you see, you pick them up, man, I picked this one up. My friend Scott says, why must you always be drilling things and making things that you have to beat with a stick, you know, those pre-embargo coconuts are worth a lot of money on eBay. I hadn't even thought of it. I get on eBay. It's a joke. He laughed. Porch dwellers. [ Pause ] That's the view. I talk about these two a lot. This is my daughter, stepdaughter, however you want to define those roles, Tiersa [Assumed Spelling] and her son Caleb [Assumed Spelling], my grandson. He calls me grandpa Sims. He's blind. [ Pause ] That's a beautiful picture in the sense of her entering into his world. She's always taught this boy, you know, just because you're blind doesn't mean you can't do something. She's taken him bowling. He goes bowling, shooting, archery. She says, at least you'll know from your own experience what the thing is when people talk about it. She used to cry when he was little, because she'd let him walk. He was all banged up, all bruised. How else are you going to learn? [ Pause ] He has an incredible ability to listen, and he's taught me a lot about sound. I got him on the porch one day, and I said, Caleb, sing me a song. Pretend you're in front of an audience and you could just nail it. He does Michael Jackson's, Man In The Mirror. He gets a perfect pitch, perfect intuition. And I say, okay, let's practice. I come back. And he does Stairway to Heaven, perfect throughout. Didn't miss a word. I wish I had that kind of recall. That's my wing man, David. [ Pause ] The old songs, the old stories, it was an Omaha chant. [ Pause ] I always say why walk when you could ride. [ Pause ] Yes, jackalopes do exist. My buddy say, Sims, you ought to go down -- do people know where South of the Border is? It's on I-95 in there. It's one of the strangest American places in the world. He's been trying to twist my arm for me to just stay there, like three days, and see what I'd come back with, probably, something like that. When I stopped hitchhiking, I beat the hell out of Volkswagens, ended up doing a motor swap in a parking lot in Madison, Wisconsin. And kept going up to Alaska, a lot of Volkswagen stories. John Muir read a book called, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Forever, back in the day. I had it like a Bible. Talk about reading by necessity. And he always said, the opening epigram on it was be kind to your ass, because it bears you. So you've got to watch your head with all of this stuff. [ Pause ] I'll let you read that. [ Pause ] The Eskimo, the new PI people have a word called, Kita. They say it to their kids. Let's go Kita. [ Music ] Kyle, you about ready? [ Music ] [Singing] Well, they say the Communist Party has died. And they say Mr. Karl Mark lied. Well, I'm not so sure. They're still the rich and the poor and the historians still have to choose sides. Well, I'll take the workers for sure. Don't be fooled by my cufflinks of gold. I'll drive fast machines Never dress down in jeans always know who's been bought and what's sold. I'm just a thorn in the side of the man, a glitch, in Adam Smith's insidious plan. A drummer and a teacher and a poet and a preacher. I'm the arrows at Custer's last stand. [ Music ] Well, my grandfather settled near Kane, a blacksmith by trade, he carried the name. From the Emerald Isle to the Titusville Wells, us walkers always chased down the flames. Well, my mother, she was born with a caul, old Irish from Tammany Hall. So the son of a worker nailed a mighty rich looker, spawned me and my iron balls. [ Music ] In the trenches of old Academe, I witnessed how all those lies stream, from out of the mouths of those suits just like Faust, and administrators spouting off steam. So I labor with my words and my books, try to remind these young people of the hooks that the lucky ones dangle while the coins jingle jangle, so be careful because professors are sometimes crooks. [ Music ] Well, Joe Hill and Che Guevarra came close to exposing the lies of their capitalist ghosts, though their bodies were killed, never gave up the will to tell people what we need to hear the most. There's more to be gained than some job and people are more than just cogs trapped inside some machine called the American dream, and education ain't like training some dogs. [ Music ] I'm just a thorn inside of the man, a glitch in Adam Smith's insidious plan. And a drummer and a teacher and a poet and a preacher, I'm the arrows at Custer's last stand. That's for Tommy boy and all those other Warriors. Thanks for listening gang. [ Applause ]