I'm starting to withdraw from [technology] as much as I can. I don't do much of the social media stuff. Like, if I'm on Facebook, it changes my relation to the real world in a way that makes me feel sick - almost like I've had too much sugar or something.

The one thing I noticed retroactively was that the energy at those Trump rallies was off the charts compared to the Hillary Clinton rallies. The Bernie Sanders energy was as good, gentler, but there was a real passion there.

Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them.

I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.

I read Rand and thought, "I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. I don't want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches." So I was working against my actual abilities.

I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.

I heard Zen teacher one time talking about abortion, and he was saying the way that abortion makes bad karma is any time the person involved pretends that there's not a cost to the choice, one way or the other; whether you get it or don't get it, there's a cost. That's just basic responsibility, to admit that there's a cost. And the bad karma is when you pretend that the thing is free.