I noticed the other day that the first song on A River Ain’t Too Much to Love ends with a bird migrating south for the winter and the last song on the record ends with a phoenix flying out of whatever it is a phoenix flies out of. The living death of fire. I think I went through all that when I left Chicago. I had been living in a stasis there. After having moved around the country on a yearly basis, I ended up there like a beached whale. No one knew what to do with me. I just lay there waiting for the tide to come in and float me home while people stood around and poked me with a driftwood stick or threw handfuls of sand at me. I realize now that there was something big birthing in me and I had to find a suitable place to birth it. I had to get out of there– not for the old reasons of moving for curiosity– but to go home.

Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush dosen’t shake, eat another piece of bread.

David once explained the effect he was after: “You know that feeling you get when you’ve just gotten back from the dry cleaners a pair of slacks, Dacron slacks, and you reach your hand in a pocket, and you feel those fuzzy sandwiches with your fingers? Well, that’s the feeling I’m looking for.” I just nodded and replied, “OK, Dave, I know exactly what you mean.” I kept this incident in mind while he and I sat across from each other and puzzled out the scenario for Lost Highway, which I like to call Orpheus and Eurydice Meet Double Indemnity. We made it work—at least for each other—and I love the result, fuzzy sandwiches and all.

“I really liked your voice-over on Futurama,” I told a person who had once been one of most powerful men in the world. Seeing the dvd, he seemed to break out of his polite-but-numbed, repetitive book-signing stupor, saying, “You know there’s a movie coming out?”

An Oregon scientist and a Kentucky nurse have found the oldest known mushroom, entombed in a 100-million-year-old piece of amber from Burma.

A closer examination of the nine-hundredths-inch-long mushroom cap revealed that it had been infected by an ancient parasite, which a second parasite was feeding on.

And:

Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth.

“The fungal kingdom comprises more species than any other plant or animal kingdom, so finding that they’re making food in addition to breaking it down means that Earth’s energetics—in particular, the amount of radiation energy being converted to biological energy—may need to be recalculated…”

Before watching faces in the morning I suppose I was as messy as a typical guy. The mood elevation produced by faces suddenly changed me: I discovered I enjoyed cleaning, and I started to spend lots of time (about an hour/day) doing it.

–Seth’s blog

16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.