--IT'S OKAY TO BE SAD

…I have this up at the Bartleby Snopes blog on Post-experimentalism and my upcoming story, “Milk”: http://bartlebysnopes.wordpress.com/

…A friend of mine reminded me about this and I love it, so I thought I would share:
 

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Video of the Commencement address.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

--THIS ISN'T WORKING

…Yesterday I wrote a story.  It started out sad and ended sad.  What do you think that means?

…Here's another sad one that I wrote which appeared in Full of Crow:

                                                                               Homebound

 

            We watched it smolder.  Water cannons shot arcs over the remaining flames and the weight of water combined with the charred cinders collapsed the building, sending plumes of smoke across the lot where we once lived.

            Magic, black or otherwise.  Hell opening up from underneath the earth.    Hell, it was, or had been.

            I took Tina’s hand.  It was small as a dog paw.  I said, “It’s okay,” and pressed hard for reassurance.

            I patted my back pocket.  The money I’d taken was a thick wad.  It didn’t make me any less nervous, but it provided spurs of hopefulness.

            We walked in the opposite direction of the commotion, well away from the fire trucks and gawkers.  Our Foster parents wouldn’t be back for several hours unless they’d been called.  The firemen would search for us and find no bones, but it’d be too late anyway.

            Tiny and I went through the wooded greenbelt.  Eventually, we came to an abandoned church. 

            The window glass was stained in grape juice and berry colors, gems that made me think of sucking candy.  When you put the pieces together, they made up a medieval woman praying while two angels hovered over her shoulders.

            We went in through the back door, down the hall.  My heart was probably beating as hard as Tina’s, but the place was empty of people.

            Inside the main sanctuary, ceilings reached up sky-high and there were more glass murals of saints and whatnot.

            Tina said we should leave, but I held her hand tight and tugged her until we got right up to the front row where the good seats were.  When I turned, I saw three aisles and quickly counted 36 long, mahogany pews.

            “Sit,” I said.

            Tina did, but she asked a penny for my thoughts.

            I was a big reader because The Fosters wouldn’t let us watch television.  There weren’t many novels around The Foster Home, so I read whatever was handy—the Bible with its contradictions, road maps, an atlas, The Yellow Pages.  One book I’d found was called “Alienation Nation.”  It had this particular passage that got me thinking.  It said something like a house is a building, while a home is a house where love exists among families.  I knew that was true without having to be told, but after I’d read those words, they settled in me like grout between tiles, and quite frankly, they were the reason I started plotting the fire in the first place. 

            Tina asked was we going to live here, in the church.  I said it didn’t matter, didn’t matter where we lived because if she and I stayed together we’d make a fine enough life for ourselves.  I could tell she didn’t believe me.  Her confidence lacked because I let Mr. Foster call her names and punch me around whenever he started scratching himself.

            A selfish urge in me prodded that I explain about arson and what I’d done and how I’d done it.  Everyone wants the gratitude of others, even if it doesn’t make you quite a hero.

            Instead I said, “Let me tell you something you don’t know yet.”

            I went on and on with the story of our lives and the wonderful things that were going to happen. 

            I started it on Christmas day in the far future.  I was a grown man and she a woman with a husband and two great kids.  I described her youngin’s and the gift exchanges, how the food tasted and how the room smelled like cinnamon and turkey gravy, but when Tina asked for me to detail the house and the way the rooms were outfitted, I said it didn’t make a difference.  I said it wasn’t a house she lived in, it was something much better.

 

--MAYBE I'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

 

…It's a new week and I need a new suit.  Hopefully I'll find one.

…Yesterday I had this piece published in Spartin Lit:

http://spartanlit.com/hooks/

…I still don't have a novel idea.  That's troubling.  I have a very broad husk of a theme, and a couple of small scenes, but not much else.  Yikes.

…The Presidential debates are Wednesday.  I love politics, was a Political Science major in college, and am very much looking forward to them.

…Here are some things I like to start off the week:

“The answer is dreams.  Dreaming on and on.  Entering the world of dreams and never coming out.  Living in dreams for the rest of time.”  Haruki Murakami

"Man does not live by a turkey in every oven or a color TV set in every home.  Man lives by faith and hope and love, by the star on the horizon, by the trumpet that will not call retreat." E. Root

"The thing is, you try your best, and what else you got?  You try your best, really, that’s all you can do.  And for me, my best happens really so rarely.  I was so always heartened by people like Michael Chabon who write so well and seem to write so fast.  Edwidge Danticat writes really well and really fast.  I was always heartened by them.  I keep thinking one day it’ll happen.  It might." Junot Diaz

"I think of life itself now as a wonderful play that I've written for myself... and so my purpose is to have the utmost fun playing my part." Shirley MacLaine

"It is often said that we never get a second chance to make a first impression. This holds true in our writing. We may be witty, charming, and absolutely delightful company, but our readers don’t know that. They judge us by what we share with them—our written words." Linda Lane

--IT GOES LIKE THIS, THE FOURTH OR FIFTH

 

...Yesterday morning I watched the beaver swim the length of the lake.  There was low-level fog skirting the surface and it was early.

…Yesterday I wrote a story.  It was my 1,000^th story/poem in the last three years I’ve been doing this.  I think it was a pretty good piece.  It was a sad love story that made my heart break for the narrator.

…Yesterday I did some submitting.  Not a lot, but some.  Haven’t done that for a while.  I even had the brass to shoot a story off to The New Yorker.  I thought, why not?

It was the story that won 1^st place at the PNWA Conference.  It’s not been published anywhere yet.

…Yesterday Xe Sands read my story “Don’t Lie” for Little Fiction and she did a really great job:

http://soundcloud.com/xe_sands/dont-lie-by-len-kuntz-no-2

 

…Today I am going to enjoy being alive.  I am going to some wineries and afterward I'll enjoy terrific food. 

I hope you have a wonderful day.

…These are some things I like for the weekend:’

"I write to discover what I know." Flannery O'Connor

"I don’t believe less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough." - Stanley Elkin

‎"Babies play until they feel like resting and they rest until they feel like playing and that is the way geniuses move forward... that is the way huge problems are solved." Martha Beck

‎"You children--understand one thing here and now, and it will count for a lot. Don't believe that destiny is anything more than what you can pack into childhood." Rilke Duino

"The best that any of us can hope to do with our writing is to present to the reader a piece of the world, and to do so with honesty and clarity and gratitude." Randall Silvis

"We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic." E.Root

"We want to read about suffering and that writerly genius manistest itself in the evocation of suffering." Tim Parks

"I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul."― Pablo Neruda

--IT’S TIME TO BEGIN, ISN’T IT?

 

...Here are some things I learned this week that you may find interesting, or not:

…Zombie bees have been reported in the Seattle area.  Novice beekeeper Mark Hohn found that his bees are infected with a parasite that causes them to fly at night and lurch around erratically until they die.

…You may or may not be a football fan.  You may or may not have seen the debacle that was Monday Night Football whereby the last play of the game was incorrectly called in Seattle’s favor, thus giving them the win.  That call has generated enormous amounts of vitriolic sentiment regarding the NFL.  Not only that, the call shifted over $200 million in bets where people had picked The Packers to cover the spread.  Lots of people pissed.

…If I could do it all over again, I would choose:

New career: 59%
Same career: 41%

…It’s estimated sales of the new IPhone could add $3 Billion to the US economy by year end.  That’s .25% of the expected growth rate.

Apple sold 7 million phones in the first three days it was offered.

…Because of the poor global economy, Ireland is losing one of its most cherished institutions.  Every single day, a pub closes its doors because it can’t generate enough sales.

…The number of people hunting has increased 33% in the last four years.  Go figure.

…Valid US passports:

2009: 49 million
2011: 110 million

…Highest unemployment rate—12.1% Nevada

Lowest—3.0% North Dakota

…I like these things:

-"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

― Henry Miller

-"If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances." Julia Sorel

-"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, not political legislators who implement change after the fact." William Burroughs

-"Letters are among the most significant memorial anyone can leave behind." van Goethe

--THEY'RE MAKING MOVIES OF MY FLAWS AND FAULTS

…This is a piece I wrote three years ago that was published in Left Hand Waving.  It’s essentially all true.

                                     
                                                                        Terminal

 

One of my brothers went to Viet Nam, the other to prison.

My brother mailed sample rations across the country, or at least that’s what we were told.  We had them for dinner one night, each of us kids taking a portion.  It was pasty and dry, like mayonnaise-coated cardboard.  I did my best not to gag.  “See, how’d you like to live on this?” Mother asked.

            Because I’d seen it on the news, I knew soldiers died but I did not believe my brother could be killed.  When I pictured him over there I saw him lying on the ground, a sand bag for a pillow, helmet tipped for shade, smoking a cigarette and ordering privates and sergeants around.  When I saw an actual photograph of him, he was holding a gigantic bullet in both hands, the same way you’d hold a King salmon.  Behind him was a pyramid of identical shells, tall as a person.  In ink at the bottom of the photo it said: D.M.Z. Nam, 1970.

            When he returned he was sullen and odd.  My father told me not to ask any questions.  “It’s not easy being a man,” he said, and in bed that night and most nights that have followed, I wondered about such a statement.

            We met my other brother at the bus station upon his release from prison.  While we were waiting, I got the word terminal stuck in my head because of the greyhound logo on the outside of the building. 

I’d known him when I was a baby, but now I was nine, so it took my sister’s cackling to point him out.

            His hands were huge, thick and leathery.  He tousled my hair and squeezed the back of my neck too hard.  When I said, “Ouch,” he slapped me on the head and called me, “Pussy” and my dad chuckled.

 

            We were pouring cement for the foundation of a new garage.  Ours had burned down.  Arson, the inspectors said. 

            My brothers and I were father’s helpers.  My brothers actually knew what they were doing.  Me, I sat in the dirt, drawing shapes with a broken tree limb.  When my father asked for a tool or for a board to be held while he sawed, I assisted.

            For just an instant, I found myself alone with him.  My stomach juices sluiced, reminding me—as if I needed proof--that I wasn’t brave.  Still Dad and I were by ourselves, so I spat the words out the way you would if you’d just bitten into something spoiled or still alive.

            He stopped what he was doing and gawked.  The sun was out, a boiling hoop.  Grime rimmed my father’s eye sockets.  “Stop your fucking dreaming,” he told me.

            That was thirty years ago.  My brothers live in other places now.  Sometimes I call.  My father lives with a new wife.  Mine tells me to forget.  She says there’s still time to be a writer if I want.

 

 

--YOU DON'T REALLY CARE FOR MUSIC, DO YA?

…I read at The Hugo House on Thursday.  I wasn’t a featured reader or anything, but you could sign up (first 10 got to read after the highlighted guests).
I still get a little nervous.  Wish I didn’t.  But I did well, or so I think.  I try to read every chance I get.

…I finished the finals edits to my novel, “The Break-in Artists” and sent it off to the four agents that requested it at the writer’s conference in July.  Hopefully they won’t have completely forgotten who I am, but it has been a while.

I don’t know what to do next.  If I start writing short stuff, I’ll probably stay in that realm for a long time.  Once you get through writing a novel, you’re almost ready and willing to tackle another.  I’ve run 8 marathons and it’s similar in many respects.  As soon as you know you can actually live through one to completion, you start to scope out another almost instantaneously.

 …I don’t understand why so many people post their political positions on Facebook.  Some of the posts are very…very…what’s the word?  I don’t know.  Maybe “polarizing”?  They criticize a certain party for being way too extreme on a particular issue, but the way they attack that party makes them seem just as bad.

…I think I’m getting fat.  Do you ever worry about that?  I haven’t run or exercised in several months.  I don’t want to be fat or have one of those paunches a lot of men have.  So I guess I should get off my ass and lace up some shoes.

 …There are topless pictures of Kate Middleton out there.  That seems wrong, doesn’t it?  Can’t a person sunbathe topless if they want to?  You probably can’t do that if you’re royalty or famous or a politician.  If you do, well, you’re sort of asking for it.

 …Speaking of nakedness, yesterday police arrested a man on I-5 who was completely naked.  He said his clothes “just kept falling off.”  As if to make matters worse, he punched the officer.

…Here are some things I like:

"We watch movies and TV about heroic acts by soldiers or cops, but maybe that sort of heroism isn’t very relevant to modern reality." Bob Dokes

"Maybe real courage is being willing to get up and face another day, and do honest work to the best of our ability despite knowing that, in all likelihood, we won’t get the recognition or financial reward we deserve."- John F. Groom

 "Nothing lowers the level of conversation more than raising the voice." Stanley Horowitz

 "For me it is sufficient to have a corner by my hearth, a book and a friend, and a nap undisturbed by creditors or grief." Fernandez de Andrada

"Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3am."  Ron Akon

"For me it is sufficient to have a corner by my hearth, a book and a friend, and a nap undisturbed by creditors or grief." Fernandez de Andrada

 "Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3am."

 "Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.” Haruki Murakami