A True Freak Cannot Be Made. A

In My Next Life, I Plan To Be A More Respectable Creature. For Now, This Is What Is Given To Us. So I Don't Know - I Think We're All Freaks At Heart. I Think Some People Strive Desperately To Be Normal, And I Think Other People Strive To Be Abnormal.

Prior To Penicillin And Medical Research, Death Was An Everyday Occurrence. It Was Intimate.

American Culture Is Torn Between Our Long Romance With Violence And Our Terror Of The Devastation Wrought By War And Crime And Environmental Havoc.

I Do Consider The Human Capacity For Violence Is The Central Issue Of The Social Contract. In Boxing We Have A Peculiarly Civilized Form, In That Boxers Don't Screech And Holler. They Don't Use Weapons. All Of This Seems To Me Quite Amazing, Because It Is So Disciplined, So Controlled. It's Ritualized, But Absolutely Genuine. And The Cultural Structure Built Around That Ritual Is Absolutely Fascinating To Me. And It Seems To Me That Boxing Is One Of Those Structures That Is Designed To Promote Harmony. I Think That It Is A Stove That Contains That Fire In Us And Makes It Safe And Useful.

Basically, We Are Pack Animals. We May Be Evolving Toward Hive Animals. The Nature Of The Pack Is That If All The Eyes Of The Pack Are On You, You Are Either The Leader, Or You Are Lunch. So It's A Basically Hazardous Situation To Have The Eyes Of The Pack Upon You. And I Think That's Really Visceral. I Think That's Bred In The Bone. That's Species - Deep.