“Bigotry doesn’t care about state or regional lines. It’s all over the place.”

I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.

The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount.

One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.

But fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it’s about perception and balance sometimes I think.

The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.

I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years.

One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility.

I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.

You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.

Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.

It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.

It’s financial of course, but it’s also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be.

It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.

I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.

I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way… it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things

I make music that I know that people will enjoy, and balance the ideas and philosophy that we put in music with music that when we play it live, people can move to it and groove to it.

If you’re interested in ‘balancing’ work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.

The balance between aggression and caution was crucial.

If you do not see great riches in your imagination, you will never see them in your bank balance.

The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.

I drink a lot of coconut water. It balances out all the other toxic stuff I put into my body.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

Life is about balance. Be kind, but don’t let people abuse you. Trust, but don’t be deceived. Be content, but never stop improving yourself.