CURRENT MISSION

A major literary agent is interested in my book on learning & communication skills; also finishing two screenplays; still hoping to "make it" before I run outa dinero

ABOUT ME

Some of the foremost minds in the world consider me one of them, only I admittedly haven't figured out yet how to turn it into a buck. 30 years ago I interviewed luminaries in the art world about their common bonds, and more recently wrote a book applying the way critics examine art and literature to everyday life. Interesting question: how can someone relate to other people, who cannot relate one thing to another, to begin with? I was in a movie made two years ago about my high school basketball team of forty years ago. One twin son played for the state soccer championship in high school; the other competed for the championship in both gymnastics and diving, and went on to break their Oberlin College pole vaulting record. It isn't a matter of being brainers or jocks, but seeing the whole WORLD as metaphor, so every lesson is geometric, applying to everything else in life.

PHILOSOPHY

MUCH easier to see and hear what OTHERS are doing and saying than YOURSELF, so we tend to MAGNIFY others' faults and conveniently MINIMIZE our own. Never met anyone who bitched about something I said or didn't, that didn't do jjjjust the same thing two minutes later. Did I say the SAME? See, there's a certain law of equivalency in the universe. BAD energy that's changed in FORM is still BAD energy, and our INNATE capacity for deception, to facilitate survival, makes us extremely adept at making what we do SEEm different from what was done to us when in REALITY it's the SAME. In short, I live my life to straighten out all the knots in my stomach that living makes.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I just FOUND it, and you want to know what I'm doing to BUILD it? Listen up: I not only wrote to Craig of CraigsList, but got him on the phone, asking as I have nmerous other seemingly Get Together sites, why not get the word out to EVERYONE that we can take the world back from the bosses now, as Gary Cooper foretold the little guys would eventually do in Frank Capra's classic, "Meet John Doe." As I put it to a film producer recently, "not another Greenpeace; not another IdeaList.org; the whole ball of wax: some 21st Century Moses with access to instantaneous woldwide electronic communications, setting EVERYONE free. Pharoah didn't like it, and Donald Trump's not gawna like it particularly, but Pharoah managed without his slaves, and Trump will get by without his." I've got a blog (some might call it a bog) at myspace.fixingour1worldnow.com but if nothing else, PLEASE for YOUR sakes read a short story by Dostoevsky called "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," which is hands down THE sublimest, profoundest resolution of the good and the bad and the ugly within each of us. The skepticism that the wold even CAN be straightened out is all that's held us back for 5000+ years from doing it. THAT is the only reason it's always been this way; not because it HAS TO be. We're ALL Spartacus now; not just those few slaves who get caught with him in the movie. Rome is just a figment of our imaginations: a Matrix. July 14th is Bastille Day. What say EVERYONE goes out in front of the steet wher they work, with every television and film crew catching them and seguaying together 100 million people shouting, "I AM SPARTACUS!" Short of that, I press on, encouraging students and senior citizens to get off their lazy asses and tell the school administrators and Veterans Administation androids what's WHAT. I told a Third Grader in passing on June 5, 2006, who asked if I'd heard that the world was being blown up on 6/6/06, that I hadn't heard that, but if they thought about it, it essentially WAS blown up every day, every time some kid just like them or grownup just like me got blown away or merely starved or was killed needlessly by a curable disease, and the only reason the rest of us don't see it is that we're STUCK in our own little worlds. Y' know, I got called down to the superintendent's office the next day because the administration office phones were off the hook with calls from parents wondering why their children were demanding that they DO something to make the grownups play fiar and stop fighting. (89% of the district's students couldn't even PASS a standardized math test.) The superintendent had a chance to have the school district whose students mobilied the country to solve our problems, and all he could think of was canning the teacher who started it. If ANYONE wants to make a tv series or movie like that--not The Fugitive or Sam Spade, Palladin or The Lone Ranger, Superman or Batman fixing little problems here and there, but some Dostoevskeyan nut--Willem Dafoe or Robin Williams, Carol Burnett or Whoopi Goldberg, who knows?--building up a head of steam until the whole world joins in by the season finale; or ws it just a dream? Am I just dreaming? Or as John Lennon averred: am I NOT the only one? CAN we be meeting in our dreams about a sane world every night, and can't we meet together when we're awake now? If anyone hs any ideas about what ELSE I an do to participate, lemme know. I can cook, I can hammer, I can make a bed, I can pitch a tent.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Are YOU kidding ME? I went to Berkeley in the late Sixties. All I did for four years practically was couch surf, only we used to call it CRASHING, if anyone remembers. Then for four more years, I was the only parent visiting my kids in college, who "couched" with them, if you prefer. Like-minded people I met at myspace have couched with me. A hundred women AT LEAST couched with me when I was single. Some of them even brought me meals! But OFFICIALLY? Not a wink!

Interests

Literature, music, and all the arts, science and mathematics some, people, life. I SURE could use a swell patron, so I could spend ALL my time writing. be glad to send samples.

• arts
• writing
• books
• literature
• cooking
• running
• reading
• tv
• blogging
• drawing
• survival
• music
• scuba diving
• basketball
• boxing
• soccer
• gymnastics
• communications
• teaching
• history
• law
• mathematics
• science

Music, Movies, and Books

An insurance executive told another, complaining about me always trying to straighten things out that hurt people who'd put their faith in me: "You have to understand, it's HIGH NOON all day long for David." Shane, My Darling Clementine, The Maltese Falcon, On the Waterfront, Meet John Doe, Fury, Soylent Green, X-Files. The literature list is WAY too long, but the forementioned Dostoevsky story is at the top of the list.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

If what I've said here isn't ENOUGH, fawget about it!

Teach, Learn, Share

Well, NOW you ask, after I've spilled my gutts out three times awready! Okay, here we go: lo and behold, after all the books are put away and tests handed in, LIFE ITSELF turns out to be a reading comprehension test. YES, everything going on around and inside you is so much TEXT in your brain, so if you're leaving out too many pieces of the puzzle, is it any wonder you aren't GETTING THE PICTURE, any more than you could have answered the questions on a test of half the reading passage were missing? Who proofreads their LIFE after sixteen or twenty years of proofing stupid history and science reports? Diggit: you are in touch with REALITY only to the degree that you can relate things going on to the world at large. People who cannot GET outside the box, to begin with, cannot be expected to THINK outside the box, and--cruel irony--are soon lost IN it, as well. Some people think it's just a matter of caring. Even caring is a learned trait. When John is thinking about David, John is first-person, I, and David is second-person, you. When does 2 come before 1? NEEVVEERR! But when John learns to illustrate what he is saying with anecdotes and draw analogies between the matter at hand and the world at large, he becomes the THIRD-PERSON narrator, and starts being literally the author of his own destiny. NOW second-person, David, comes before third-person, John naturally, so John naturally cares about what happens to David more! It's also the authenticity you hear in some people's voice. Ever hear the old saw about having to lose yourself to find yourself? This is how it's done. Someone can't care who isn't really there, to begin with. Pretty scarey, huh? All those people around you, who are only partially there at all. Not just at their desks, but in their living rooms and, yes, even in their bedrooms ...