Listen, I was young when I lost control of my hands. Twenty five, twenty six maybe. I had been working on farms for years by then. I know that sounds vague but I'll explain. I was a volunteer. That means I wasn't getting paid. Not money anyway. Not sex or anything weird like that either, if that's what you're thinking, and it probably is what you're thinking. I was paid in food and roofs. That is, different roofs and different food, but never meat. I don't eat meat. I don't eat meat or fish. Haven't for years. And that means poultry too, chickens and turkeys. The reason I don't eat fish, I'll tell you because a lot of people ask, is the same reason I don't eat meat plus an extra reason. You see because when I was a kid I used to go fishing and I used to really like to go fishing, back then when it was a rod and some fishing line, live bait, worms or something that you dug up in your backyard. Now they fish with nets and they fish mean. This is what I'm talking about. I don't eat fish anymore because pretty soon all the fish are going to be gone and I don't want it to be partly my fault. Plus I just don't like the look of those boats anymore. So sleek and slippery and fancy looking. What happened to wood and rope, or a good strong iron hull? I don't know. Anyway, like I was saying, I was paid in food and roofs. How it worked out is that I gave the farm a couple of hours - 3 or 4 - of good work in the mornings and then I had the rest of the day to myself. Had the weekends to myself, too. And in return, the farm gave me a place to sleep and food to eat. You know, because I got tired of money. Of using money. Of getting it. Of holding it. I grew up the son of a hard working man. A man who made his way sweeping floors. It's a real American tale, I know, but by the time my father retired at age forty nine, he was the vice president of a fifty million dollar a year manufacturing company. Not to mention all the money they had tied up in assets. Great big assets. Giant steel punching presses. Worked like cookie cutters. The biggest was a two thousand ton press. Worth a couple hundred thousand dollars these days, just one of them. Because the company, they made car parts for General Motors, that's what they did with the presses. He worked long hours towards the end. Running that whole shop. A couple hundred employees. I worked at the shop, cleaning the parking lot of empty potato chip bags and soda cans when I was fourteen. But until then I was at home most of the time with my mother. Just the two of us. At some point, which is what made my father have to retire in the end, the shop closed down. All those environmentalists, the people preaching about global warming and melting ice caps and stuff. Just as well though. We're better off things went this way. But I was talking about my mother. I was the son of a mother who told me that I could go anywhere, be anything. Like everybody else born after the war, I guess. You have such a good head on your shoulders, she used to say. Tell a kid like that enough times that he can do anything he wants, he starts to believe it. That's the trouble. Given the choice of everything, I never chose anything. I was always too afraid of choosing something. When you believe that you can do anything, choosing one thing is like losing everything else. After a while I got fed up with my mind and that setting and so I packed up a backpack and took off. That was back when you could still hitchhike. I mean, back when there were still a lot of cars on the roads. Hard to imagine that world anymore now.