I know you've heard that line before--that hope is a thing with feathers. It's possibly Emily Dickinson's most famous poem. But I didn't understand what it meant for most of my life. (Why does hope have feathers? What's hopeful about feathers?)

Let's look at the full poem. (Don't worry! It's short!)

"Hope" is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

But’s It’s Alright. It’s Alright.

I'm a fan of protest music, and with gestures broadly all of this stuff going on, I've been thinking about it a lot. And while there are certainly times for the more overt ones (Eve of Destruction, Ohio, or Fortunate Son, for example) the one that I've been listening to is a lot more mellow. Tired.

American Tune, by Paul Simon, is a song that is haunting in its defeatedness. But--that's not it. It's not defeatist. It's just tired….

So others don’t die quietly.

That phrase, "Recover loudly so people don't die quietly" was unknown to me until I saw it on a bumper sticker last week. I didn't know what it was supposed to mean, but I definitely knew what it meant to me.

When I got home, I looked it up and found out that it's a motto of an anti-addiction group--and I love that--but to me, in the 20-odd minutes I was following that car and pondering the sentiment, it referred to mental illness…

I have a new favorite movie. I know what's you're saying: "But Rob, On The Waterfront has been your favorite movie since you were 21!"

And you're right. It took a lot to bump my favorite movie out of its number one spot, but man, Interstellar just has really hit me. It didn't the first time I watched it, or even the second, but when it became available on Netflix I watched it over and over (I watch movies while I work, so I watch a lot of movies) and it has so much depth. It's scientific depth and plot depth, but especially emotional depth….

…Is not what I thought it was.

I'm a writer and an artist, and I've been listening to Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim's musical about the creation of art, for at least 35 years, and I had thought that I knew what it was saying.

I obviously can't recount the whole thing here, but there is an artist in the second act who creates giant light-and-laser machines called Chromolumes, and he sings a well-known song called "Putting It Together."..