If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.
My eyebrows make a more profound impact on other people than they do on me. I just let 'em grow.
I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.