I realized that even in a world of proliferating media venues, online and in print, and on TV and on countless cable channels, the idea that I could be considered an expert on chronic knee pain was I think troubling for society, but very exciting for me.
We cannot wholly rely, as though it were Medieval times, [on the notion that] the only reality is what we see in front of us. There are germs. There are changes that are happening in our planet's ecology that are happening over such a long period of time that we cannot see the changes.
The reality is that there is an enormous value to gut-check instinctive decision-making in the world that is not hampered by reams and reams of research and complexity.
It was inevitable that in the proliferation of media and media channels and the natural debasing of authority that comes when you make an expert of someone who knows a few things and can be on television and you put the word "expert" underneath them, that is to say me, then eventually the very concept of expertise itself would become meaningless.
The very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting.
I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to "truthiness." I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible.
I am someone who values knowledge, actual knowledge. I also value stories and fiction a whole lot, and that's where the fake knowledge comes in.
I was always fascinated with the way that things pop on the Internet - the ways you build communities and create little stories and ideas that people play around with and send back to you.
I am not an Internet superstar. I am, ironically perhaps, the most old media superstar of all time. My fame is due to broadcast television.
My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.
I think, as we all learn as a child, you have to learn to tolerate ambiguity better and I'm still terrible at it and I hate it; even the word ambiguity makes me sick to me stomach.
By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.
I think that by the time I start writing the third book, of course, I will be President Of The United States, and that also will have something to do with it. I'll probably have to acknowledge that somehow.
Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.
To want to become the President is, I think, such a bizarre ambition that it is automatically deranging.
There is no metaphor for death. All comparisons are odious, but I'll do one anyway. We all have these moments of harsh clarity where we realize that something is gone, whether that is youth, whether that is someone we care about, whether that is where we literally lose someone we care about to death. Or we end a relationship that we thought would last forever, or have one ended for us. We all have these moments in life where it seems impossible to fill up the time that we have left for us, and yet we have to do it somehow.
I don't really collect anything. I mean, if I see a piece of Moxie soda memorabilia, I'll probably buy it. I'm a sucker for regional soda brands and forgotten histories and that sort of thing.
The understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.
