Sometimes when I'm watching television and something, an image, will come on that has to do with 9/11 or some of these families telling their stories, or children talking about drawing pictures of airplanes flying into towers, you know, I find myself still choking up.
It was great to get rid of the long hair. It's such a pain that, if you look at it, it's always wet when guys wrestle: you dump gallons of conditioner in it to keep it wet so you're not choking on it. You have all kinds of stuff in it, and just maintaining it is a lot of work.
Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.
The first person that I ever heard sing a song I wrote was Jason Derulo. I was in the studio when he was doing it, and I mean, I've heard that guy's voice my whole life. When he was singing words I wrote, I started kind of choking up, but I tried to be all manly and puff my chest up and be all, 'Yeah, it's not a big deal.'
I was writing a scene where a guy was choking another guy to death. You can go online and type 'chokeholds' and watch scenes where martial artists choke each other out. You can hear what noises they make when they go unconscious, see how their bodies flop and everything. YouTube is amazing for the more detailed stuff.
Perhaps it's because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he'd want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers - sometimes it's the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat.
I've never owned an actual trail-running shoe myself, but maybe I should. My favorite paths are fraught with peril, much of it skulking at shoelace level. A rock, a root, an errant pine cone. Wham, and you're down, choking in dust and picking pebbles from wounds in your forearms and knees.