After 23 years closeted at Westminster, where often all you can see out of the windows are other parliamentary buildings, I appreciate space, and I retired to Dartmoor to find it.
I was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and that's hard to do for a city kid because when you look up you just see buildings - and really, your first thought is to look in people's windows. So to look out of the space - out of living space - and look up to the sky, binoculars go far, literally and figuratively.
Modern buildings of our time are so huge that one must group them. Often the space between these buildings is as important as the buildings themselves.
I worked hard in gymnastics since the time I was six years old until I retired at 23 years of age.
I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let's All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont.
When Zinédine Zidane retired, he said he'd never be a manager and it wasn't in his plans. But after two years out, he missed football a lot. I think he retired a little bit early, he could have gone on for at least another season, and it would have been a pleasure for us to have him.
After I retired, I spent a quarter of a century in the business, and when I retired and a new regime took over, Vince McMahon Jr. and that, and in the beginning I went back to help out. I color commentated with him, but then I started to see things that were disturbing to me.
I retired at 35 in '98 and thought, 'There's only one place to go, and that's downward.' I retired at a good level. I was at peace after 15 years - I was lucky to play that long.
I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.
The Americans are still the leaders in human space flight. I feel we have a danger here of kind of stagnating. We're kind of resting on our laurels and there's a danger going forward if we don't take bold steps to really support human space flight in this country that we could fall behind. After the space shuttle is retired, we're going to have a big gap, five to seven years, at least where we're not going to have the ability to send our own astronauts into space, we'll have to buy rides on the Russian Soyuz, and so that will be a pretty big step down for us.
Musically, what happened was this: I retired twice. I retired after The Black Crowes, and I retired after Brand New Immortals. Then, we started buying real estate, which really took up my time. I was busy. I was still teaching yoga, but I was mostly busy running business, and I was fine. I was happy.
I'm 50 years old and been a college coach for 23 years, but after 12 years, no matter where you are, there are ups and downs.
Searching for the self when I was entirely alone was hazardous. What if I found not so much a great emptiness as a space full of unpleasant contents, a compound of long-hidden truths, closeted, buried, forgotten. When I went looking, I was playing a desperate game of hide-and-seek, fearful of what I might find, most afraid that I would find nothing.
I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall.
Too often what are called "educated" people are simply people who have been sheltered from reality for years in ivy-covered buildings. Those whose whole careers have been spent in ivy-covered buildings, insulated by tenure, can remain adolescents on into their golden retirement years.
There are apartments in the soul which have a glorious outlook; from whose windows you can see across the river of death, and into the shining city beyond; but how often are these neglected for the lower ones, which have earthward-looking windows.
I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.