When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.

I felt proud that the baby's first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea.

There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don't have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job.

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.

I've been in football a long time and people have problems through debt, drugs, drink and family.

At 17, I traveled to Mexico in a lemon yellow Mustang and saved money by bunking down in cheap, cockroach-infested flophouses. In my early 20s, I went on to thumb rides through Europe, readily sleeping in train stations, my backpack as a pillow. Once I even hunkered down for a night on a sidewalk grate - for warmth - in Paris.

Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation's place in the global economy, and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war.

I'm a dedicated father - a hopeless, dedicated father. I mean, I am dork dad. I am just - I love my children. I have kids - you know, Joey's 30-something, and then I have all the way down to 4 years old, believe it or not. At my age, five kids.