Zuby

was the politics of self-help really um i you can only help yourself if you're free and so the person who's going to help you be that is the person who's going to help you become more yourself it never seemed adversarial it never seemed ideological it seemed natural it seemed to come from a great american tradition and now that he's gone because i'm a writer i want to place him in a tradition i want to say

who is he mark twain well mark twain was a very pessimistic bitter person uh who believed that the human race had just as about effed everything up that it could and may have been better off never having been you know born

And Scott was like Twain in that he could surprise you and he could turn a phrase, but he was a lot more positive.

Was he Will Rogers?

Never met a man he didn't like.

Well, I kind of get the feeling that he didn't.

He maybe disliked them on second meeting, but on first meeting, he probably liked them quite a bit.

What he really never met that he didn't like was a problem or a difficulty that he couldn't see as an opportunity.

And the people who used to say things like that to me when I was young used to irritate me.

Oh, every difficulty is a challenge.

Every failure is a new chance to win in a new way or something.

I found those people endlessly annoying.

Why didn't he annoy me when he said those things?

What was it about Scott?

Because I could see he was living them and I could see it was working.

It wasn't like my school counselors who I knew had problems.

I mean, I knew, and as his life went on, and as I followed him more intensely on the rowing machine, because he made me wanna do things like row, I found myself getting stronger and stronger in these years after my dad died.

And then about last spring,

I saw that he was perhaps dying.

And on, I think it was the 22nd of May, I made a tweet.