No, it's what I would like to have happen. For example, the tattoo. I've never been tattooed or had my ears pierced. What I picture is having a tattoo, maybe an eagle, but it would be just sitting there on my forearm. And that's one thing that bothers me: that it wouldn't change. So the idea that a tattoo would just sit there and never change has me thinking, "Well, wait a minute, what if I had a special ink that would cause the tattoo to slowly move, very, very slowly along my forearm across my shoulder and to the nearest opening?" And it would disappear, maybe you'd see the eagle half on my cheek and half inside my mouth disappearing. And it would creep along and wander around and get stuck maybe under my kneecap and I'd rub it loose and it would be changed while it was inside of me and it would move on and come out, not looking like an eagle at all, through one of the other orifices. And so I'd think about getting a scientist to develop this super tattoo ink that can do this amazing thing. But give it to a tattoo artist and it might cause a problem. What if people don't want their tattoo changed?

I have a doctor friend who is in research in narcolepsy at the University of Chicago. He has about 40 dedicated drones working with him measuring sugar consumption as they move from axin to dendrite across synapses. What I always say to him is ... "Hey, when you find out where 'whimsy' is, or 'notion,' give me a ring." Well, by God, he came by a couple of months ago with two guys from Frankfurt who were selling the University of Chicago a device that you could use with a computer to do an XYZ of the brain for tumors. And he wanted me to see it. It was a beautiful program and I asked them, "Do you think you can find whimsy?" "Oh, yeah, we could do that." And I said, "Well, set it up." And then I'd say, "OK, I'm being whimsical now." But what if I was fooling myself and I wasn't really being whimsical, I just thought I was? When we define something are we really it? And can we find it?

I think satori is where you reach that state of enlightenment yet you don't realize you're in it.

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Yeah, that's where the truth is right in front of you when your back is turned. There was a short film once, a fellow was scribbling a message and you think, "What's he writing?" You don't know what it is. He folds it up carefully and puts it in his pocket and he goes to the top of the Eiffel Tower. He takes this note out and you think "Uh oh, this is his last statement, he's gonna jump," but, no, he makes a little airplane out of it and he throws the note off the top of the Eiffel Tower and an accordion starts to play light-hearted French music. And you follow this little paper airplane flying willy-nilly wherever. And it goes down, swooping gracefully over the rooftops of Paris and it goes through a window and lands on a woman's lap. She opens the thing up and reads it, closes it. Walks out of her place and goes to the Eiffel Tower, goes up to the top and slaps the man in the face.

Did you ever want to be famous?

I love applause, and I love an audience, and I love to do what I do, but I become so caught up in what I'm doing that all the marketing and focus of getting there and staying there, schmoozing, making the right moves, becomes something else really. I guess I have that kind of Swedish melancholy that the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen had, that -- after it's over it's over. No, I think being in the right place at the right time sometimes can ruin you. It's easy -- so much of what happens is luck. I've been doing albums now since 1956, and I've met wonderful people and I've got a lot of people that e-mail me now and it's very gratifying. But, the nice thing about where I am, hidden away here, is that I can do almost anything I want to do and I have nobody to blame but myself.

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