(gentle music)
- Acceptance speech after setting
the world record in goosebumps.
I wasn't by any means a natural,
was not one of those wow hounds born jaw dropped.
I was tough in the husk,
went years untouched by rain, took shelter.
Seriously, even and often, especially in good weather.
My tears like teenagers hiding under the hoods of my eyes.
So committed they were to never falling
for the joke of astonishment
When I was told there were seven wonders of the world
I trusted the math, believed I had seen none of them.
Of course, beauty hunted me.
It hunts everyone, but I outran it.
Hid in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife,
or a week's end.
Then one day in a red velvet theater in New Orleans,
I watched Maya Angelou walk on stage.
17 slow steps to the mic.
She took a breath before speaking,
I could hear God being born in that breath.
My every pore reached out like a hand pointing to the first
unsinkable lotus in the bayou of the universe.
I'd never felt anything like it.
Searched the encyclopedia for the feeling's name.
When I got home, goosebumps.
Afterward I thought I can do this.
Started training, morning to night,
crowbar swinging like a pendulum at the wall of my chest,
tore the caution tape off my life
and let everything touch it.
Allen Iverson on the television in his first season
with the Sixers crossover sharp as a V of sparrows
flying through the paint like Michael Angelo's brush.
333 goosebumps.
My baby sister sober for the first time in 13 years
calling to tell me she just noticed
our mother's eyes are green.
505 goosebumps.
One day, my friend scored tickets to a Prince concert.
Tiny venue.
I was right behind the sound booth.
Prince's entire band that evening, women.
At the end of the show, the sound person turned around
and whispered he didn't play one song on his set list
the whole night.
I live on stages.
I know what it is to scratch a plan,
but not the whole trip and still arrive to your destination
200 years before your time.
421 artists formerly known as goosebumps.
But that's just the fancy stuff.
Some of them came from simple facts.
It rains diamonds on Jupiter, 189 goosebumps.
Blood donors and Sweden receive a thank you message
when their blood is used.
301 Nordic goosebumps.
One night in Michigan my friend still undiagnosed
could not uncurl her fingers to strum her guitar.
So she sang the chords instead.
It was the first time in my life
I'd seen pain become an instrument.
10 dozen goosebumps for each and every note plucked
from the string section of her refusal to silence her dream.
After that, nothing in the world was great.
Even the movie of my past was released in color.
The oldest man in my hometown could not get to the door
to listen to our carols.
So we went inside and sang at his bedside instead.
24 boots on the front step catching snowflakes
with their tongues, 776 goosebumps.
At one point, everything started doing it.
A sincere apology, 221 goosebumps.
An enemy's love poem, 222 goosebumps.
The moon rising over the continental divide.
My girl and I thought it was a car driving off the cliff
and suddenly nothing in the world was dying.
You ever felt that, a split second,
when nothing in the world is dying?
888 goosebumps.
And the next day I sharpened a tiny ax
so I could split the seconds myself.
Too much lives in a moment to not feed it to the fire
and the heart slow.
A Missoula tree house filled with candle light,
143 goosebumps.
The octopus documentary, 54 goosebumps multiplied by eight.
The biggest dog in the shelter
hiding behind a teacup Chihuahua
and the woman who came to adopt a cat,
taking all three of them home, 1,012 goosebumps.
There was no escaping the magic now.
Beauty caught me and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record is
if someone breaks it after me,
and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much that without even trying
I'll break it again.
(gentle music) (applause)