On Sunday, I flew into one of the world's largest airports into a metropolitan area of approximately 18 million to spend a week teaching 6 students how to make boxes. At night I turn on the television for a few minutes to see what's on... wondering whether there is anything available that isn't stupid, insipid, demeaning, insulting of the intelligence or violent and insultingly gross. Believe me, there isn't. Can you see how these factors might leave me feeling a bit out of touch with the broad expanse of American society in which millions are in actual fact out of touch with the creative essence of their own humanity?

It is a society of our own making. It seems to be our "unmaking" as we explore chemical and pharmaceutical means of modulating and controlling our internal gyroscopes... hoping to establish a sense of normality in what is extremely far from normal.

So, today I will teach a flipping story stick method for accurately installing hinges without even measuring. I'll teach how to make some simple inlay. And I'll demonstrate a bit of how to be in touch... with wood, with technique, with beauty, and with the human creative capacity that is far more real than what you see on TV, reminding perhaps for my students and for myself that being in touch is really about the hands.