David C. Smith's Blog

• I would have had an Uncle Harold except that he died when he was 6 years old. This was in 1936. My mom’s mother, my Grandma Steib, said that he had the sweetest little smile. What happened was that Harold had a stomachache, so Grandma put a hot water bottle on his tummy. The stomachache was actually appendicitis. His appendix burst and subsequently he died at the hospital. The idea of this charming little boy with that sweet smile suffering like that, and then my grandmother doing what she thought was the right thing to do, only to have it turn out to be the worst thing she could have done, haunts me in ways that horror stories do not.

Harold would have been my third uncle on my mom’s side. Grandma was married and divorced twice, surely unusual in the 1920s. I don’t know much about the first husband except that his last name was Ryan. Their son was my Uncle Chuck, my mom’s older brother. With her second husband, the man named Steib, she had three daughters and a son—my mom, Clara; Frances; Elvira; and Robert, Bob. The women’s names give you a clue as to when they were born, their generation, don’t they? Not many women are named Frances or Clara these days, and certainly not Elvira (except for the Mistress of the Dark, of course). Anyhow, the guy who would have been my Grandpa Steib, if I had ever met him, was an alcoholic, my mom said. He’d stop off at the beer garden or tavern and leave the kids in the car while he went in and put it away. This would have been in the 1930s and 1940s, of course. On Sundays, he didn’t drink but recited from the Bible; the kids would try to hide anywhere other than have to sit there and listen to him preach scripture. He also refused to give my mom permission to marry my dad when she was not yet 21; that’s how it was back then. So she and my dad had to wait until mom turned 21 years of age and do it on their own. This was in 1949. So whenever you watch an old film noir or something from 1949, think about young kids back then wanting to get married but having a guy like my mother’s father stand in their way, and it was all legal. Guys ruled. I grew up with these stories.

One nice memory is that Grandma Steib and my dad’s mom, Grandma (Claudine) Smith, used to sit and do needlework together. They got along well. I have a black-and-white snapshot of them from the mid- or late 1950s, sitting together on a couch. God knows what they had to say about their husbands, being that it was a man’s world and all. My own memories of those two women are nothing but good; I still have Danny and the Dinosaur, a storybook Grandma Smith gave me when I was around 8 years old. I read that book until it almost fell apart. She liked horror movies, too, and Alfred Hitchcock, and The Twilight Zone, and Halloween. Turns out we had a lot in common! Maybe she sensed that appreciation of the gothic in me from an early age.

Anyhow, the story about Uncle Harold and my Grandma Steib, then when I think about her later, knowing her as I did when I was a boy and young man…what must it have been like, to have known what she’d inadvertently done to the little boy with the sweet smile? Haunting, as I say. And in 1936, during the Great Depression. It serves to remind me how dark and shadowy that period must have been for many Americans, especially Grandma Steib and her husband. The house I remember from my childhood is their little farmhouse on Keefer Road in Liberty Township in Trumbull County, Ohio, where I grew up, but their first house was in Pennsylvania. They lost that house when the bank foreclosed on it. My mom said that her mom told her that Grandpa Steib struggled to get the money they owed on the house but got to the bank after 12 noon, the deadline to prevent the bank from foreclosing on the property. So they lost their house. Grandma remembered looking out the back window of the car, looking at that house, as they drove away and came into Ohio. This is a world that I’m glad we have gotten past, although we still do live in a world where banks rule. Maybe that’s why Grandpa Steib drank so much.

• One of the best comments I’ve ever read is by Alphonse Daudet, the nineteenth-century French author. Naturalism; social observation; a very clean, almost conversational style from the little of him that I’ve read. Found this in a book called The Practical Cogitator, the 1970s paperback (originally published in the 1940s). Here it is: “Music is another planet.” Perfect. Perfect.

• When I think of death, I think of the birth and death dates in the articles about personages included in encyclopedias. I’m sure this comes from all the hours I spent reading many of the articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica my Aunt Nancy, on my dad’s side, gave to us in the mid-1960s. It was the 24-volume 1964 edition, and I kind of fell in love with it. One reason for that is because I am a word nerd who loves to read. Also, when I was young, I wanted to know everything. I failed in that regard in terms of, oh, chemistry, higher math, physics…many of the sciences, although I love science, at least in the way a lay person does. (I’m there for Nova every week on PBS, and I scour the Web for all sorts of stuff, chiefly archaeology.) Anyhow, I was not a sports-minded kid, so when my dad and brother would settle in to watch football on Sundays, or when there were no interesting old movies (I am also a movie nut) showing on TV on rainy Saturdays, I’d sit on my bed and read Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, this or that odd science fiction novel, or stuff in the Britannica, all sorts of things. I still recall reading the article on fashion, clothing, attire…whatever it was called. Fascinating. The movies, especially silent movies. Architecture and buildings. Musicians, artists. Anything about ancient history.

But the articles on famous individuals were interesting because who they were and when and what they had done, or not done, was now complete. Their years were there to prove it. Born this year, died that year. What must it feel like to have one’s name and the pertinent aspects of one’s life concentrated in that way into an article and facts weighed, conclusions drawn, because one has passed on? I wondered if there were anything I could ever accomplish that would make it worthwhile for me to be included in such an encyclopedia or register. When my wife, Janine, and I moved to Chicago, I found a copy of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, published in 1997, on the shelf at a Barnes & Noble store Janine and I used to visit with our friend Joe Bonadonna. I remember pointing it out to Joe and saying, “We know who isn’t going to be in here,” meaning me. I looked. I was in there. Really? And still am in there, I guess. It’s now all online. And I have a Wikipedia page, too, which is really something. A fan of mine at Stanford University created it years ago. I was amazed to learn that. Other friends of mine update it occasionally. So now I have my birth year in parentheses after my name and eventually—but not too soon, I hope—will have the closing date. I have my family, whom I love, and I want to stick around for them (and they want me to, too), and I still have things I want to write, including some very creepy little horror stories and a couple more novels, at least, including a ghost story. So we’ll see. I’m at the keyboard every day; it’s a habit formed in high school and one I cannot break. So we’ll see. But it still does something to me to see myself listed along with people who’ve really accomplished a lot of things as an entry in some book or list online. I guess I am still the twelve-year-old who read Poe and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Marvel Comics and Famous Monsters of Filmland and science fiction novels and wondered how they did it, writers. Where did they get their ideas, and how did they ever get published?

• We are, to borrow a term from statistics, regressing toward the mean—by which I mean that this Atlantean Golden Age of the West, our postwar height, especially in the United States, is collapsing upon itself, retracting, so that the few sit above the many and the many are illiterate or semiliterate, being amused to death (in Neil Postman’s phrase), and couldn’t care less. Technically, regression toward the mean in statistics or mathematics would require random variables, and that is about as much as I understand about it. I am using the phrase imaginatively to say that I think human society has pretty much adhered to a central or median position of the few above the many, at least since we have moved out of the hunter-gatherer phase. I feel that this has been the default throughout human history; it is our settled space. We belong here. Those of us with the interest and brain power, with the talent and insight, with the imagination to continue challenging ourselves to seek wisdom or enlightenment or insight, will remain, but we have always been a small population. Why pretend otherwise? Literacy peaked when printing presses ran like crazy, most people got a fairly good education, and there was nothing or very little to compete with print. It’s over. We will stumble back into our beehives and cocoons of immediate gratification, ignorant even of our ignorance, and very pleased with ourselves, doing as we are told. That’s the best!

• Apropos of this thought, when I was writing Oron way back around 1973, 1974, I conceived it as a sort of mythic or legendary story that, in the far future, if somehow the gist of it survived, could be told around a fire in a small company of listeners, perhaps when the new Dark Age comes (it will), with sufficient ingredients to remind us of the fundamental storytelling elements that keep human beings going: kings and warriors, sorcery and demons and gods, travel and discovery, betrayal and desire and death and rebirth, just as when we started telling stories. Maybe my reach exceeded my grasp, but the notion was there.

• I hated working retail, which I did in the late 1970s when I needed a job upon discovering that it is impossible for a fiction writer to survive on writing alone unless you hit that small, lucrative, narrow sweet spot where mediocrity succeeds. So I worked in a series of hardware stores–sorry…home improvement stores! There were people all day long. I don’t care for crowds, and being around others drains the energy from me, but mainly, I’d have preferred being left alone so I could read and work on any story ideas I had, oddball stuff. However, on that job, I did learn a few practical skills—glass cutting, pipe threading. What I did not care for was being treated rudely by guys with IQs half the size of my waist, in inches, as if I were a numbskull and only they knew how to do a thing. But that’s the region in which I grew up, Youngstown, Ohio, a steel town whose edges are rough, whose everything down to its core is rough.

• Characterization, writing, storytelling. Robert E. Howard once wrote, regarding the sort of rough-and-tumble protagonists he created, “They’re simpler. You get them in a jam, and no one expects you to rack your brains inventing clever ways for them to extricate themselves. They are too stupid to do anything but cut, shoot, or slug themselves into the clear.” Quite a few critics have used this statement to justify their dismissal of Howard and his adventure stories, but it occurs to me that this was Howard’s way of expressing his own dismissal, even contempt, for the machinations of more intricate or complicated story lines in the same way that he was suspicious of our modern intricate and complicated lives. He grew up when the Western frontier was just past, listening in on other forms of storytelling and appreciating historical incidents. Think of the scene in the first Indiana Jones movie in which Jones, confronted with a master sword-wielder, simply pulls out his revolver and shoots his attacker. Cut, shoot, or slug your way out. Why fumble finding the right key on the key chain when you can put your shoulder to the door and get through that way? Leave the other stuff to Sherlock Holmes.

• Using foreground as a verb. Just…don’t. Stop it. Use emphasize or focuses on. Is that so hard? Postmodernism, poststructuralism, metanarrative, metafiction, meta-friend-for-drinks…I get it. This is where we are at this moment. Everything has become air; poke it and you get the insubstantial nonsense of grand narratives, which deserve to be postmodernized and poked. I get it. Just stop using foreground as a verb. It hurts my ears. I suppose I am conservative in some way regarding this. I understand that foreground has been adopted for new or modern or postmodern usage to distinguish its being of service in postmodern conversation, and that that is important for the kids to devise something new to shock their elders (“Oooh, we’re so postmodern and Foucaultian, dressed in 1980s primary colors and listening to Bananarama, that we use foreground as verb.”), and that this is fun, but I find it more sensible to understand simply that things fall apart and then are put together in new ways, either magically or by us, that the old way was a grand fiction and the new way is a grand fiction, too, and what we all need to do, aside from shocking audiences and readers with interesting broken sentences and words and broken people and broken narratives and boxes within boxes or even Yeats’s gyring spiral, is to sit and watch. I know that it means I am not participating or contributing in a radical or avant garde postmodern way, but the avant garde becomes the norm, the postmodern dissolves into that air, we will always find interesting ways to communicate our perilous humanity anew every generation, whether it is making marks on bones or Byron or Ionesco or Shepard or Wicked, but they are all carriages on a train going in circles to wave hi, as it goes ’round, at Plato or Socrates or the Buddha or someone designated by the tribe to keep the fire burning in a pouch as they all follow a trail to the next place. Hi! And there is always a next place, even if it is the grave. Hi!

I like to sit and watch the wind blow through the trees—new buds, a flowering, leaves shining in the rain, then turning gold and red and finally falling to the ground to be  buried under snowfall, the branches bare and quivering in the wind, everything still until the eternal return, ancient and modern and postmodern all at once, the eternal return. We are the buds, we are the leaves, we fall to the ground, et cetera.

But I may also be hypocritical appreciating the ways of storytelling or artists with their bold canvases and ceramics and displays, the shock of the new (Robert Hughes), music of all kinds, people spinning and dancing, excites the hell out of me. Throw everything overboard and start over. Break it apart and keep going. Do it. It feels as though we are moving forward when we do this. So I am also a hypocrite, although I still dislike the use of foreground as a verb.

• Journey. Another word we need to abandon. Life as a journey. “My cancer journey as I recover.” Journey as self-discovery. I want us all to disappear into a place before now when we simply lived lives and were not obsessed with our egos and our therapy and our journeys. Sit down on your journey and look around and get past yourself. Help others instead.

• Ultimately, intelligence means little. Cunning is everything.

• Any movie with Vincent Price in it. (And why can’t we have knighthood for artists of this caliber in the United States?)

•Also, any movie with Peter Cushing in it. He was never so honored, either, during his career.

• Christopher Lee, however, was.

• I still have the copy of a little (4¼” × 5½”) side-stapled book I wrote when I was 9 or 10 called The Java Man, which was like the movie The Neanderthal Man only set in Java, and the transformation comes when a volcano explodes and parts of ancient Java Man bones get stuck inside the modern man. When the transformation comes, I announce it in all caps with squiggles: “He had become THE JAVA MAN!!!” In the story, the sufferer dies when he falls from the top of a building, not a new idea at the time. I taped a little green plastic toy of a caveman to the cover of this creation to make it an exceptional attraction. Only the one copy, however, exists.

• The first fiction books I recall writing for my own amusement constituted a series about a little cave boy and his pet dinosaur, influenced, I think, by Roy Rockwood’s Bomba the Jungle Boy. I had at least three or four of these cave boy books, now long gone. Still have the Rockwoods. Java Man…Jungle Boy…. I sense a theme….

• But one of my favorite stories by my own hand was “The Man of the Golden Atom,” in which a scientist finds a glowing meteorite in the forest near his home/laboratory and because of its rays is diminished in size like the incredible shrinking man from the Richard Matheson story and movie. The title I borrowed from the old Ray Cummings sf story, which I had heard of—maybe in Famous Monsters of Filmland?—but had not read. At the end, in trying to escape a spider, the shrunken man, now reduced to a primitive, Bomba-like state, crawls under a slightly open window but is pelted by raindrops and falls into the garden outside, where he is caught in, and his life is ended by, a Venus flytrap. (There’s that theme again.)

• Another writing project for junior high school was an idea I borrowed from Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which four men, the last survivors of a nuclear war, journey to the center of the earth and find a lost world, where they can possibly survive. One of my friends in the eighth grade, maybe Sheldon, read it and asked me, “Why isn’t there a woman? There has to be a woman for people to survive.” True. I had been aware of this fact for some time, but I was a shy guy. That written theme was so lengthy that our teacher wrote a note at the top with my earned grade (I forget what I got), saying, “I didn’t expect a chapter from your forthcoming novel.” Prescient of her! No spiders or Java Men, though.

• Aerosmith, “Dream On.”

• We are living now in the Bardo.

• Autumn, for me, is the best season of the year. Things cool down, at least most things. Colors come out before going away for a while. We can go within. Quieter. Easier to go within, without the distractions and noise and light of a long summer and the people it brings out. (I don’t do well with crowds but have learned to desensitize myself.) Breathe. Enjoy what comes without being forced to participate in nonsense. Here is the world. I see it now.

• Something I enjoy very much, even vicariously, is sitting in with artists talking shop or loosening up about how they get into what they do. Just musicians jamming, actors talking about what they find what they’re exploring a role, writers getting excited about the craft. The best. Pure illumination. I could sit in on such sessions for hours because true creativity is the most mystical and enlightening thing in the world. We know this. Think about all the mythological creation stories we have, all so human. I am taken away by our imagination and vastness and boldness. On the other hand….

• Not everyone has a soul.

So this morning with my first cup of coffee I caught the end of CBS’s Sunday Morning news magazine and learned about how the public library in Brooklyn has set up a way for people who want to be fashion designers can get their start. Most, but not all, are women of color, several of whom have spent half a lifetime already in some other field. But this is what they always wanted to do or try out, fashion design. And I am hooked into watching this the moment we learn that the women at the library who put this project together on a shoestring contacted a famous designer (the guy who used to be on a television program called Project Runway, I think) to help these folks. Once he learned how sincere they all were, he made sure to get involved and offer his professional guidance.

I know zip about fashion and fashion design. I know what bell bottom jeans are because I was a young man in the 1970s. I know about A-line dresses (think of the mid 1950s) because (1) I came across reference to them in an Encyclopedia Britannica article about the history of clothing and (2) I knew about the clothes Grace Kelly and the other actresses wore in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. But here’s the thing: with this episode about learning fashion design in Brooklyn, I was watching people invest themselves in personal goals they had long desired to experience, and they were doing it under the guidance of a professional. What entranced me is that behind-the-scenes glimpse of the professionalism involved in this field.

This was catnip for me. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing–for example, videos online of how musicians hold jam sessions and go back and forth with their ideas about chords or notes or melodies. I know zip about music, too (although I do like a variety of different kinds). But listening in on why certain blues musicians use certain chords or progressions or notes, whatever they may be—well, I feel as if I’m in a sanctum sanctorum and observing the initiation rites of some ancient sacred mystery.

Myself, I like to feel that I operate on some level of professionalism. I still have warm memories of my years at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons when I was the managing editor of that organization’s monthly peer-reviewed journal. I worked with a first-rate staff of copy editors dedicated every day to maintaining exactness with every term, syllable, sentence, and paragraph we dealt with on the page, making it our protocol to review each manuscript repeatedly.

(This level of perfectionism is now lost at most medical journals, which are produced by publishing behemoths whose primary dedication is to getting studies through a meat grinder and online as quickly as possible. The expertise comes from the doctors who perform peer review; after that, factota do what they can to review and polish as quickly as possible. I failed miserably a few years ago when I signed on to do some freelance copy editing for one of the largest medical publishers in the world. Their protocol, now commonplace at most of these journals, is to hire persons with some experience in medical editing and have them push through 10 manuscript pages an hour. To do that, only the most superficial review is possible: Are the figures cited in order? Do we even need this particular figure? Is dilation or dilatation meant here? A reference citation number is missing: Author, please advise. My cat could do it. There is no time to double check whether the percentages in a table add up to 100, and certainly no time to ascertain whether this section needs a B head or a C head or even a D head. Just…GWA, as I learned from the brilliant Anne Rossi who trained me when I started my career at Neurology: Go With Author.)

Now I pay attention to any opportunity I find to sit in on professionals engaged in shoptalk, even if it’s performative. For instance, I really enjoy watching the FBI shows on CBS (or did, back when they had three different titles) and NCIS. And the reruns of shows on Story Television and the History Channel: who came up with the idea for boxed chocolate chip recipes? for example, or the history of steam power. Hell, I watch Ancient Aliens just to observe brainy, imaginative people gather around a table and discuss the aerial machine described in the Book of Ezekiel or how certain ancient megaliths are clearly the leftover remnants of some temple of the Anunnaki. I am indiscriminate. Again, catnip.

But, why cop shows?  At first I watched them because they’re reliable, disposable, relaxing pulp fiction, following a certain structure of set-up, development, and resolution with a cast of characters we come to care about. But that gets old fast. Now I realize that what gets to me is the fact that we have a group of bright professionals standing around talking about how to solve a problem or address a concern. It echoes what I felt when I was in the Publications department at the Academy and my staff and I had to figure out how to solve some procedural glitch or other, intelligent people coming together to deal with some professional-level issue. I felt the same way when I found a documentary online about the musicians in the Wrecking Crew. Or whenever I come across a show about the development of our space program. Find Failure Is Not an Option, either the book or documentary, and tell me you aren’t riveted every minute you spend with it. And when a group of us local writers and poets used to meet once a month at the now-gone Top Shelf Books here in Palatine, Illinois, to read our work and discuss it with other writers—heaven. I was with my own kind, I guess, and for a few hours not alone at the keyboard and inside my own head.

Professionalism. Expertise. Exactitude. These are the qualities that have allowed us to build the best systems we’re capable of in this country and around the world. It pains me to look at the ass clowns now running our government—arrogant ineptitude in action, grievance rather than fairness, posturing and lies instead of personal integrity and honor, adolescent attitude rather than probity, conscientiousness, and the thrill of dedication to something bigger and better than oneself. Where’s their self-respect and dignity? Those should still mean something, whatever labels we throw at each other. I am ashamed for them.

We are all the less for it when we fail to come together on common ground as we used to, agreeing to assist each other in the American project as best we can, at levels of professionalism learned through steady education and application.

So I just came back in from cutting half the back yard, where the grass (thin as it grows) is very tall. I let it go weekend after weekend because I have been putting in time doing freelance editing, reviewing stories to include in Close Thrones and Arcane Arts (which is nearly done), and before that, reading through the page proofs of Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography, which will be rereleased soon in an updated paperback edition as well as a hardcover edition for libraries. (I was able to make a few corrections of fact as well of typos, as well as add to or add a couple of notes.)

The morning is muggy. I got started a little before 10. Now it’s 10:30 and the battery of my Ego lawn mower is out of juice. Got to give it a half hour to recharge.

Anyhow, it is damp, I’m catching the overripe aroma of wet grass, trees, all of that, and it takes me back to summers in my parents’ back yard when I was an adolescent and the whole point of summer for me was to take it easy and read sf and anything else that caught my fancy—maybe something about ancient Egypt or the Roman Empire, but usually paperback adventures and sf. Lots of Ace books (I still have many)—Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Bracket, and the usual suspects. We’re talking the mid-1960s, when I would have been 12 (in 1964) and thereafter. I was already following our space program and, soon, Star Trek. For some strange reason I was not drawn to the digest magazines; I don’t know why and realize that there is no excuse for that! It was books for me, I guess. But also Famous Monsters and Creepy and Eerie (I still have all the early issues. And a bunch of FMs, too.)

But one strong memory is that I was a member for a while of the Science Fiction Book Club, so I remember reading Heinlein (Farnham’s Freehold is one, and Starship Troopers) and other authors. What I miss most is those monthly bulletins they put out on that glossy paper. I saved none. They were almost square and they had those exquisite Virgil Finlay illustrations. I thought at that time that I might become a comic book artist or illustrator; I practiced every day with pen and ink, usually a crow quill pen tip and a  bottle of India ink in a rubber base. I practiced a lot but never got past being fairly meh. Still, I loved the feel of drawing with that pen tip in real ink.

To be continued.

The most important question was determining why I was losing blood and how. I had an early colonoscopy (I wasn’t due for one for another year) done by my gastroenterologist. No sign of bleeding in the gut; no sign that bleeding could be because of my hiatal hernia. The oncologist found no signs of malignancy in lab readings. An ultrasound of my heart showed it to be in excellent condition. We were left guessing as to where this slow leak of blood was occurring. There are less common reasons that my hematologist and I will explore.

Meantime, my family and I are still angry that I was told by two physicians that my shortness of breath and fatigue were the result of long Covid. To be sure, my GP ran the regular blood panels every 6 months when I went in for wellness checks; the hemoglobin levels were fine. So there is the mystery. But the pulmonologist I originally saw had quickly labeled me as having COPD; my new pulmonologist (I will never go back to the first one) told me that he had checked that doctor’s file on me and that if I do have COPD, it is at a trivial level. (I thought so myself; I showed no overt signs of COPD.)

So…I did not die. I feel now, a week after my hospital stay, fairly normal and am back to writing and editing. Time and doctor visits will tell where that years-long slow leak and breathlessness came from.

Doctors began arriving late Saturday morning. The attending introduced himself. We discussed what the problem could be and the procedures he wished me to undergo. The immediate problem was that my hemoglobin count was down to 3.8 g/dL. For men, it should be at 13 or 14. If it could be raised to 7 or 8, that would be acceptable. But at 3.8, I was essentially dying and had been suffocating for weeks. (A friend, also a medical editor, told me later that she entered the 3.8 measurement into an online query: Can someone live with a hemoglobin count of 3.8? The answer was, Possibly.)

The pulmonologist came in and we had a pleasant visit; he, too, at one time had considered a scholarly life in medieval studies, as I had back in the seventies. He ran down some facts and told me that I’d also be seeing the cardiac doctor. Indeed, he appeared shortly and ordered me to be given Lasix (furosemide), a diuretic. I was edematous as well as anemic. Clearly he was concerned about fluid buildup around the heart; I could certainly be a candidate for congestive heart failure.

Within 10 minutes of taking the Lasix pill, I began to let the water loose. This went on for more than 24 hours, gradually lessening, until (after having unintentionally made a couple of wet messes in my bed and learning what a condom catheter is) the total amount of fluid I expelled was 7 liters—almost 2 gallons.

So Friday evening, December first, about ten-thirty at night, I asked my wife, Janine, to call for an ambulance. I could barely breathe. I had been barely breathing for days; for weeks, I had found it difficult to take in a breath when I did something as simple as stand up or walk five steps; and for months, for more than a year, I had been told that I had (1) long Covid, which affected my breathing, and/or (2) COPD, the result of my smoking for 26 years, even though I quite 27 years ago.

Once admitted into the hospital, I waited hours before being taken to a room. Lying on the gurney in the emergency room bay was not a problem; moving even the slightest cost me my breath. When I was taken to my room at three in the morning, I was gasping like a landed fish for a long minute or minute and a half at a time—an eternity. Sitting up on the gurney triggered it. So did trying to place my feet on the floor.  Anything did. I told the attendant techs to let me die. Let everything in me go into collapse. I was kind of in shock. Later, one of the nurses told me he was ready to start CPR on me at any second.

Once in bed, I relaxed, even as the nurses treated me like a human pin cushion. I was extremely anemic. But I began to receive blood, eventually 4 liters, and, later, 2 liters of iron.

So I just found this great article in Get Pocket, which shows up on my desktop as soon as I turn on my computer. An oral history of the making of My Cousin Vinny, which is basically a B picture but so well written and so well acted that it has become legendary. “What Is a Yute?” is the title of the article.

Here’s the thing: I will drop everything and pay strict attention whenever I come across an article or a video that provides behind-the-scenes glimpses of how artists think and create, how a movie came to be made, how studio musicians add so much to album tracks while remaining anonymous, or pretty much so, like the Wrecking Crew. It’s kind of like sitting at the feet of some guru, I guess, for me to get glimpses of creativity or inspiration.

It’s the same when I talk with other writers. I can’t get enough of it. I want there to be a group of writers sitting here over coffee or some beers talking shop about their inspirations, their work habits, where this or that character or scene or bit came from. It’s like a drink of cool water if I were hot and really thirsty.

I’ve spent most my life being creative. It’s me. Drawing. Writing stories and novels. For me, there’s still a bit of a holy mystery surrounding this process, despite the hard work and discipline required. And I want that There is a kind of mystery

Few Will Understand, and of Those Who Do, Fewer Still Will Speak of It

I’m not sure what that means, but it has a ring to it, same as So Let It Be Written, So Let It Be Done.  For years I couldn’t remember where I’d heard or read that. Turns out it is spoken by Yul Brynner in that kitschy old Cecil B. DeMille movie The Ten Commandments. It is frightening that our parents and grandparents took such movies seriously, but then, who are we to talk? We have huge and huger audiences for Fast X and Super Mario Brothers. It is, indeed, the end of Western civilization.

Which is right and good. Time for us to take a rest. Pax Americana and all that. Yes, we are still protecting the perimeter and, yes, we are still beholden—more than ever!—to the billionaires and gazillionaires who rule us (let’s be honest about that…they do, and we seem not to care), but things are winding down. This is the Anthropocene, after all, soon to  be the Anthropo-gone, as we burn up or melt away or drown or whatever awaits us. It is coming at us, some of it already here.

Anyhow, the meaning of the title of this blog, and of more to come, is this: Typically, once I start typing (or talking), I don’t know when to stop. So the only way to stop is…to stop. Which I will do in every blog from now on, whether it