Richard Dooling's Blog

A $37 Trillion Credit Card Balance Transfer

During the last U.S. presidential election, American voters insisted that the economy was issue number one, but neither candidate campaigned on managing the national debt, or even mentioned it. Now the experts all agree that the government's $37 trillion debt is unsustainable, a scary thought, given that, since 2001, and for each of the last 24 years, the government has spent more than it took in and borrowed trillions to cover the difference. It's safe to assume that the country won't be living within its means anytime soon. But the economists don't tell us what will happen when that which is not capable of being sustained is sustained no longer?

I am not an economist. I majored in English literature and never took a business or finance course. I barely understand how treasury bonds work, but I'm told that it's how the government borrows money from investors to pay the interest on debt that it borrowed from other investors, so a little like a credit card balance transfer of $37 trillion? I remember juggling credit cards like this when I was young and foolish and completely broke. Is the government foolish and completely broke?

Should I believe the other guys in my old man's coffee group up here in Flyspeck, Montana, who tell me not to worry, because investors will always buy U.S. bonds no matter how many we sell? Why? Because the U.S. dollar is the world's safest, most trusted currency, the primary reserve currency of central banks all over the world.

How long will the dollar be the world's safest, most trusted currency if the International Monetary Fund ranks us among the world's ten most indebted countries, measured by debt-to-GDP ratio, with Greece a little more indebted than us, and Senegal and Ukraine more solvent?

What if our enemies make like Russia and start using the Chinese renminbi for their international transactions instead of the dollar? If the renminbi doesn't catch on, might other countries, like the Arab Gulf States, turn to crypto currencies or gold to teach us profligates a lesson?

Speaking of gold. It's October and the price of gold is up over 50% year-to-date? Why are investors buying gold instead of more Treasury bonds?

Should I worry that for 70 years United States treasuries held a pristine AAA rating, but now they merit only a AA rating? What if instead of giving the government more money to service its Mississippi River of debt, investors suddenly start buying bonds from companies like Microsoft, which pay about the same interest rate and have a AAA rating?

If I'm an old-timey banker or bond buyer with a sharp pencil and a green eyeshade deciding the credit worthiness of loan applicants, should I lend money to Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, whose company has $95 billion in cash and $40 billion of long-term debt? Or should I lend money to President Trump and Senate Minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who can't stop bickering long enough to sign the loan papers and whose country has zero cash and $37 trillion of long-term debt?

I was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, home of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Wealthy investors give cash to Berkshire so that experts like Buffett will invest it for them. What am I to think when Berkshire Hathaway has $350 billion in cash, almost a third of its holdings, and sees no stocks or bonds worth buying?

And how does the government respond? Time for a shutdown! Will investors line up to loan money to a country that is $37 trillion in debt and closed for business until further notice?

Will the government default on its debts? Or will it print $37 trillion new dollars and deliver them to its lenders in wheelbarrows and shipping containers?

I was driving my pickup truck to town for groceries the other day, when I heard on the radio that the shutdown could last until November, and maybe even longer. The next song up on my playlist was Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad Moon Rising. Was that just a coincidence, or does it mean something?

Send The Dead

The Kindle ebook edition is on sale for 99 cents for a limited time.

As of this writing, it's the Number 1 release in Caribbean and Latin American Literature.

Thanks to all who left Amazon customer reviews.

Pub Day Arrives

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. —Winston Churchill

Send The DeadRead more about Send The Dead and all four included stories at dooling.com.Purchase Send The Dead as an Amazon Kindle ebook.Purchase Send The Dead as an Amazon Paperback.

Illustration by Rob Dobi

Ten Thousand Repetitionsby Richard Dooling

When I was a boy in the 1960s, long before the Internet and 24-hour news cycles, people didn't get their news by scrolling through feeds on phones and tablets. No, they got their news from me. I was a paper boy. A professional! As were my brothers and most of my friends.

The Catholic grade school we attended in Omaha, Nebraska was a short walk from Paper Station H at 40th and Cuming, where we paper boys, thirty or forty strong, gathered every day after school with print-smeared canvass bags slung over our shoulders.

The paper station manager sat behind a battered desk on the only chair in the room and harangued us about collecting from deadbeat subscribers by Saturday, or the money would come out of our pockets.

We paper boys sprawled on our backs on long wooden tables and waited for the truck from downtown to bring bundles of the Omaha World-Herald, evening edition.

The manager passed around handfuls of rubber bands, which we did not need, because we were experts at folding and tucking newspapers into tight rolls that could survive a long toss onto a front porch. No rubber bands needed, but we took them anyway because, while we waited for the truck, which was often late, we used the rubber bands to shoot flies off the ceiling.

Go ahead and be skeptical that a nine-year-old shooting a rubber band off the tip of his left index finger could kill a fly on a high ceiling, but I assure you it was a skill so easily mastered that we were soon jaded fly assassins looking for something with a little more razzle-dazzle.

How about shooting a rubber band to put out a lit match at ten paces? Also so easy that we soon specified that one had to "snuff" the flame without hitting the head of the match itself, no consolation prize for guttering the flame without putting it out.

The manager volubly disapproved of us playing with matches in a newspaper station, so we were soon back on the tables shooting flies off the ceiling. It was so easy to kill the flies, we began wagering on whether it was possible to just "wing" them by turning one's shooting finger sideways and attempting to injure the fly without killing it.

Wanton boys, we soon observed that properly "winged" flies usually fell to the table and crawled in circles, clockwise if the fly had a damaged right wing, and counterclockwise if the injury was to the left wing. As in billiards, the marksman now had to call his wing shot before firing. "Left!"

Such were the skills I acquired in my formative paper-boy years. These days progressives fret that making fourth graders carry Sunday papers over a two-mile route through subzero Nebraska blizzards amounts to child abuse, whereas conservatives want to hear about how important it was for me to work and earn money at an early age, collect payments from subscribers, show up every day and make sure people got their newspapers on time.

Maybe, but I think I learned more from shooting rubber bands at flies. The same lessons that Malcolm Gladwell once turned into an entire book called Outliers, whose central premise is the unsurprising idea that if you do something a lot, you'll probably get good at it, whether it's rewriting sentences, programming computers, shooting free throws, parenting, napping, or hunting spider monkeys with a blow gun in the tree canopy of an Amazon jungle.

These skills, once embedded, may atrophy over the years, but like riding a bicycle, one never forgets. Forty-some years after I delivered my last newspaper, I was on a book tour, speaking to readers in a bookstore somewhere in the Midwest. In the middle of my presentation an aggressive wasp flew into the room and began dive bombing members of the audience, causing a stir when people covered their heads and moved away.

When the wasp landed on one of the light fixtures, I asked the audience if anyone had a rubber band.

I don't remember if I sold any books that day, but I received a standing ovation when the wasp fell to the floor in two pieces.

Substack

If you read or write on Substack, you may have noticed that I just started publishing there as well. For now, I mean to publish the occasional stand-alone essay on Substack, but I'll write more and better stuff for this newsletter, the one for which you kindly signed up. No ads or nudges here. No chats, restacking, retweeting, notes, comments, likes, or mentions here. But if you need to reach me, just hit reply, and I'll eventually get your email.

If you are a Substacker and read me over there, I did my best to turn off every request for payment that I could find in the Substack settings. If an orange button asks you for money, it's not me, so please ignore it. If this leaves you with a sad feeling of unrequited generosity, please leave a Goodreads review or an Amazon customer review for one of my books. That helps more than anything.

Happy Fall!The trees are in their autumn beauty,The woodland paths are dry,Under the October twilight the waterMirrors a still sky;

Yeats, The Wild Swans of Coole

A Novella and Four StoriesPub DateOctober 6th Amazon Release

Send The Dead will be released on Amazon as a print paperback and as a Kindle ebook on October 6th, 2025. The novella and story collection will also participate in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.

Kindle Ebook Preorders

Kindle users may preorder Send The Dead at Amazon for only $2.99, and the ebook will appear on their Kindle devices on the release date. Print copies can't be ordered until the October 6th release date. I will try to provide advance notice of any giveaways on Goodreads or Amazon.

The Book Jacket Blurb

Young Marina January offers guided tours of plantation ruins and historical landmarks all over the island of St. John. In the taverns, coffee houses, and national parks, she gives storytelling lectures on the history of the Virgin Islands, teaching tourists about the St. John Slave Uprising of 1733.

One evening, she’s approached by an acclaimed director who is making a new historical film, and the production company is setting up shop on the shores of St. John. He wishes to recruit Marina as a cultural liaison and consultant, a promising turn of events just in time to pay this month’s rent.

Her first day on set, the film’s handsome star, Gabriel Nash, takes a liking to Marina and offers her yet another opportunity: to be his personal assistant. Willing to work dual roles, Marina agrees, until she discovers that Nash is a narcissist with dangerous secrets. His obsessions nearly kill her. But he misjudges her appetite for revenge and her expertise in the lore of the occult.

With his novella Send the Dead, New York Times bestselling author Richard Dooling concocts a potent brew of literary horror mixed with history, Hollywood, tropical sun, and supernatural terror. Along for the ride are four other short works that appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Smoke, and Esquire magazines: speculative stories about aging and immortality, religion, culture shock, science, magic, all-too-human madness, and the tyranny of the normal.

The Four Short Stories

The novella, Send The Dead, comes with four of my favorite short stories.

Bush Pigs

Originally published in the New Yorker, this harrowing tale is a cult favorite among expats who wander abroad and are unprepared for the shock that awaits them upon return to the States. After three years in the bush, a Peace Corps Volunteer is evacuated from war-torn Sierra Leone and sent home to Omaha, Nebraska, where he attempts to celebrate his return in a steak house. What happens next is called reverse culture shock. G.K. Chesterton put it this way: "The whole object of traveling abroad is not to set foot on foreign land; it is to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land when one returns."

How Bush Pigs Came To Be

Parts of my second novel, White Man's Grave, are set in a village in Sierra Leone, where a Peace Corps Volunteer has gone missing under suspicious circumstances. Many readers come away from it thinking that I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was not, but a good friend from college, Mike O'Neill, was, and I stayed with him for months in the remote village of Mbundobu.

Among many other talents, Mike has a gift for languages. He spoke several tribal languages, especially Mende, and took me all over Sierra Leone on the back of his Peace-Corps-issued Honda motorbike. We shared many adventures, some of which are in White Man's Grave.

About ten years after my visit and just before White Man's Grave was published, Mike actually did go missing in Sierra Leone, where he led the Red Cross relief operation. Mike was captured by rebel teenage warriors in the east of Sierra Leone. He was held for thirty days, during which time the village he was in was bombed. He eventually walked 47 miles through the bush, No Man's Land, between the rebels and the government troops and was reunited with his family and returned to Buffalo, New York, where he had grown up before I met him. I spoke to Mike by phone soon after his safe return and heard his incredible story. That night and the next day, I wrote the first part of Bush Pigs. The second part, set in a steakhouse in Omaha, was an out-take from an early draft of White Man's Grave.

Performances of Bush Pigs

Bush Pigs was published in the New Yorker in 1994. National Public Radio played an audio version of the story a few times, and I received well-wishes from many expats and returned Peace Corps volunteers (RPCVs) who heard it. A few years later, Symphony Space in New York City asked actor Mark Nelson to read Bush Pigs live at its Selected Shorts program. The performance also included a reading of Jumpha Lahiri's Hell-Heaven.

I have permission to share the Selected Shorts audio version with you, but please do not download or distribute it, as I do not own the rights to the recording, just the underlying story.

Mark Nelson reads Bush Pigs at Symphony Space

Mapping God's Voice

The venerable Story magazine has been around since 1931 and published Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Carol Shields, and many others along the way. In the 1990s, Story was edited by the beloved Lois Rosenthal, under whose direction the magazine was five-time finalist and two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for fiction.

Lois was a fan of my third novel, Brain Storm, which was, in part, about forensic neuroscience and scanning criminals to detect abnormalities that may have caused them to malfunction. Lois called once with a question about temporal lobe epilepsy. It may have been a ruse, because when I mentioned that Dostoyevsky suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, and that he had once said that he would trade ten years of his life for a single aura, the often mystical sensation that precedes a seizure, Lois said, "I want you to write a story about that for me."

So I did. But more than neuroscience, Mapping God's Voice probably came from working nights on a psych ward in my early twenties to pay off my college loans. I took the job because, if the patients slept, I could read and write all night. But at least once a week, my literary labors were interrupted by a distressed patient who needed my help, because God was talking to them, speaking in plain English, about glory and eternity. The doctors were saying, take this pill and you'll stop hearing God's voice, but why in God's name would I want to stop hearing God's voice?

Paleopsychosis

I wish I could say something noble or uplifting about this story, but it amounts to the literary equivalent of a drinking song for evolutionary psychologists and paleoanthropologists. Peking Man and Piltdown Man chase the Venus of Willendorf around a prehistoric tavern called Stone Binge. I still like it, or it would not be in this collection, but it could be charitably described as sophomoric.

It originally appeared in Smoke magazine, a men's cigar-themed magazine.

Diary of An Immoral Man

Back near the turn of the century, longevity was much in the news and on the minds of researchers, who were looking into extending human life spans to 150 years and beyond. In 1999, Esquire magazine called with a proposal: Would I write the diary of the first man who lives forever? Would I pretend to be the first person who escapes the grave by taking anti-aging drugs and regenerative medical treatments? If I get cancer of the liver, they explained, I don't die, I get a new liver transplanted in me that was grown from my own stem cells. And then what happens?

This piece was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. I call it a speculative essay, but it could pass for a short story.

Send The DeadCover Art

We have cover art! Publication soon!

A Novella and Four StoriesSend The Dead

In February of 2002, we escaped a brutal Nebraska winter and vacationed for a week on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. White sandy beaches, turquoise seas, yes, all of that, but over half of St. John is national parkland, most of it forested mountains. I am not a beach person, but I'll do just about anything for a view, and hiking St. John offered amazing vistas over the Caribbean.

I hiked to a few historic sugar plantation ruins, including the famous and scenic Annaberg Sugar Plantation ruins and the less-scenic and, in my opinion, thoroughly haunted Reef Bay Trail and Sugar Plantation ruins. Both date from the 18th century, when sugar was the most precious commodity on earth, and the Caribbean was the best place to grow it.

In those days, sugar was white gold and an instant sensation in Europe, but so expensive that most commoners could not afford even a taste of it. Sugar production also required a massive labor force. Five times the manpower it took to grow cotton or tobacco, because the cane spoiled unless it was processed the same day it was cut. Enter the slave trade, and the Danish plantation owners could be brutal masters. Walk those ruins at dusk, and you will hear cries of anguish from centuries ago.

On other hikes, I learned about the St. John Slave Uprising of 1733, when enslaved West Africans led by Breffu, an Awkwamu warrior princess, rose up and killed more than sixty colonial plantation owners, managers, and their families. The slaves captured the fort in Coral Bay, took control of the island, and held it for six months. The Rebellion was one of the earliest and most successful slave revolts in the Americas, until the Danish governor hired an army of French maroon hunters from Martinique. Led by the sadist, Commander Chevalier de Longueville, the maroon hunters pursued, captured, and tortured all of the surviving rebels, except those who took their own lives to avoid such a fate.

Soon rebellion stories occupied my reading list and my dreams, but what to do with them? I went from thinking I'd write an essay, no, too short. A nonfiction book, no, too long. A screenplay, which I almost sold, twice! Ah, Hollywood fish stories. A historical novel, already been done. Night Of The Silent Drums, by John L. Anderson. Call it process of elimination, novella was the only form left, unless I wanted to take a stab at epic poetry in my old age. Instead of historical fiction, I wrote a story about filmmakers making a movie, shooting on location in St. John, a movie about the St. John Slave Uprising of 1733. A modern tale, but told against the gore and glory of history.

No Preorders

I decided against preorders, because why pay in advance when you might get an e-book for free? The book-launch marketing and advertising for Send The Dead will likely include at least one giveaway campaign. Outfits like Bookbub, NetGalley, and Amazon itself allow free or discounted e-book copies to be had, in the hopes that early readers will write reviews on Goodreads or Amazon. If you are a Kindle person, you might get a free e-book. I will provide advance notice of any giveaways, so watch your inbox.

Send The Dead will be available on Amazon as a print paperback edition, or as a Kindle e-book. The collection will also participate in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.

I will tell you much more about the novella and each of the four short stories soon.

Issue #3

This is Issue #3 of I Would Prefer Not To, the Send The Dead Cover Art Issue.

Issue #2, the Warren Buffett IssueIssue #1 welcomes subscribers to I Would Prefer Not To , a quarterly miscellany published by Richard Dooling. Find other issues at the Archives.

The Warren Buffett IssueHappy Spring

First, a week ago Warren Buffett announced that he will be stepping down from his job as the top dog at Berkshire Hathaway. I gathered links to four New York Times opinion pieces I've written about Buffett over the years. He is a first-class wit and fun to write about.

The issue, then, is whether a witch person, or witch host would always know he or she had a witch spirit. The Mende disagree on this point, and so do the anthropologists. Some say that when a witch enters a village, it is like a powerful sound in a room filled with tuning forks. Or let’s use a Mende proverb: Hinda a wa hinda. ‘Something brings something,’ or, even better, ‘Like brings out like.’ In the Midwest, they might say, ‘If you plant corn, you get corn,’ something like that. Anyway, some forks respond to the frequency, others don’t, and those responding can ‘feel’ the frequency—they know they are witches, even though they will always deny it.

But others say that often a witch host sees only malice, chaos, destruction, and evil all around him. As time goes on, he senses that the evil seems always to be linked to him. Then, perhaps he has a dream, or is skillfully questioned by a looking-around man or a witchfinder. Suddenly the witch host realizes that the darkness he always so quickly saw in others is really only his own dark powers reflected in the looking glasses of their innocent hearts. He discovers that the evil he had always ascribed to human nature is really the fruit of his own wicked labors. He planted seeds, and now the harvest has come in. His life is filled with evil people, because they are his converts, members of his coven. In one horrible instant, he sees that he is the cause of much of the despair, destruction, and evil in his life. He may have convinced himself that he was only using bad medicine to protect himself—so-called defensive medicines, or counter-swears—but before long, he discovers that he has a witch spirit, and the witch-spirit has gradually … taken over.

Excerpted from White Man’s Grave, a novel by Richard Dooling

White Man's Grave: A Novel

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