I spend a lot time in pharmacies. It’s the wages of rage. I now need several medications to stay alive. Thank God for Big Pharma, I always say. Without it I’d be in the ground. A few days ago, I was in the pharmacy waiting for my prescription to be filled. Sitting beside me was…
The ineffable joy of burning bridges
November 11, 2023
I’m not burning all my bridges. But I’m burning enough of them to make people upset. This morning I got an e-mail request to be added to the mailing list. When I went to the site to do so, I saw that half of my subscribers have unsubscribed. I think most of them were the…
The eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month
November 11, 2023
Today is Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2013. It was Armistice Day, the end of combat operations between the belligerents of World War I. The ceasefire took place at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. It’s always been rather disgusting to me that people can negotiate and fight at…
Accuracy is evil! Shut up!
November 10, 2023
A plurality of the people interested in military history are terminally unpleasant. I keep having that realization rammed into my block-of-oak head. They believe that accuracy is evil. My latest dust-up with a very unpleasant, truculent military buff was over my statement that a certain book contains many historical inaccuracies. I won’t copy and paste…
The armored man
November 9, 2023
One of my favorite films is John Frankenheimer’s Seconds. It’s been called the most depressing movie ever made. I disagree. It’s a cautionary tale. The movie is about a secret company that allows disaffected middle-aged men to fake their deaths and start over. For a fee the company gives the men plastic surgery, sets them…
Mom, I’m really pissed off at you
November 8, 2023
I’m very angry at you for killing yourself, Mom. Sad-angry, not I’ll-smash-your-face angry. So I’m going to do what you always said when you got upset: “I want to write a letter to somebody!” Here’s my letter to you. Dear CeeCee: You died on October 13, 2013, after nine months of refusing to eat. Since…
Should I learn how to be a Mexican?
November 7, 2023
I don’t follow sports at all. Today on the radio I learned that a football player named Richie Incognito was suspended for using racial epithets against his former teammate Jonathan Martin. Here’s where it gets completely deadly for us as a culture, indicating pervasive rot that will bring us down if not excised immediately. Incognito—I…
The importance of not being afraid
November 6, 2023
Both my parents were afraid to die, but Dad was crippled with terror. It was simply not possible to talk to him about his death. He told me in all seriousness that until he was seventy-five, he honestly thought he’d live forever. I’ve never known anyone who thought he was immortal. The neighbors who used…
Is female beauty in fiction really a problem?
November 5, 2023
The novelist Adelle Waldman—author of The Love Affairs of Nathanial P.—recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker titled “‘A First-Rate Girl’: The Problem of Female Beauty.” In it, Waldman says the following: You’d think it would also be a rich subject for fiction writers—after all, our attitudes about beauty and attraction are tightly bound…