• The theme from Perry Mason. I grew up listening to this mixture of the bluesy and the sinister and it has haunted me ever since, that trombone at the beginning of the end credits climbing the scales and then that tremolo from a flute. Eerie and foreboding. I’ll often… Continue reading
• One thing that I cannot abide, that makes me shake like some degenerate fool at a holy roller church, is harm done to or anything awful befalling children. I want to rage. Living through the reportage of the sick sons of bitches who raped children via Jeffrey Epstein and… Continue reading
• 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… Continue reading
• 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… Continue reading
• 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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
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… Continue reading
