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 →

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… Continue reading →

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…. Continue reading →

I’ve finished reviewing the pages of Oron, which will soon be released by Wildside Press in a refreshed version. I say refreshed because I have not heavily revised the story. I’ve corrected the typos in the Zebra edition of 1978, removed or amended the many “hysterical” dramatic elements that mistakenly… Continue reading →

I haven’t been writing much on my blog for a few weeks. I think it is from the feeling of being snowed in and so cold. But! I just found an article on how scientists have extracted some Neanderthal DNA and have grown a Neanderthal “mini brain” in a petri… Continue reading →

So Svengoolie last weekend showed Creature from the Black Lagoon (not The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which is how it always fools me, with that initial definite article, like Carpenters, the sister-and-brother act, not The Carpenters), and I watched it for the umpteenth time and enjoyed it just as… Continue reading →

Sometimes I wonder, if were on a desert island, alone in some ocean, would I continue to write, find some way to write? There would be no one to read what I wrote, no one to listen to me read aloud what I had put down, for me to ask… Continue reading →

So the other night I was up late and I watched The Twilight Zone on Me-TV, the Chicago channel that boasts Svengoolie and SciFi Saturday Night and otherwise broadcasts nationwide television shows from the Fifties through the Eighties. The episode was “The Masks,” and those of us well-read and of… Continue reading →