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Some Novel Approaches (Some Nonfiction Ones, Too)

I won’t waste your time (and mine) writing about lousy books. Life is too short.

I recommend these books below. These are brief notes (no spoilers) about my recent reading, ranging over fiction and nonfiction.

Click on the book jackets if you want to check out the publishers’ information on each book.

Hope you enjoy.

Yesteryear by Caro Clare Burke (Knopf, $30)

I start my mornings with three dailies — the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. All agree that Yesteryear is the book of the summer. (Or book of the summah, as the Globe might say.) That sounds like “beach read” stuff, which is one of those triggering phrases that might make you want to puke.

For the record: this isn’t your sister-in-law’s beach read. It just so happens this book was published as May rolled around and the timing throws it into the summer-book category.

Forget that noise. This is an engrossing and intriguing and constantly surprising book that has at its center a trad-wife influencer [remark on how that phrase wouldn’t exist 10 years ago] and what happens when she appears to do a Billy Pilgrim move, and becomes unstuck in time. Or does she?

With a deft touch, Burke follows the saga of the influencer’s families [note plural], giving us the chance to ponder the realities we manufacture through social media. Is it life or is it synthetic life?

Corny to say, but true: likely you will be wrapped up in this book long after you finish reading it.

Murderland by Caroline Fraser (Penguin, $32)

This book was published last year, so it’s already out in paperback. [Cheap bastard alert!] I’d go for the hardcover, though, because you’ll carry this book wherever you go until you finish it. A paperback might not survive.

I confess: I like true-crime books (and great detective fiction, by Michael Connelly, Tana French, Michael Koryta and others) and I have read a lot about serial killers. (One of my favorite book titles of all time: Evil Serial Killers … as opposed to warm, cuddly ones?)

This book allows us to ponder the disproporiate number of serial killers from the Pacific Northwest. That’s the author’s home turf and she weaves together the various stories of the killers — Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, the I-5 killer and others — with her own, and with the manufacturing history of the area.

She comes to the conclusion that lead poisoning from smelters burning and polluting that awful stuff warped the minds of a susceptible lot.

Interesting premise and execution. The personal story does not detract and the details of the killers and their methods will revolt you anew.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, $30)

I am not always in step with the rest of the world. I never finished Keefe’s book Say Nothing, a bestseller turned television series. But after reading London Falling, I need to give Say Nothing another chance.

London Falling is a terrific book. It follows a small family through crisis and tragedy, as the parents try to learn what went wrong with their second-born son.

Again, the themes of curated identity play a huge role here. There are two sons — the golden child … and the other. Unable to match his brother’s accomplishments, the younger son manufactures another identity and another life, this one steeped in London’s underworld.

Keefe, a New Yorker writer, earns the trust of the family, which gives him the ability to write the story from the inside. Even though we know doom lies ahead, as we read we want to step inside the story, to steer it right.

We realize again, after reading this harrowing book, that parenthood is not a job for chickenshits.

The World’s Worst Assistant by Sona Movsesian (Plume, $30)

First, accept my premise: Conan O’Brien is the funniest human on earth. I’ve always appreciated his humor, but since getting a new (to me) car that came with Sirius XM, I’m rarely off Conan O’Brien Radio. Aside from bits from his 30-plus years of late-night entertainment, it is home to all episodes of his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

My corollary to the above law is that the second funniest human on earth is Conan’s assistant, Sona Movsesian. Despite the bold claim in the title of her memoir, she must not be truly the worst, since she’s been working with the Red-Headed Phantom for nearly two decades.

Her let’s-get-real personality is perfect foil to Conan’s flights of fantasy and weirdness. Their symbiotic relationship renders Needs a Friend the perfect podcast. The nice thing about it being on Conan O’Brien Radio is that there are no commercials. (Though the commercials are often quite funny when Conan performs them.)

This book is a few years old, so sue me. She has a sequel called The World’s Worst Mom, which I vow to read before frost covers the pumpkin.

This is out in paperback for all of you cheap assholes.

(The podcast is worth your time. Conan is a masterful interviewer.)

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Random House, $30)

William Faulkner has Yoknapatawpha County, Stephen King has Castle Rock and Elizabeth Strout has Crosby, Maine.

Once every couple years, Strout takes us back to Crosby for her rotating cast of characters — Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton, Bob Burgess and the town’s other denizens. These protagonists share the narrative, this time with a murder element.

Strout won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton was a best-seller. This book is largely in the hands of Bob Burgess, an attorney near retirement age, happily married but wanting more.

We’re not used to murder as a regular feature of Strout’s narratives, but it’s not much of a reach here. It comes organically from these characters.

This is book about grownups for grownups. Though Strout often indulges in superfluous asides (not quite Now, Dear Reader, but close), her storytelling is swift, efficient and rich with character.

In the Days of MyYouth I Was Told What it Means to Be a Man by Tom Junod (Doubleday, $32)

Much praise has been heaped on this book, but allow me to heap some more.

Junod is a gift-from-God magazine writer whose first book is a memoir. (Let’s hope the publisher is preparing a collection of his journalism for book number two.) The title, borrowed from Led Zeppelin, is perfect. This is all about the life lessons he learned from his father, Lou Junod. Despite being an unrepentant bullshit artist, Lou is nevertheless capable of being loveable on occasion.

Tom grew up both confused and comforted by his homelife. His parents were married for 59 years, despite prolific affairs and bouts of severe unreliability. He was thr youngest in the house, the one who had to deal with parental detente the longest.

So many memoirists pull their punches, but Tom Junod writes with breathtaking honesty. I predict a Pulitzer.

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The Neverending Story

So: I almost died again. That’s happened before, but this time was an even closer call. And another child of mine saved my life.

This is part of my continuing memoir about health issues. I thought I was done with this story, and even titled the previous entry “This Might Be the End.” But it wasn’t.

So think of this as the post-credits sequence.

This dispatch might have a few moments that are not for the squeamish. In fact, maybe I need to post a

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: The account that follows includes a lot of gross stuff. Though I’m embarrassed to share this, I feel compelled to do so, since this whole memoir is about learning to listen to our bodies, even at their most loathsome moments. Keep a puke bucket handy.

OK, to backtrack:

Eight years ago, I had knee-replacement surgery. When I awoke in the recovery room, I could tell something was different. I was numb below the waist. Nurses assured me that this would pass, but after a day, not much was passing. I couldn’t urinate, or at least not much.

I was sent home with a catheter and with a schedule of home visits by nurses. Thus began a ballet of take it out / put it back in / take it out / put it back in.

With the catheter out, I felt an overwhelming need to pee, but could not. All the catheter in’n’out introduced an infection.

I was living alone, but my ex-wife dropped in once a day to check on me, usually with one of our boys in tow. She found me once pasted to my sheets by sweat, with my teeth chattering. It was a horrible, delirious fever. She wanted me to call an ambulance but I refused.

The next time I looked up, my daughter Sarah was there. Twenty-four hours had passed but it’s as if I’d blacked out. She’d come up from Brooklyn and finally got me to the hospital and surgery and eventually to the world of self catheterization.

Lifesaver No. 1: Sarah McKeen

Sarah McKeen and husband David Tracy

That was my first sepsis experience. I had another such experience two years later, at Travis’s baseball camp.

Other times, I felt the tingles of sepsis brain fog at the back of my skull. I called my primary care physician, Dr Chu, who immediately prescribed the antibiotic to knock things out.

Catheterization was just part of my life and the process became so much a part of my routine that I could do it in my sleep. Unfortunately, I might’ve done that a couple of times. I’d be halfway through the procedure when, all of a sudden, I realized I had not put on my gloves. Or that I had not swabbed Mr Happy sufficiently before sending my tubing up my schwanz.

My medical supply company didn’t send everything I needed to self-cath, so I had to order a few other supplies. I ordered the same gloves used at my doctor’s office.

Son Jackson pointed to a line on the packaging of the gloves that noted that they were not sterile.

And so now we’re more-or-less caught up.

Savannah and her husband had moved nearby and had just welcomed their third child, Thomas, to the world just a week before my near-death.

Travis was graduating college and immediately starting a job with a global software firm an hour away from my home.

Charley was home for his final summer vacation and would finish his degree the next year.

By this point, Jackson had been living with me full time for six years. I’d tried to keep life simple by renting houses, but the owners always ended up selling out from under us. So I finally gave in and bought a house – a new house (built in 1880) by New England standards, and just right for the two of us.

I’d hosted Travis’s graduation party and Savannah had just birthed grandson Thomas when I began to feel a bit wookety.

I spent a Sunday on the couch, watching old movies. I was a Boy Scout, so I’m always prepared. I kept a saucepan on the floor in case I needed to vomit.

Still miserable at the end of the night, I trudged up to my bedroom, self-cathed, then gobbled a gummie and hit the sack.

Next day, not much change. The nausea was worse and I coated the saucepan with my bile.

Then, early evening: I felt a stirring in my gut. Jackson was upstairs. He had two rooms of the house: his bedroom and a game room and an overlarge closet (bigger than some bedrooms I’ve had), which he turned into a soundproofed recording studio. ‘Tis there where he creates the music he releases to the world under his stage name, beenz.

(To hear his album Look Alive, click here. You can also order the CD on this site.)

So I hear him upstairs and he sounds occupied, talking to someone on his headphones.

That stirring!

So I try to get up off the couch, but can’t. I have no strength. I sense my gut setting off its alarms, so I do the only thing I can do – I roll off the couch and start crawling, hands and knees, to the bathroom.

Jackson never uses this bathroom. He’s in command of the upstairs bathroom, usually littered with used towels and overflowing garbage cans. I rarely venture in there.

My bathroom, off the kitchen, is as immaculate as I can make it. It has a shower, the washer and dryer, and the usual stuff including that which I most need at that moment: a toilet.

I don’t make it.

I still can’t stand up. When I reach the bathroom, I try to grasp the sink and pull myself to a sitting position, to no avail.

And here it comes.

As awful as it was, I took solace in this fact: at least it was my feces. If I’m trapped on the floor of the bathroom with excrement leaking onto my body and clothing, at least it was mine and not somebody else’s.

(Cue Eric Idle)

And then it happened again.

And again.

Throughout this, I was wrestling with my clothing, hoping to be able to pull myself up to the toilet. But the sink didn’t help, the doorknob didn’t help and the toilet didn’t help.

But then a weird thing happened: I time traveled.

I lay there on the floor, on top of the bathroom rug, feces all around me. For the next hour – or so it seemed – I was a child again.

When I was a little boy living in Germany, I would wake in the night sometimes and go announce to my parents that I was sick. After checking me out and pronouncing me okay, my parents told me to lie down and see it my urge to vomit passed.

So I would curl up on the little green bath rug and sleep the rest of the night there. Both parents are gone, so don’t call the Department of Children and Families, you busybodies of the 21st Century. As a matter of fact, sleeping there on the little green rug for the rest of the night was tremendously comforting.

Several decades later there I was on another bathroom floor, on another bathroom rug. I’d come full circle.

Maybe this is how it ends, I thought. Here I was, pinned to the floor by the cruelty of gravity, awash in my own waste.

After an hour or so, I made another effort to pull myself up. I was halfway to a standing position when I fell again, this time slamming into the shower door. Thank God it didn’t shatter.

Still on hands and knees, I reached out of the bathroom to the kitchen cabinet where the paper towels were stored. I began cleaning my foul waste from the floor, aware that Attack Number 4 could occur at any instant.

I was weak, and I couldn’t think. I recognized my sepsis brain fog and knew I was in big trouble.

Then came the thundering hooves of Jackson McKeen down the stairs, then I heard him on the other side of the door: “Dad, what’s wrong?”

He’s not psychic, far as I can tell. It’s just that – our grossness alert is still in effect – the pungent aroma emanating from the bathroom had reached his upstairs lair.

“I’m okay,” I lied. “I’ve made a mess in here. I’m going to clean it up, then I think I’ll go to bed early.”

That was my plan: somehow I’d sleep this off.

“Bullshit!” he shouted. “You’re going to the hospital.”

“No, I’m okay. Just let me rest a little, and clean this up. I don’t need the hospital.”

“You’re an idiot,” he said. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

He was right and I knew it. I would later recount this story to my brother, a physician, and he said: “You don’t exhibit good judgment when it comes to your own health. Jackson is your better angel.”

I wonder why that is, after all I’ve been through. But my brother was right.

I acquiesced to Jackson. “Okay,” I told Jackson, “but grab me a couple garbage bags and put them outside the door, then leave the room. I can’t leave the bathroom like this.”

“Fuck the bathroom,” he said.

“Just let me clean this some,” I said, “or I won’t go to the hospital.”

“Idiot!” he said again.

“You can help by going upstairs and getting me some clean clothes to wear.”

So I set to work cleaning up the befouled bathroom. I couldn’t stand upright, but managed to somehow get my loathsome bod into the shower stall, where I used the spray nozzle to remove waste from my legs. I had to revert to a crawl when I was done, because even if I had been able to assume a standing position, I worried I would fall again.

Jackson had gotten me a clean pair of jeans and my lucky hospital shirt. This was the shirt I’d worn to the hospital for every one of my surgeries, a tribute to Hunter S Thompson. On the front, in gonzo script, it read, “Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die.”

I hope the shirt would work its charms again.

I closed the bathroom door. “Do not go in there,” I said. “I will give it a thorough cleaning when I get home.”

Or if, I thought.

I still could not stand upright, so I was a human jackknife as he got me to his car. I walked hunched over and it took every ounce of strength to fold myself into the passenger seat.

On the way there, I asked him to be my interpreter. “I can’t form sentences,” I told him. “You need to be my advocate.”

Why resist the emergency room?

Partly, I always wonder if my illness is more important than a gunshot wound or an automobile accident.

Partly, I remember an emergency room visit a couple years before. I spent 8-10 hours on a gurney in a hallway of the emergency suite, listening to the screams of an elderly (i.e., my age) man who could not move his bowels.

Fuck! Fuck me! For hours and hours.

I was ready to grab an ice cream scoop and dig it out of him.

Overcrowded emergency rooms are nothing new. But when Jackson got me to South Shore Hospital that night, I was surprised by how quickly I moved through the system. The machinery was well-oiled.

Even at these moments, I could not stop being me. When I was finally taken to a private room in the suite, I was assigned the proverbial pretty nurse. I wanted to ask, “Excuse me, but shouldn’t you be selling poppies from a tray?”

But I did not.

My chronic dehydration caused a lot of problems. My veins had largely collapsed, so it took six or seven sticks before we finally got an IV going. Allie, the pretty nurse, was being helped by an aide who eventually ended up tapping a vein on the inside of my elbow.

I was dying of thirst. For once in my life, I craved water, but I was told no fluids until any tests a doctor ordered had been conducted.

I was there all night, delirious, slipping in and out of consciousness. Jackson expertly described all of my health issues from the previous decade up through the bathroom floor that evening. I faded in and out, but every time I looked up, there he was: sitting on the floor against the wall and if he slept, I never saw it.

Jackson’n’Me: The Early Years

Lifesaver No. 2: Jackson McKeen

After spending the next day in an observation suite, I was given a private room when one came available. Turns out it was on the dementia ward.

I was still unable to function. I couldn’t stand or walk. I was catheterized with a Foley catheter – that’s the one with a balloon that inflates inside – and had to use a bedpan. It was still foul. All I can say is that I will never eat Jell-O Chocolate Pudding again.

Turns out I was the victim of a double whammy. I had sepsis, but I also had something the nurses nicknamed C-diff, which is short for Clostridioides difficile. The Centers for Disease Control define it as “a highly contagious bacterium that infects the large intestine, causing severe, watery diarrhea and painful colon inflammation (colitis). It typically occurs when recent antibiotic use disrupts the gut’s healthy bacteria, allowing C-diff to overgrow and release damaging toxins.”

So I was getting it from both ends. I had been on a couple of antibiotics in recent weeks and that seeded my problems.

None of my other issues went away. The doctors took me off Gabapentin – probably trying to minimize my meds during my hospital stay. The neuropathy pain was off the charts and I could only sleep after plunging my tootsies into the ice-water bucket provided by the nurses.

Jackson with brother Travis on Travis’s graduation day

My James Brown fever (I wake up! In a cold sweat! Unh!) lasted three days. When my teeth weren’t chattering, I was a hunka hunka burning love. I got to 102 degrees, if memory serves.

I had a headache that lasted three days. I lost my appetite. I had to learn to walk again, to come to a full stand without crumpling into a heap on the floor.

Within a few days, I was able to get to the toilet on my own (with the help of a walker).

It took over a week, but finally I was physically able to be discharged.

It sounds benign, but being in a hospital bed that long damages the psyche. I was still in my mental pea-soup and so could not read or concentrate. Jackson came to see me and served as my translator. The other boys also visited.

Savannah, with her newborn, did not visit. I did not realize how contagious C-diff could be.

She’s a nurse, so when I told her I had something I never heard of called C-diff, she texted back, “Oh shit.” As I recounted my evening from the bathroom floor and how, if not for Jackson, my plan was to crawl upstairs to sleep-off my latest infection, she texted back, “You would not have woken up.”

That made me realize how close I had come. And I kept hearing my brother’s words in my noggin: “You don’t exhibit good judgment when it comes to your own health.”

So I made it home after more than a week.

I was weak and couldn’t – still can’t – do more than one thing a day. The Visiting Nurses Association checks on me every other day. We’re trying to find a better set of supplies for my daily cathing. We’ve changed some other medications.

It’s good to have a great primary-care physician in my life. Though I’m sure she’s not proud of it, Sofia Chu knows the ins’n’outs of this abandoned reptile carcass of mine.

I was lucky to be under the care of such fine nurses and physicians. Yes, I did send a thank-you card as a matter of fact

So I hope I’m on my way back.

Don’t be like me. Please use good judgment with your health.

Welcome, my friends, to the story that never ends.

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Stopping By Woods for 9,861 Evenings

Henry David Thoreau was a rank amateur, to hear Christopher Knight tell it.

Sure, Thoreau spent some fine time alone in his cabin by Walden Pond, but he still allowed himself human contact. He’d hit up some friends for dinner now and then. So yeah, in Walden he painted a picture of himself “as solitary as a dervish in the desert” for his two years at the pond.

Whose woods these are, I think I know. I ought to — it’s my backyard.

Hold my beer.

Knight was on total radio silence with humanity for 27 years. Top that, Hank!

Knight was on a drive in central Maine and when his car ran out of gas, he got out and walked into the woods.

Police caught up with him nearly three decades later and in all of that time, Knight told investigators he spoke only one word (“Hi”), when he happened to run into a hiker.

It’s unclear why Knight did all of this. Michael Finkel spends most of his book, The Stranger in the Woods (Knopf, $24.95) trying to get an answer, but the reality is out of his reach, still planted somewhere in Knight’s noggin.

Knight’s family was mildly reclusive, but functional. By all accounts, it was a loving family, just not touch feely, as Knight says. Though all the residents of the area where Knight camped called him “The North Pond Hermit,” Knight disdained that word. He was a stoic, he said, in the classic sense.

I would’ve learned none of this had not Finkel’s book hit me in the nose.

I was reaching for a book off the top shelf in my office and I dislodged The Stranger in the Woods. It caromed off my nose and landed on the floor. I picked it up.

As far as I could recall, I’d never seen this book, had no idea how I got it. But I opened it, read the first sentence, and did not stop until I was finished with the story.

I wonder how the book — published in 2017 — got on my shelf.

I was aware of Finkel. I read his earlier book, True Story, and knew that several years ago he was dismissed from the New York Times for creating a composite character in a story on modern-day slavery in Africa. 

When the whistle was blown on that story and the editors sent Finkel packing, he learned that a murderer in Oregon had been operating under the name Michael Finkel. The unraveling of that man’s story was the basis of True Story, later turned into a film with Jonah Hill as Finkel and James Franco as the killer.

I’d liked True Story simply because Finkel was so readable. I often talk about narrative velocity in class and Finkel writes like an X-15.

(I also trusted him. He spent much of True Story apologizing and admitting his shame and remorse. I gave him a chance, and the rest of True Story won me over.)

Knight’s story is still a mystery. Why, at age 20, did he walk into the woods. He hadn’t planned to. He had nothing with him — no clothes, no camping gear. To live, he stole.

He was a polite burglar. He never trashed the homes he entered. He didn’t take the usual valuables — electronics, jewelry, etc. He’d take a can of tuna from a stack of cans in the cupboard. He’d just take one. He might take a tarp out of a shed.

He earned the Hermit nickname early on, and he hated it. He also hated it when people began putting bags of food and supplies on the doorknobs of their cabins. He didn’t want charity.

A lot of those cabins were for weekend or summer use, so they were often empty. Still, Knight never slept in one. He slept outside for 27 years. Did I mentioned that this was in Maine, where they have significant winters.

Click here to order.

Yet he never built a campfire in the boulder-shaded home he set up. He stole a propane stove and that was all he had for cooking. He didn’t use it for heat.

When police finally caught up with him — he was spotted on the live feed from a video camera at a camping complex — he asked that his family not be contacted. He had been raised right, he told the cops. He knew that stealing was wrong and he did not want to bring shame to his family.

The story is fascinating. We all make choices. Knight’s was unusual, but you get the sense it was, in some strange way, the right decision for him.

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The Freewheelin’ Ed Sullivan

Another splendid Record Store Day is in the books, and I am still reeling with the giddy high of the music.

Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo during the Freewheelin’ photo session.

Being a geezer, I confess that most of my selections are rooted in the music of my generation.

For example, I got Joni Mitchell’s  Rolling Thunder Revue, culled from her performances on Bob Dylan’s gypsy carnival road show of 1975.

I also got The Warfield by The Grateful Dead, taken from two 1980 shows at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater.

But the real prize came later. My favorite record store sold out of it by the time I got there — and I was there by 8:45 am.

Eventually, I tracked down a copy of it.

It was the reproduction of the original version of one of the greatest and most significant albums of my lifetime, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

That album was recorded and sent out to stores in early 1963, but was recalled by Columbia Records. This was done in part because of a controversial song, but it worked out well for Dylan: He took the controversial song off the album, along with three others. He replaced them with brand-new compositions: “Girl From the North Country,” “Masters of War,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” That last is one of my favorites from his early albums. It still gives me chicken skin.

If I had one of those original Freewheelin’s from 1963, one that had been recalled by the record company … why, I could afford to pick up your tab for dinner. Some copies of the original Freewheelin’ have sold for $35,000.

So, with my life enriched by two Freewheelin’s, I’ve jumped down the rabbit hole of Bob Dylan research and I’ve noticed an error that has been fruitful and multiplied.

I must call bullshit.

Even Goldmine, that wonderful magazine about music and records, makes the occasional mistake. In its piece on the Freewheelin’ / Record Store Day hoopla, the magazine says  “ ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,’ [is] the song that prompted Dylan to walk off The Ed Sullivan Show when Ed wouldn’t let him play it.”

Ed Sullivan

In another story, actor Steve Buscemi makes a comment aimed at the deceased Ed Sullivan after reciting the lyrics to “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” at a Dylan tribute concert. “With all due respect, you blew it, man!”

I admire Buscemi as an actor, firefighter and humanitarian. But I hope he will understand when I say, “You’re out of your element, Donny.”

Sullivan supported Dylan and wanted him to do the John Birch song. A representative from CBS’ standards and practices office — in short, a censor — said Dylan could not do it. The censor overruled.

Every trusted source in my Dylan library affirms this story.

Ed was a good guy. OK, he was so wooden that redwoods withered in his wake. Speaking did not come naturally to him and watching him try to engage in post-performance smalltalk with his guests was excruciating. He might’ve invented cringe television.

But this man with no discernible talent hosted for a couple of decades the epitome of a television variety show.

And despite the protests of CBS’s affiliate stations in the Deep South, he booked whatever entertainer he wanted.

In the early and mid-Sixties, some stations down south put a sign onscreen when a black entertainer appeared: “Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have lost our programming.”

Sometimes, the stations put up test patterns of stand-by signs. When the black entertainer finished his or her set, the feed from New York would be magically restored.

Ed Sullivan didn’t give a shit. If he wanted James Brown on his show (his “really big show”), then he’d book him. (Ed was especially fond of Brown.)

Ed Sullivan and James Brown

Here are some of the artists Ed booked, southern affiliates be damned:

Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Diahann Carroll, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Nat “King” Cole, Sammy Davis Jr, Bo Diddley, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, The Jackson Five, Mahalia Jackson Gladys Knight, Sidney Poitier, Billy Preston, Smokey Robinson, Nina Simone, The Supremes, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, Ethel Waters, Flip Wilson and Stevie Wonder.

Eventually the walls came tumbling down. Down south, viewers began to hunger to see these great entertainers and the affiliates eventually caved.

Don’t believe me? Navigate your television to a Netflix documentary called Sunday Best, which tells the whole story.

So give Ed his due. In your memory, you think of him as comical, talentless man. But the evidence points to the mark he made on our culture. Among his many accomplishments, he stood up for Bob Dylan. He was overruled by the censor, but he was a man of principle. He may have had the personality of a tennis shoe, but he stood for something.

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Whiz Kid

I used to go into a coma when Rolling Stone arrived in the mail. I started subscribing when the magazine was two years old and read it religiously. I wouldn’t  look up from those newsprint pages until I’d read pretty near everything.

Cameron Crowe

I think the magazine peaked in the early and mid-1970s. I remember a piece about a guy who was obsessed with meeting his hero, Gene Autry, former singing cowboy of the movies. And there was a great portrait of Sen. Sam Ervin, the country lawyer who led the Senate’s Watergate investigation. Then there was a marvelous book-length tick-tock about filming The Last Picture Show by the great Grover Lewis.

Wonderful storytelling — and it ranged over the culture. It wasn’t all about rock’n’roll music.

And then — suddenly — a new byline: Cameron Crowe. It didn’t take long for word to get out that he was a real kid, 15 years old — our age.

He thus became our role model. I started working full time for my local daily when I was 14 and stayed on the job until the newspaper folded a few years later.

As a young peach-fuzzed reporter, it was a struggle to be taken seriously. No matter what I did, I still looked my age. But I asked good questions (I think) and my sources soon began talking to me like I was an adult.

I imagined what it was like for Crowe. He was talking to the Allman Brothers and Joni Mitchell and the Eagles. I wanted to know his secret. They obviously took him seriously — the stories he wrote were brilliant. 

I was following rock stars on a much smaller scale. These backstage expeditions were in the company of my pal, Neil Sharrow, aka Birdman (sharrow = sparrow). He was much more savvy when it came ti talking to roadies and stage security.

We got into the dressing room for Yes and had a great chat with keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman. As we left, he said, “Best of British luck to you,” and that became a benediction I often use.

We also got to meet Chicago. I interviewed them later, extensively, for a national magazine, but that chat was set up by publicists. I had more fun hanging out with them in the parking lot when they were just breaking through to the mass audience.

And of course, I followed The Beach Boys around and interviewed them several times, and one afternoon, we were sharing backstage airspace with the Boys, the Eagles and Kansas.

Now, this was nothing like what Crowe was doing, but this was a side gig for me. I also had to be a college student and cover the environmental commission’s long running efforts to bring noise-abatement to the city. I spent a lot of time at city hall — more time than I spent on campus. I didn’t hang with Neil Young; I hung with the mayor, whose name was Hooker.

Of course I followed his work — Fast Times at Ridgemont High (first a book, then a film) , then his splendid films, Singles, Say Anything, Jerry Maguire  and, eventually, Almost Famous.

That was a nearly perfect movie — so well-written, so well-acted, and a story with the aroma of truth. That’s what it felt like to be a kid reporter, trying to stalk a rock star. It dislodged so many memories of my much-lower-scale life, and hulking brutes at the stage door coming between those rock stars and me.

I think I’ll put this on my tombstone: You’re not on the list.

All of these memories began to erupt when I got Crowe’s excellent new book, The Uncool (Avid Reader Press, $35). As he pages through his life, we find the roots of his Almost Famous stories, and we meet the real people behind the characters.

First among his cast of characters is his mother, Alice Crowe. I was also blessed with caring and supportive parents, so when he writes about Alice, I get a little misty. When he filmed Almost Famous, he wanted to keep the actors apart from their counterparts. But Alice ignored her son’s directive and became great friends with the sterling Frances McDormand, who played her.

Crowe is a master storyteller, no matter the medium. The book is peopled with Joni Mitchell, Tom Petty, Gregg Allman, the members of Led Zeppelin and a wonderful cast of supporting players at Rolling Stone. And of course, he writes about his mentor, Lester Bangs, who explained why they were both doomed to be the Uncool.

I inhaled the book and tried to slow down my reading as I got near the end. I wanted to make it last longer. After all, I’ve been reading Crowe and enjoying his work for 50 years.

He’s also done a book on his talks with master filmmaker Billy Wilder. For his next book, I hope he collects this great pieces he wrote for Rolling Stone back in the 1970s, with headnotes that describe his adventures in getting the story.

This is a tremendously entertaining book. I can’t be blamed for wanting more..

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Trump Porn

I live with one of my adult sons and though he is in his early 20s, he’s never gotten past that adolescent stage in which a child’s sole purpose in life is to irritate his parent.

The Extortionist in Chief

In my case, he calls me all the things he knows that I hate. For example, he calls me Pig, though I am neurotically tidy. He calls me Racist, which I am not. Worst of all, he calls me a Trump Voter. 

I would rather vote for my cat’s litter box than vote for Donald Trump, but my offspring nonetheless rags me. (Too bad Carlos’s kitty toilet was not on the 2024 ballot; it has more intelligent contents than Trump’s so-called brain.)

My son accuses me of being fascinated with the former and current president. Horrified is probably more like it, I tell him. 

“Then why do you watch the news all the time?” he asks. “Why do you read so many books about this guy you profess to loathe?”

He calls it Trump Porn.

He is right about my reading habits. I’ve read a lot about Trump in the past decade, for the same reason that — despite our better judgment — we might occasionally sneak a peek at “Naked and Afraid” or “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” We have to remind ourselves that such wretched things are possible.

I liked Bob Woodward’s three Trump books, particularly Peril, which he wrote with Robert Costa. I loved reading stories of how poorly Trump handled defeat. 

Let’s not forget Cassidy Hutchinson’s vivid description of the Trump-thrown hamburger and the ketchup dripping down a White House wall. (From her book Enough.)

Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man was an excellent book that showed that Trump was born a liar and a cheat and has watered and manured those traits steadily throughout his life. 

I liked Jonathan Karl’s Betrayal, which told the story of what we thought was the end of Trump’s political career.

The fact that he is president again makes further reading of Trump Porn depressing on an epic scale. 

But that doesn’t mean we can easily turn away from this kind of porn addiction.

Consider Injustice, the new book by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, both Pulitzer winners, both formerly of the Washington Post. This is a detailed account of the Department of Justice investigation into Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection and in his mishandling-of-documents case.

You’ve got to admit: it’s amazing how that dark day in our history — January 6, 2021 — has been recast by Trump and some of his Republican pals in Congress. Despite the fact that police were assaulted, it’s been painted as a rosy day in the park.

Injustice makes me proud of the lawyers whose hard work built a brick-wall case against Trump — a case that will never be presented. 

It’s as if the Department of Justice is no more, having been largely dismantled and staffed with mouth-breathing Trump sycophants. He renamed the Department of Defense. Maybe he’ll rename Justice the Department That Lets Me Do Illegal Stuff.

This guy isn’t really president. He’s the extortionist-in-chief.

The subtitle of Injustice tells it all: “How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department.”

Special prosecutor Jack Smith is a central character in the book. At the moment, I can’t remember what Trump calls him. He probably uses his fall-back “radical left lunatic,” or calls him deranged. Instead, we see here a dogged and dedicated public servant, on the trail of the truth.

Jack Smith

He worked methodically and fairly to build a case.

There’s such a thing as too methodical, though, and a running theme of Injustice is that attorney general Merrick Garland’s tentative nature contributed to killing the case.

But like Smith, Garland wanted to do what was right — hard to do in a society where what is right doesn’t matter anymore.

What an old-fashioned concept — caring about truth and what’s right in the world.

Lord, I hope I live long enough to see this end.

For now, read this book and become enraged. Let’s all get angry and work to bring back those values of truth, integrity and honor.

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Babs From Brooklyn

Perhaps it’s time for an intervention. After a lifetime of feelings ranging from indifference to outright loathing, I’ve decided that I was all wrong about Barbra Streisand. I have, at this late stage of life, become a fan.

This troubles friends and family. Has a space alien sucked my brain from my head? What has happened to change my feelings about this singer and actor I professed to despise? And if I’ve changed about Barbra Streisand, can a switcheroo on Neil Diamond be far behind?

My friends are so worried, but before they call the white coats to take me away, let us ponder the sitch.

Why those earlier feelings, I now wonder.

Barbra Streisand at 24 (her lucky number)

I always admired the Voice. Good Lord, she has a gift. That I always acknowledged.

And I had liked some of her films. The Way We Were set me sniffling in the darkness of the theater. And I thought she did a beautiful job directing and acting in Yentl and The Prince of Tides.

So again — why did I tell everyone I couldn’t stand her?

Maybe it was the song choices she made and the over-the-top show-biz posturing whenever I saw her perform.

Again I wonder: why those feelings?

I was raised on musical comedy. As a kid, my parents took me to the theater every two weeks during summers. We saw all of the summer-stock / road-company shows that the theater scene — such as it was in Fort Worth, Texas — could offer.

So I grew up well versed in the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Lowe, as well as other Broadway gods. Though I no longer care for musical comedy, that aspect of my upbringing still reverberates through me.

Whenever I would sing around the house, Ex-Wife No. 2 would chime, “Showtunes!”

No matter what I would sing — even “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” or “Masters of War” — it always came out sounding like a show tune.

But after Cream and Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath hit my adolescent turntable, I put away those original-Broadway-cast albums and never looked back.

Streisand came to represent that unsubtle over-the-top stage belting to me.

There was another reason I grew to dislike her. It was that Monster Diva vibe I’d pick up now and then. I’ve always liked my artists humble, falsely or not.

Ex-Wife No. 1 and I had gone to see A Star is Born — which we quickly renamed A Star is Boring — when it hit theaters back in 1976.

I hated the movie as I hated most movies that portrayed the rock’n’roll business. I can’t think of a rock’n’roll movie that got it right until Almost Famous in 2000. Seeing Barbra and Kris Kristofferson as rock stars just didn’t do it for me. Despite the fact that the film was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, I still thought the movie was a festering gob of whale vomit.

The clincher came during the credits. As we watched them roll, Ex-Wife No. 1 seized on the wardrobe credit: “Miss Streisand’s clothes … from her closet.”

My Ex scoffed loud enough to turn the heads of departing theater-goers. Thereafter, whenever we saw Barbra’s picture in the paper or saw her on TV, My Ex would snarl, “Miss Streisand’s clothes … from her closet.”

So why, considering these feelings, did my mind seize on the idea of reading Barbra Streisand’s autobiography.?

When it was published two years ago, I was filled with the sudden and unexplained desire to read it — but for some reason didn’t actually pick it up until two weeks ago. 

Once in my presence I gorged on it — all 970 pages.

I was a glutton for the book, like Henry the Eighth gnawing on a greasy turkey leg.

Streisand’s a great storyteller who propels readers through the narrative … all 970 pages, as I say.

Thousand-page bios or memoirs are more appropriate terrain for books about Josef Stalin or other historic characters.

Click on the cover to order

But Streisand never hits a dull patch in her storytelling. If Plato was right about the unexamined life not being worth living, then Streisand has certainly lived a worthwhile existence.

My Name is Barbra (Viking, $50) examines nearly everything about her life and has successfully turned me around. I am now a fan.

I’ve begun hitting eBay hard for old Streisand vinyl. I’ve rewatched Yentl and am searching my streaming services for the films I’ve missed along the way. (I have no plans to see A Star is Boring again, however.) I need to find The Mirror Has Two Faces. She directed that one too, and co-stars with Jeff Bridges, who has moved into the top position as my favorite actor. (Following the death of the great Gene Hackman.)

Here are some random thoughts about the book:

  • What is it with her mother? No matter what she did, Streisand could not please her mother. To say Ma was stingy with praise is to understate a critical problem in her daughter’s life. I can’t recall her mother ever saying, “Barbra, you got a good voice.” Nothing! Mother might’ve been resentful of her daughter’s extreme talent.
  • The book serves many functions. It’s not just an autobiography, it’s also a manual on Yiddish terms and phrases. I love learning something new.
  • She’s modest. If it’s false modesty, so what? If I could sing like her, it’d be harder than hell to keep my ego in check. In my view, she does.
  • She brings up the “Miss Streisand’s clothes … from her closet” credit. It was the truth, but critics slammed her for the ego-centric feel of it. It hurt her. So now I feel guilty.
  • Fellow dudes: No matter how nice we are to our Beloveds, we will always pale next to James Brolin. Brolin, Streisand Husband No. 2, is one thoughtful and romantic motherfucker. I plan to keep this book handy to scan for romantic ideas.
  • Once, Jim Brolin was in bed with Streisand and in no hurry to sleep. He told her sleep was a waste because he didn’t want to miss a thing. Streisand told her songwriter friend Diane Warren about that and she used Brolin’s line to write “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” a hit for Aerosmith. Brolin deserved a writer’s credit.
  • She loves dogs. She even cloned one.
  • Speaking of Brolins, James’s son Josh Brolin, that wonderful actor (see No Country for Old Men) also writes poetry Who knew? Seems like an interesting guy.
  • We learn a lot about her first marriage, to Elliott Gould (speaking of wonderful actors). It reminds me of Gould’s charisma. If you’ve never seen The Long Goodbye, go watch it right now. Then watch every other movie Elliott Gould has ever made.
  • She and Gould sound like great parents. Jason Gould is a lucky dude.
  • I love her rants about Donald Trump. She’s more eloquent in her disdain than most MSNBC pundits.
  • If she believes in a cause, she generously supports it.
  • Despite her talent and her perceived power, studios sometimes still say no to Streisand projects. She doesn’t always get what she wants, which is a shame because when she does get what she wants — see Yentl, The Prince of Tides, etc. — what she wants is spectacular. Do we need further proof that Hollywood is a sexist town?
  • She loves to eat and loves to talk about food. Reading this book made me hungry.
  • She is a national treasure.

Okay, so maybe that last one is a little corny. Bob Dylan means so much to me and I think of him the same way. We’re lucky to be around when great artists stalk the earth.

And speaking of lucky: I feel blessed that I have lived long enough for these two artists in their mid-eighties to finally record a duet. (To hear Streisand and Dylan sing “The Very Thought of You,” click here.)

I have no problem admitting my errors. I’ve done a 180 on Barbra Streisand and I’m so happy I didn’t take my indifference to the grave. So what if it ain’t rock’n’roll? I have room in my heart for all kinds of music, as long as it’s good.

As my Late Sainted Mother always said, “If we all liked the same thing, it’d be a pretty dull world.”

I can like the Ramones and Perry Como. And I can like Barbara Streisand and Daddy Longlegs.

In fact, Streisand takes us so deep into her world and her artistic choices and her hopes and dreams that I can no longer call her Miss Streisand. Henceforth, she’s my pal.

Meet my buddy, Babs from Brooklyn.

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Stories He Can Tell

I’ve never been to a film festival, but I’ve read about 10-minute standing ovations at the end of a Cannes screening. 

The closest I came to anything like that was the night that Annie Hall opened in my hometown. There was an ass in every seat, no loudmouth back-talkers, and everyone laughed in the right places. Then, of course, the Standing O.

Click on the cover to order

It was one of the highlights of my movie-watching career.

Not every Woody Allen film has gotten that kind of reception. 

His humor and storytelling were briefly in planetary alignment with mass taste for a few years, but then he spiraled off to his own galaxy, making his quiet, esoteric films — some of which occasionally found a decent-sized audience (Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Midnight in Paris, to name a few).

I’ve enjoyed more of his movies than I’ve disliked. That’s wrong. I don’t think I’ve disliked any of them, but now and then I find one a wee bit boring or self-indulgent.

I’ve always found Allen’s prose to be more consistent. 

He published three collections of his short stories and comic pieces in rapid succession — Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975) and Side Effects (1980). He began publishing prose in the New Yorker in 1966 and kept up a pretty vigorous schedule of contributions. 

Some of these stories were the kind that made me laugh out loud. Some were honored with recognition that had before been lavished on Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty  and John Cheever. (Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode” won the coveted O. Henry Award in 1978.)

He maintained a film-a-year schedule and still produced short stories — until his prose work slowed to a trickle, then stopped, in the 2010s.

Twenty-seven years after Side Effects, Allen published a collection called Mere Anarchy, but his prose output has ramped up in the last five years. First came Apropos of Nothing, his hilarious and touching autobiography, a collection called Zero Gravity and now, at 89, his first novel, What’s With Baum? (Post Hill Press, $28).

Certain doors are no longer open to Allen. He signed a deal with Amazon Studios but has still struggled to release his films. His previous big-time publishers (Random House, Little Brown) no longer publish his work, so he has aligned with Arcade and Post Hill Press, two smaller pubishing companies.

Woody Allen in Stardust Memories.

Too bad that his books and films are not getting the distribution he used to get. His work has not lost a step.

Reading What’s With Baum? Is like watching one of his films. It’s structured that way and has a plot and a narrative approach that lends itself to screen treatment.

Baum is a once-promising writer experiencing several varieties of writer’s block. His third marriage has come with a son who loathes Baum. The boy is poised for success, including magazine and television profiles, and with his new book being hailed as a work of genius. 

But Baum discovers a dirty little secret about the boy and the book and becomes, at least among his family and social set, the avatar of ethics.

It is a masterfully written book. Few storytellers have Woody Allen’s gifts. I hope he is able to continue sharing his stories.

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Journey Through the Past

Truth is stranger than fiction, which is what makes fiction such a comfort.

We often turn to fiction to escape, but so many of the novels I read turn on tangents so close to the life I lead. I read the echoes of my existence in many of these stories. 

The Book of I by David Greig (Europa Editions, $24) is unlikely to remid you of your sputtering love life or your fellow proles dwelling in neighboring cubicles.

To start, the story takes place in 825. It may not look like it, but that’s a date — as in 825 A.D.

The main characters are a young monk, an aging Viking and a woman who makes mead that can change the course of history.

Since Grimur the Viking is a major character, you can expect a certain amount of pillaging and sword-wielding violence. 

Yet the book is funny. I might even venture to say hilarious.

Reading it, I was reminded of a Coen Brothers film. I remember sitting in a theater lo those many years ago, watching Blood Simple. That was the first Coen film and I knew nothing of them. How well I recall my reaction. There was violence, followed by humor. Then those elements merged. The audience was perplexed, to find itself laughing at brutality.

Click on the cover to order.

There’s a lot of violence in The Book of I, but much hilarity ensues. It’s an intoxicating blend, a work of deft writing. No surprise the author, David Grieg, is a playwright, a man aware of the power of words.

The story is so well told.

The island of I (I think we’re to pronounce it ee) is a bleak place off the coast of northern Scotland. Today known as Iona, it’s in the inner Hebrides, and has long been famous for its abbey. It’s a spiritual place, y’understand?

Brother Martin, one of our three protagonists, is loweest on the totem pole among the monks. 

When the Vikings arrive to do their pillaging, the monks are delighted, because they have been joyfully awaiting martyrdom. They get it, of course — the Vikings are nothing but thorough — killing all of the monks, save Brother Martin.

The Vikings don’t find and kill Martin because he has a supreme hiding place, lurking undernearth the rancid shit in the monk’s trough of excrement and urine.. 

While he hides there, Una, the mead-maker and beekeeper, is being assaulted for the last time by her husband. It’s the last time because Grimur the Viking happens upon the bickering couple and he severs the husband’s arms. However, Grimur is later knocked unconscious and his fellow Vikings bury him.

When the Vikings depart, the stench-covered Brother Martin happens upon the Grimur’s hastily-made burial spot — a hand reaching up throuhg the dirt is a dead giveaway — and digs him up.

David Greig

Now liberated from her brutal husband, Una joins Grimur and Brother Martin to and form an alliance and begin to rebuild.

The book hits that high note that connects comedy and tragedy — again, much like the Coen Brothers. 

Or maybe Coen Brother. Now that they are making films separately, we can see it’s Joel immersed in drama (he made The Tragedy of MacBeth) and Ethan who’s the funny one. He’s finished two entries in his Lesbian Trilogy (Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don’t) and more fun no doubt awaits. The Book of I has that Ethan Coen tone.

Together, the Coens create an excellent blend of comedy and tragedy. This book matches that tone.

. . . . .

A couple of years ago, my sister-in-law had us all do the ancestry.com thing. My sibings and I all had a blend of Irish, Scottish and German blood.

But me? I had a whiff of Viking blood. 

How did that happen? I well recall the aphorism that motherhood is fact and fatherhood is speculation. 

Nonetheless, I am working to embrace my inner Viking and therefore award The Book of I my first Viking Seal of Approval.

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This Might Be the End

I don’t think this story will ever end — at least not until I end. 

Not until I …. shuffle off the mortal coil . . . get deleted . . .  eat weeds by the roots . . . get carried away by angels . . . become a null parrot . . . bid adieu to Earthy scenes . . . change a fleeting world to an immortal rest . . . depart from this in hope of a better life . . . take the big sleep . . . cancel my subscription.

And those are just a few euphemisms for death.  (When I was writing Everybody Had an Ocean, which is about rock’n’roll stars in the 1960s, I knew there’d be a lot of fucking in the book. To avoid overuse of the Fuck Word, I wanted euphemisms for the act. My pal Sarah Kess helped me put together a list of more than a hundred such, and that list was so much more fun than this death list. My favorite was “crashing the custard truck.”)

I could go to my eternal reward later this afternoon. Or I might stick around for thirty more years. Of my parents and grandparents, four out of six made it deep into their nineties. 

You never know.

So, back to the point: where and when does this end?

How about here? This may be a good stopping point. 

(Click for “The End” by the Doors.)

I still have neuropathy. The primary medication for this is Gabapentin. I take the maximum amount, but the neuropathy does not go away. If I stop taking those pills, the pain is significantly worse. 

So I keep taking Gabapentin because it lessens the pain.

What helps more is the mushroom supplement I put in my coffee, and cannabis, whether in tincture form in coffee, or gummies. I dislike smoking, but will burn one down in a pinch.

Cannabis gummies give me terrific sleep. When I catheterize before bedtime and take a gummy, I sleep through the night. I’m not sure I’ve done that regularly since my footie-pajama days.

Without gummies and / or Gabapentin, the neuropathy is sometimes so bad that it wakes me. If I’m having an onset before hitting the sack, it can keep me up for hours.

I describe this neuropathy sensation as if “I’m walking on your feet.”

I never know where my feet are going to go. I have no control. 

I warn students about my neuropathy at the beginning of each semester. I feel they deserve a warning and to not think I’m just lazy. I tell them I may sit down, which is something they’re probably not used to in large lecture classes. But standing too long, with the neuropathy, feels like dancing on nails.

I also warn them that I walk like a drunk, but that I’m not drunk. Again, I’m never sure where my feet are going next.

This can’t be helped. 

(For the record, I don’t drink much anymore. I have maybe 3-4 beers a month, perhaps the most startling thing my friends note about my health issues of the last few years.) 

This all started due to ass cancer. So perhaps you wonder about the state of my ass.

It’s fine; thank you for asking. 

It’s not a perfect ass, but after what it’s been through, a little gastric eccentricity now and then is to be expected.

I think back on my former gastric horror shows and think of those events as masterpieces of CGI. That couldn’t have really happened, could it? No body could produce that much foul waste, could it? Those scenes had to be special effects, right?

I still have problems with the southerly orafice now and then. Fortunately, none of these incidents have turned into a public spectacle, like the train station incident years ago. Knocketh thee on wood, please.

When I go someplace new, I immediately locate the restroom for possible emergency use. I never go anywhere without crafting a contigency plan. I have changes of clothes in my car and in my office. At work I store these emergency clothes, along with old research papers, in my refrigerator. Not sure why I do that, but I do.

This fecal fear means I limit my activities sometime and pass up doing things a normal-assed person might want to do — things that an abnormally-assed person like me might fear to do.

But I have to put my ass first if I want to avoid disaster.

That’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say.

I am this way because I wanted to stay alive. This is the price I pay, so I accept it.

Every couple of weeks I fall. These falls happen at the strangest times. The most recent one, last Sunday, came after I walked into my house. I didn’t trip on a cat toy or hook my shoe on the threshhold. 

I just fuckin’ fell.

One or two of my boys have been with me when these falls happen. It’s still kind of freaky to us all. It’s only happened a few times in a public place. Usually, it’s inside the house or in the driveway.

It’s astonishing that these little dudes, whose diapers it seems I was changing just two days ago, have turned into big, hulking men, helping their father to stand. 

Life, it is short.

Jackson thinks my falls are related to dehydration. I’m not sure. I should drink much more water than I do — he’s right about that. But more water means more pee and that introduces other sorts of issues.

In addition to “my urologist,” I have “my neurologist.” The falls could be related to something in my melon, but so far no evidence of that.

You heard right. I’ve added a neurologist and an allergist to my Rolodex of medical professionals.

Here’s why:

In addition to the falling, I started getting the shakes. I couldn’t open jars or even the boys’ juice packets. I could not write by hand.

A couple of times my right hand shook so hard in lecture that I held it behind my back so my students wouldn’t see.

On top of the shakes, I began to have memory issues.

I was being interviewed for a Bob Dylan podcast a few years back when, right in the middle of analyzing one of his songs, the floor fell out from under me. 

I could not think of the next word I planned to say. I could say other words. 

I told the host, “I don’t know what’s happening.” Also: “This is really embarrassing.” Lots of silence coming from me. 

The host, Rockin’ Rob Kelly of Pod Dylan, tried to coax me through. “Just take your time,” he said. “Relax.” 

He got me through it. This emptiness lasted a full minute — absolutely no idea how to continue my thought.

Eventually words came back to me and we finished the interview. Rob edited my brain malfunction from the recording and when I listened to it — which I did, because I wanted to know if I sounded weirder after “the incident” — it sounded great. I made sense as I analyzed one of my favorite weird basement-tape Dylan songs, “Clothes Line Saga.”

As I listened to the podcast, I couldn’t tell when my brain left the room. I sounded somewhat lucid, considering it was me.

But that scared me.

Then the same thing happened in class, and that was terrifying.

I jabber for a living. Talking is what I do. And in one school year, I had an incident in the fall semester, then an incident in the spring semester. In both cases, it happened in a lecture: my non-stop yapping suddenly stopped.

Both of these incidents happened in my History and Principles of  Journalism class, a large lecture, with usually between eighty and a hundred students. 

Neither brain malfunction lasted as long as the podcast incident. Maybe thirty seconds, though it could have been shorter. Maybe the students mistook it for a dramatic pause, not realizing the panic inside my skull. When your brain decides to hop a psychic freight, you’re unable to correctly judge the passage of time.

Those incidents worried me and I asked Sofia Chu, my primary-care physician, if she would recommend a neurologist, and she did.

I spent a summer shuttling to different members of a neurology practice. The first session had some testing. The second session was long — four hours of testing and being interviewed. We also played some memory games.

I have to admit: the tests were exhausting. I was mostly embarrassed by my issues with short-term memory.

My mother had Parkinson’s. My sister has Parkinson’s, as do several friends. I feared that was my problem, but after some initial concern, turns out I don’t yet have it. I have a “slight cognitive malfunction,” which, my neurologist assures me, everyone gets at my age.

To this, I offer a big whew.

However, it’s given the boys ammunition. 

“Damn,” I say, coming home from he grocery. “I forgot to get detergent.”

“Are you having another slight cognitive malfunction, Dad?”

It’s Charley who likes to tease me. I ask for help with some task — folding laundry, for example — and when the job doesn’t get done in sufficient time, I take issue.

“Are you going to fold this laundry or are you going to make your poor ol’ cancerous dad do it?”

“You’re cured,” Charley says. “Your cancer is gone and your ass is fixed.”

Then he goes ahead and folds the laundry.

My pain migrates. One day my left forearm hurts to all hell, then the next day it’s my right shoulder and the next day my left knee.

I can’t figure that out.

About two years ago, I began having rashes and these too migrated. My left arm would be clear, but the right arm looks like the lunar surface.

One day, I have a huge bump at my temple. Looks  like I’ve been in a prize fight. The next day I wake up and the painful bump is on my lips, which are swollen and look like boiled frankfurters.

I went to see a dermatologist and before he could take a look at my regular skin eruption, he was digging a chunk out of my arm. I had to come back two weeks later so he could get more of my arm for a second biopsy. 

The thing probably would turn into skin cancer, he said,  but he caught it in time.

He put me on a course of medication and sent me to an allergist. The allergist couldn’t figure out what it was that I was allergic to, but she gave me long-term medicine that keeps the skin eruptions at bay.

So long, hot-dog lips.

Jackson serves as my health-and-wellness conscience. He has lived with me full-time for about six years. I tell friends, “Well, somebody has to find the body.”

He’s very concerned for my health. He’s a slob in many ways and perhaps that’s not entirely his fault. I suspect it’s genetic.

But he does do some things: he cooks a couple of nights a week, he does the lion’s share of the mowing, and he keeps the main part of the house clear of his stuff. He realizes that tripping on his gnarly Crocs left in the hallway would bring about one of my falls.

What he does best: constant harassment about my water consumption, which is, in his view, inadequate in the extreme.

He’s right. To remind me of my needs, I have a splendid new T-shirt with this printed on it:

DRINK WATER

LOVE HARD

FIGHT RACISM

To order this cool shirt for your own bad self, click here.

Chemo and radiation battered me and so my immune system was shot to shit. 

I’ve worked in Boston for a decade and a half, and was a proud user of public transportation.  

But then I began to get spooked. Transit riders would sneeze, slinging their goo across the subway car. I have no time for such hijinks. 

I also tired of being pressed together with others, in a mass-grope on the trolleys that run through campus. During my subway trips, I’d amuse myself by watching the snot trails on the faces of my fellow passegers.

Being immuno-compromised and in such proximity to the germs and expectorations of others was not a good combination.

So I began driving to work — in the worst driving city in the country. 

In the Marco Polo Guide to Boston, the “Driving in Boston” section reads, in its entirety, “Don’t.” In another section, the guide advises tourists who insist on renting a car to go ahead, but to be sure to leave it in the rental-car lot at the airport.

It is a difficult city for driving. They don’t call the locals Massholes for nothing. Driving to work is truly a contact sport. It’s kind of like watching Death Race 2000 unfurl on your windshield twice a day.

My carbon footprint might be the equivalent of a pacyderm’s but being solo in a car allows me to tend to all of these sudden issues — urinary, gastric, mental — when, on public transportation, I might be trapped.

Still: I miss commuting to work by ferry. There’s nothing quite like approaching Boston from the water.

I’ve always been a believer in therapy, but I had not gone to see a therapist regularly in many years. After my wife moved out and the horrifying process of divorce was under way, I decided it was time to see someone.

She became one of the most important people in my life. I ended up meeting with her weekly for six years or so. 

At the start, we picked through the remains of the second marriage and rather swiftly I began to feel at peace about the end of all that. Then we settled into multi-year sessions devoted to parenthood and the possibility of romantic love coming into my life again.

We kept talking. We finally came to mutual agreement that things were much improved — thanks to therapy and anti-depressants — and so we could end our sessions. She told me she was always there if I needed her. 

I haven’t called. I’ve been tempted, but mostly just to get on the horn and say, “Waaasssss uuuup?”

I’m not going to compromise my therapy sessions, but I will say that there was great value in what she said about helping my children through the post-divorce years and the aftermath of trauma. 

Childhood is anguish and suffering. Other children are cruel. Adolescence devours lost dreams. 

I had a pretty demanding job, but I was never off. 

My real job was at home, and I built my life around the boys. I’d get them on the weekends, so there was no time for a social life. That was okay with me; I so valued my time with them.

After a while, Jackson came to live with me full time, so my life was rich and also a challenge. Mostly, I struggled with trying to get this stubborn boy to do his homework and to consume the meals I worked so hard to prepare.

My failure rate was high with those tasks, and others. I will say he has tremendous hygiene and has excellent manners (in situations that do not involve his immediate family).

My life was a whirlwind of commuting, work, baseball and football games, coaching basketball (Charley’s town-league team), and chaufeuring the boys around the South Shore. 

That was our life:  Movies. Red Sox. Game Stop. Fish sandwiches at the Mill Wharf. Friends. Sleepovers. And in the summer: Road trips!

Savannah had moved away to Florida, so the house was all-male. Travis captained the high school baseball team, Charley captained the football team and often, after games, the house carried the fragrance of Essence du Athletic Sock.

I made a lot of pancakes and a lot of pizza. In my defense I also made chicken with sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese, manicotti Florentine and New England Boiled Dinner.

I’d apologize for the sameness of my life each week when I saw my therapist. 

“Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” I’d start. 

For some reason — probably because it’s what I’ve done all my life — I framed my weekly accounts into pithy stories, as if it was my job to entertain my therapist.

But after a few years of therapy, a few years of a certain kind of sameness, I began asking her: “Am I really living or am I just waiting to die?”

Instead of resorting to the well-what-do-you-think cop-out, we would explore the question.

Through dating apps, I’d met a variety of fantastic women. Several have become treasured and terrific friends. 

Alas, I was no one’s Mister Wonderful.

And how could I be? I asked my therapist. I’m a mess, and came pre-loaded with a list of health issues that that would serve as a date-killer if I was asked, “How have you been?”

I’d have to tell the truth. That’s just the way I roll. So who would want to wake up with Mister Has-Bowel-Issues  every day?

When I wrote one of my dating profiles, I said that I was “pre-cancered,” which I thought might get that stuff out of the way. 

One of my former girlfriends saw my profile and said I was under-selling myself. She got my password, hijacked my profile, and sang my praises. 

I got a lot of responses from that — people interested in what she said, not interested so much in me.

I’ve always had a lot of close female friends. Maybe the women I’ve met through these dating apps see me as friend material, not boyfriend material. (Though the term “boyfriend” at my age seems to be stretching it. I suppose I’d be a geezerfriend.)

Is that a bad thing? To be a friend? I say no. I’ve never had too many friends.

I have loved many intelligent, beautiful and hilarious women. Sometimes, I can’t believe I’ve had the life I’ve led. These women have given me a tremendous highlight reel. I’ve remained friends with most all of them.

So, here I am. Maybe I need to face it: the romantic part of my life is probably over.

That could change, but I’m okay if it doesn’t..

Years ago, when I lived alone in Florida, I’d often wake at 4 or 5 in the morning and be unable to return to sleep. I’d get out of bed and go to my home office and listen to music, drink coffee and read

Often, the record I’d listen to was World Gone Wrong by Bob Dylan. He performs some traditional country blues, including the title song (originally known as “The World is Going Wrong”) by the Mississippi Shieks. 

That album contains one of Bob’s greatest performances. “Delia” is one of the saddest songs I know and Dylan has never sounded more moving, when he sings the song’s refrain: “All the friends I ever had are gone.”

I have lost a lot of friends in the last couple of years.

There was my friend of longest duration, Lucia. I met her when I was 16 or 17 and she was a worldly woman, about five years older. She and her roommate Kathie and I were inseparable for a few years. We attended our first Bob Dylan concert together.

Later in life, Lucia lived with her husband in a house overlooking the bay in Pensacola. Despite the six-hour drive from my home in Gainesville, I’d frequently go there for weekends. It was my refuge.

One of my few acts of semi-heroism occured there. One of Lucia’s friends came to visit and brought along one of her pals. We chatted and had some drinks, then Lucia and her husband went to bed. 

Marcia and Susy and I went down to the dock. Susy stripped down to her skivvies and jumped into the bay without checking the water. She hit a submerged boulder and fractured her skull. 

I got her out of the water and carried her up the steep slope — really a cliff, which brought to mind  The Guns of Navarone. Trekking up the slope was  a difficult task even when not carrying a grown woman. 

I got her to the emergency room. She had to stay in the hospital, but I was back at the house before Lucia woke up. She was startled to hear of all the drama that occurred while she slumbered.

Susy thinks I saved her life. As I see it, I just transported her to the hospital. But if she thinks of me as her hero, I’ll take that.

Lucia had a worn leather couch in her living room. You could lie there and watch the bay, down the embankment, and listen for the sounds of the water and the cars on the Scenic Highway (its real name). She called that leather couch “The Spaceship,” because once you laid down, you went on a trip to dreamland. As a guy whose never had much luck taking naps, it was revelatory.

I miss Lucia. I wish I could take another ride on the Spaceship.

Then there was Tom. I have an excellent older brother, but Tom became an auxiliary brother. He was about 10 years older and had had many lives. He co-wrote some songs with Jimmy Buffett, had published a half-dozen novels, and collaborated on two unfinished screenplays with Hunter Thompson. 

I owe two books to Tom: meeting him and interviewing him enriched my biography of Thompson, Outlaw Journalist, and he bequeathed to me Thompson’s idea for the book that became Mile Marker Zero.

Tom’d lived in Key West in the 1970s and knew the cast of characters — writers Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison, painter Russell Chatham and actor Margot Kidder.

Tom said he was too close to the material write the story of that creative and carnal community, so he entrusted the story to me.

But beyond that, he invited me in to his creative, multi-faceted world.

His death was sudden to so many of his friends. No one knew he was sick. He was unselfish and stoic to the end.

And now Jim and Russell and Margot are also gone.

Then there’s Jon. He was another friend of long duration. I saw him at work most days for 25 years. In addition to the usual friend exploits of beer and chicken wings and baseball and football, he served as a great role model.

Jon was a lot of things, but to me he served as an ideal of what a father should be. I saw his example and tried to follow it.

When I heard of his death, it was a stunning blow. Jackson berated me for not flying to Florida for the funeral, but I didn’t think I could hold it together. The last thing his family would want was a blubbering man in the back pew.

And there were others — Bill the painter, for example. He was a man of great talent and enthusiasms. We would pass a note online most every day. He was another father I deeply admired.

And Mike, a pal from 25 years of going to football games together. 

And Meredith, a student who became a great friend, killed in an accident long before her time.

I was talking with my friend Wayne today. He lives in Florida and I was recalling that of the people in one of our Venn diagrams of overlapping friendships, we were the last two left. 

It’s sobering.

I talk about death a lot. I make my somebody-has-to-find-the-body joke with Jackson, and he rolls with it. What else can you do? 

I often hear the great Hoosier poet John Hiatt singing in my cranial jukebox:

‘Time is short and here’s the damn thing about it:  you’re going to die, you’re going to die for sure.  And you can learn to live life with love or without it,  but there ain’t no cure.”

A few years ago, I was asked by the university to record some sort of message to the students on the verge of graduation. I think they expected me to say something funny, but I thought I’d been given a serious and enormous charge.

“Don’t check out of this world without leaving the place better than you found it. Make sure that it matters that you were here.”

My whole life, I’ve fretted about that. What would I leave behind? I’m proud of the work that will remain — both as a storyteller and as a teacher — but in the end, I see that the whole point of being here was to leave behind the legacy of my family. I have seven children and (so far) six grandchildren. They have — and will continue to — make the world better.

I can’t ask for more.

Last night, I dreamed I was dying, but slowly. I knew it was coming and was at peace. 

As I prepared for death, my friend Wayne put his hand on my forearm led me from room to room in an old house. I recognized it as the Indiana farmhouse where my family lived temporarily when my father was transitioning from the Air Force to private practice.

That was the summer I was 13. I think of that time frequently and memories are vivid.

In each room of the house, we found my family and friends from the many places in my life, from England and Germany, to Nebraska and Florida and Texas. 

Of the family and friends, some were dead and some were living. I wondered: Is this heaven?

The dead were talking with the living, swilling highballs, smiling at the others. I saw my parents, my grandparents, my friends I’d lost.

Gradually, the friends drifted away, but he children and grandchildren stayed.

The house had no furniture, but all seemed content to stand and play their roles in a collection of conversational bouquets.

It was like a well-cast cocktail party where everybody was happy and fluttered from room to room, trying to talk to everyone. I was the orchestrator of this party. I’d subliminally created the guest list and brought everyone together.

I was in constant motion, checking each room to make sure everyone was happily engaged. I wanted no wallflowers.

They didn’t know I was dying and that this was my farewell. I just wanted to watch and see that everyone was happy.

It wouldn’t be long before I would exist only as a memory.

Ifelt a hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t Wayne’s. He’d crossed the room and was talking with the boys, getting them to laugh, as he always did. 

The girls were all laughing too. The hand rested lightly on me and I started to turn but couldn’t see anything or anyone. 

I wondered if it was that presence I negotiated with so many years ago — that time in New Mexico, when I think I died. I’d asked for more time. Jackson was in utero. Travis and Charley weren’t even thought of yet.

I can’t leave; not now. This is not it. I’m not finished.

That was so long ago now. I’d gotten what I asked for. I got a lot more time.

If it’s time to cash that check, I’m ready.

Then I woke up.