💀 💀 💀 three days in October: Halloween Eve, Halloween, Day of the Dead — with today’s Bob cartoon for the second of these occasions; and then the Day of the Dead is also a significant day for me personally — my (Path to)  Sobriety Day, the day I took my last drink, 5 years ago now
Today. 10/30. In my morning e-mail, the latest The Bob newsletter, which leads with this seasonal cartoon:
(#1) Halloween treats (courtesy of The Bottom Line)
Two thoughts here.
Thought 1, I don’t get trick-or-treaters where I live, but I’m taken with the preposterous idea of giving out printed material instead of candy. I could have a stack of photocopies of my postings by my front door!
Then I considered the postings that have gone by in the past couple of weeks: on LSA awards, the dark lord of death, cartoons and comics (Zippy the Pinhead, Rhymes With Orange, Pearls Before Swine, Bizarro), food (the dacquoise La Marjolaine, Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas), waterfalls in my living room, Millbrook songs, writer and artist Jessica Hagedorn (with full frontal nudity). There’s a striking absence of men lewdly displaying their bodies, men intently engaged in acrobatic sex, and linguistic analyses, but for the trick-or-treaters I could certainly copy some of my notable past achievements in these areas. They would be an education.
Thought 2, Bob does in fact have a new book he could be giving out on Halloween. It’s about cats, a plus for kids. But it’s also about famous writers, which would no doubt dampen most kids’ enthusiasm.
(#2)Â Nava Atlas (the stories) & Bob Eckstein (the illustrations), Inspired by Cats: Writers and Their Mews(es), Countryman Press (9/25): on 60 famous authors — Mark Twain, Colette, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Toni Morrison, and 55 more — Â and their beloved companions
Sobriety Day. 11/1. For some years, after my world fell apart in 2003 (my man Jacques died, and then I nearly did, spectacularly, and had a long return to daily life, but as a disabled person), I slipped into a low-grade depressive (but still functioning) state for some years, drinking more and more to blunt my unhappiness. Then Covid-19 erupted, and we went into lockdown, and I was even more isolated, but got infected anyway, survived, and drank more heavily.
Eventually — on 11/1/20 — I saw I was in a deep hole and took my last drink, hoping to climb out of that hole.
And plummeted further, into alcohol withdrawal syndrome. Went into Stanford Hospital, then into a rehab center, finally emerging, very seriously damaged, into a new life on 12/5/20 (Rehab Return Day). Details in a series of postings (on this blog) on my return, which was followed by a long stretch of recovering (some of) my abilities and once again beginning a new life. I have now been a recovering alcoholic for 5 years, and that’s a very good thing.
So 11/1 is the Day of the Dead, but for me, the day of (yet another) new life.
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