Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Regular life is busy. Lots of running here & there, social events, birthdays, softball games & other granddaughter things going on. I’m riding the motorcycles pretty much every day, burning through books, getting the humble manse set for winter. Half the time my head’s spinning at day’s end.
Diagnostics fizzled on the oncology front. The needle biopsy was inconclusive and the doc was unenthusiastic about trying again, seeing as how complications are not unheard of when poking around the aorta with sharp instruments. So now it’s wait & see. I’m back on the checkup-every-90-days regimen. Eventually a lymph node will light up within scalpel range, not like these others buried deep in the abdomen. Then it’s easy to carve one out, run it down to the deli guy at the supermarket, have it sliced thin and put on microscope slides and, uh… uh oh… this guy’s lymph system appears to be made of salami grease and pepperjack bits.
If it’s the same old lymphoma from 2019 it could take years before there’s a node that’s easy to remove in its entirety. If the cancer’s morphed into a more aggressive type, it’ll happen faster: a nice juicy node will be sticking out of the side of my neck in no time, ready for a sharp blade wielded by deft hands. Hell, you could subcontract an easy biopsy like that to the first band of carneys you run into. Strap you to the wheel, give you a spin, a guy in a top hat and a cape goes into his windup… THWACK! Pick your node up off the ground, put it in a baggie, run it over to Pathology by way of the Stop & Shop.
On to a few pictures and we’re done here:
Waiting room at the doc’s. Humanity could do worse.
You may be of the opinion it is doing worse. I won’t say you’re wrong, but try turning down the media noise, see if that doesn’t help. Media of the misnamed social variety, above all.
Wildflower season is over. I’ve mowed all four gardens.
Spared them until the last few holdouts were gone.
This was a few days before mowing. We were overrun with prairie peas this year. Very pretty. Lots of seed pods everywhere. They don’t seem to be edible. The local wildlife took no notice.
My girls. This was on a recent rainy night out for D2’s 40th birthday.
From left, 2, 3, 1.
We had a private Lord of the Rings-type dinner in a stone hobbit house, big round door, the works, about a dozen of us. Pam’s sisters from Arizona flew in for it and boy were their little Fell Beast arms tired.
D3’s significant other, Mark, was playing at a live-music event at a local farm recently, we all turned out.
That’s D2 and her husband, Jonny. D1D1’s swinging around in the tree upside down. Little D1D2 is nestled under a blanket in auntie’s arms.
Farm store in the background, open for business.
D1D1 has her own girl-sized electric guitar—very cute—but here she’s practicing chords on her dad’s Telecaster.
Detective Pam’s still at work following up leads on the never-ending mystery of her genealogy. Here’s a photo she’d never seen before, her great-grandfather on the Alabama side.
This is 1920, when John Henry Wilbanks was 49 or 50. He died in 1954 in Huntsville, Alabama, a month after Pam was born in that city.
We both had the same immediate reaction when we saw the photo: Holy (colorful expletive)! John Henry nothing—It’s Johnny Danger!
Mr. Wilbanks was quite the ringer for my old pal. I sent the photo to Danger’s widow, Kathy, who shared our astonishment. It’s quite eerie.
This pic below was taken at Hitler’s Olympics, Berlin, 1936.
The gal on the right is Britta Granberg. My friend Ulf Granberg is Britta’s nephew.
Ulf’s the editor who hired me to write Phantom stories for the overseas books in the 90s. I’ve been with King Features for 23 years now but Ulf still calls from Stockholm once a month, to stay in touch.
He mentioned, on our September call, that his 106-year-old aunt (107 coming up in December), had competed for Sweden as a gymnast in the 1936 Olympics.
I asked if he had a photo of his aunt from her adventure in Germany. He said if one exists he had never seen it.
After we hung up I found the snapshot seen above here. Last year, the County Archives of Västerbotten, Sweden, had done a piece on the ’36 Olympics to recognize Britta as the community’s oldest resident. Someone involved had dug up the photo somewhere. Britta was 20 when it was taken.
At 106, she’s still very much with it. Ulf tells me she was interviewed on local radio last fall in connection with the national elections to the Swedish parliament.
A few pics my friend Robyn sent from the Lode Ranch in Wheatland County, Montana.
I’d love to get back out there soon. It’s one of the favorite places I’ve happened upon in those years of aimless wandering I was privileged to enjoy. My 50s & first half of my 60s.
An inside word on the Phantom strip, where the long-running, dual-timeline Wrack and Ruin series is well into its final chapter.
Big surprise in January of this year when the entire Bandar nation showed up at Gravelines Prison to get the Phantom and Savarna Devi out of there alive. I doubt anybody’s noticed, but a full year before the Bandar arrived the Phantom told readers exactly what was going to happen.
He said it as sort of an inside joke to himself (to his horse, actually, the guy talks to his horse all the time), which I think is why the connection has gone unnoticed. Hell, the obvious stuff goes unnoticed, so something from one year to the next, forget it.
January 2023:
This was him in civilian guise the previous January, in the prophecy timeline.
Random pics…
This past Sunday, John and Larry and I enjoyed a workshop afternoon at John’s house. Here’s our friend the Perfesser making himself a Harpo wig out of a yellow pine board.
The ’49 truck on these dewy autumn mornings.
Some of my motorcycling compadres made it back up to Alaska a few weeks ago. From left, that’s Dennis, Doug, Mitch, Steve, Bruce and Robert.
I haven’t met Bruce but the others I ran into here & there in 2019; at Teslin Lake in the Yukon, then some days later up at Eagle Plains, then I ran into Mitch and Steve at one of the river crossings in the Northwest Territories. Can’t recall offhand whether it was the Mackenzie or the Peel.
What great fun it would be to cross paths again on some other random road to nowhere.
That’s about it for news. Will close here.
Oh…! Hang on… been reading the Russians lately…
After Notes from the Underground, I read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. That can be a heavy lift; the kind of book you read in a hundred sittings, 5 to 6 pages at a time.
After that, I read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, because I read somewhere that Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot to engage and counter Turgenev’s literary take on the forces roiling Russia in the 1860s, the same tensions of class, culture, nationalism and religion in conflict today under Czar Putin. Does anything ever really change in Russia? Serfdom, Soviet Communism, Crony Capitalism, Authoritarian State Capitalism… Give them credit, anyway, for thinking up new names for the same old soul-crushing way of life in Mother Russia.
Finally got to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a wild meta narrative, that. It’s a novel about a guy writing a novel about characters borrowed from other writers’ novels. Quite a riotous send-up of literary pretension and Irish culture, if lovingly so, which is what makes it so funny. (O’Brien once said, “I declare to God if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob.”)
I didn’t dare read the book while Pam was asleep one floor away, it’s far too hilarious. Dylan Thomas had the perfect blurb: “This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.”
I’ve got a copy of O’Brien’s The Third Policeman on the way. Will finish up W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in a day or two, then it’s on to a number of essays I’ve queued up, by W.E.B. DuBois and William H. Gass.
Okay, closing here then, and for true, with a sound check on the iron piggy. I’m experimenting on where to place an external mic for the GoPro. See what you think.
When I recorded the clip below the mic was mounted by the right-rear turn signal.
There’s nothing visually interesting in the clip but the sound’s not bad. A minute anywhere and you’ll get the idea.
There’s a kind of flabby, burbling sound on throttle-off decel, which might mean I had the mic too close to the right muffler. I hear a bit of contact patch and trailing brake, some valve clearance and a bit of slack in the muffler hangers.
The big bumps jangle the side cases around in their metal-on-metal brackets but that’s an easy fix; I’ll tighten them up with a ratcheting strap next time.
Will position the mic higher, too, and more in the middle, see whether that makes a difference for the better.
Cheers to all.
Tony DePaul, October 25, 2023, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
