
My notes for the group, from my eclectic moutain of notebooks – ideas you can steal and run with!
Create an image with words instead of an image with suffering.
My blindness was wasted on you.
I can’t make sense of my dreams, which already make perfect sense.
Even after she left me, she said she’d never leave me.
Story idea: I hold in my trembling hands pages full of insane words, written in my own handwriting, that I have no recollection of writing.
Story idea: a man spends an entire winter cutting down a huge oak tree with his bare hands.
I wrote this sitting on my front porch, from my notes, Monday afternoon before Open Mic Night…
Death and All of His Friends
As I write this, I am 61. I am in great health, both mechanically and emotionally.
Somehow, though, I had forgotten, in this glib, thoughtless, indifferent passage of time, that there are more days behind me than ahead of me.
So come with me, possibly with the fancy, phony flipping of calendar pages from a 1950s B movie, to a few choice reminders of our bitter mortality.
It is 1982. I am 19. Although I am at college, I am unwilling to do the actual college thing. I sleep all morning and stay up all night. I listen to lots of music, thinking that my judgement and superior taste in graphic equalizers and total harmonic distortion makes me important, like I’m some kind of professional critic or appreciator, just waiting to be discovered by Stereo Review or Popular HiFi.
I wrote in my journal, though not well.
Staying up late sometimes involved pizza and playing pool in the lobby of my dorm. It was then and there that I met the “Night People,” a collection of other lost souls who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, sleep at night.
One of my favorite Night People was Debbie. She had long, honey-colored hair and big glasses that hid beautiful green eyes. She wore a perfume called Hope. I remember the smell of Hope in her hair like it was yesterday.
She moved back home after her first semester, but made time to visit the Night People as often as she could.
After one visit, I held her close for a long moment at the base of the stairs that led to my dorm. Finally we let go, and strands of her hair snagged in my three-day beard.
“Parting is such sweet sorry,” I said.
“Isn’t it, though?” she quipped back.
One night, April 6, 1982, I walked into the lobby where the very gloomy-looking Night People were gathered. As I approached, Molly said, “Did you hear about Debbie? She was killed in a car crash tonight.”

Flash forward
Flash back
Fade to blue
Fade to black
Three weeks later, at the end of the semester, I drove to my hometown. My first stop was the apartment of my former college room mate. He’d flunked out after just one semester, and ended up unhappily working at his father’s gas station.
His car was outside the apartment, but standing next to the car were Lori and Lynn, who I didn’t expect.
“Did you hear about Jeff?” Lynn asked, her voice cracking slightly. “He committed suicide tonight.”
Note: she did NOT say “killed himself.”
Flash to night
Flash to day
Fade to white
Fade to grey
It is now February 23, 1994. It is a busy morning in the newsroom. Someone said there was a call for me on line one.
It was Michael, who always turned language around in unexpected ways.
“The police are looking for anyone who might have had contact with the late Kathy,” he said. It took a few more sentences to get a fully straight-on explanation from him, that Kathy, who I dated off and on in 1993, had killed herself.
Flash to midnight
Flash to noon
Fade to me
Fade to you
As I get older, of course, these events accumulate, changing from something we can taste or feel into the ever-dryer ink on a page.
A year and a half ago, an extinct girlfriend, with whom I had become friends again, was ill, then dying.
This time there was no “did you hear?” This time a laconic text message bluntly announced, “Pam has died.”
Flash to the start
Flash to the end
Fade to forever
Fade to…
Fade to what, Richard? You can only be clever about death so many times, after which you yourself seem dead inside.
This week, I was looking through copies of 2024 editions of my newspaper, trying to find stories I’d written, columns I’d penned, and photos I’d shot, for an upcoming journalism contest.
I was in the middle of July’s stupidly clever headlines and ledes and captions, and a few decent news photos, when I saw something I’d missed on the first pass reading my own newspaper last summer: in the obituaries, the Debbie I’d dated a few times in the 1990s, who I had liked and considered a friend, had died of cancer at 60.
Flash to today
Flash to the past
Fade to…
Well, we all fade. Debbie, Jeff, Kathy, Pam, Debbie. You, me, everyone.




















