By them, I mean the man writ large, starting with my father and moving forward in time to every boss I ever had.

Just typing the words makes me feel old and like I want another cigarette. However, neither feeling old nor burning another stick erases the words from my head: ‘I let them get to me’.

I had that thought first thing in the morning and it shook me real bad for half a day.

I soothed the shakes by walking to four bookstores, buying five books and a turkey sandwich, and having two conversations, the best of which was with the new curator at the museum, who tried his best to convince me that Liz Cheney should be the next President, which was so wrong it was also deeply entertaining. I listened to him. Sagely.

Normally you’d need a town ten times this size to have access to that healing strategy.

I like it here.

In May, sixty-some years ago, Gary Cooper died in LA. In July, his friend and hiking partner Ernest Hemingway committed suicide with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Later in the fall, I made my planetary debut in Chicago

A lot has happened since then and it wasn’t all pretty.

But now I have some books to read before sleep, and one of them was written by Hemingway, because I enjoyed his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden so very much, and finished it the night before I woke up and thought ‘I let them get to me’, and I was right, and the book was right too.