DrakeNews 119: March 4, 2021
Dear People,
This will be different (and maybe more data than you want). It was certainly more than I wanted.
This has been a very rough two months. I had my eyes tested for glasses. In the course of this I got eye drops, Apparently as a reaction to the eye drops, my urethra locked up. After a bad night, my wife ran me over to the ER where I was catheterized and drained of something over a liter of urine, which is a lot on my build. I went to urology a week later to remove the catheter. I still couldn’t pee on my own, though, so I still have tubes in me till see the urologist proper later this week (the earliest option). Dunno exactly what that will mean, but the current situation is only borderline livable. The tubing frequently separates at one joint or another.
Apart from that we got a vaccine shot (and perhaps by the time you read this ) the second.
I haven’t gotten any work done. There hasn’t been any time I could be sure of privacy since lockdown occurred. I used to be able to plot in confused situations. I no longer can. The crunch with which I wrote To Clear Away the Shadows while I was still recovering from being hit by a car, plus the Parkinson’s diagnosis and now this catheter, have combined to rob me of flexibility.
Several times (usually at 3 in the morning) I have decided that I will no longer try to write novels. I hope either the world or my mind changes for the better in the near future.
In 1977 we visited writer Ramsey Campbell and his wife Jennie in Liverpool. Every morning Ramsey went to an upper floor and sequestered himself from phone and Jennie to work for a fixed number of hours. He came down and lived normally at the end of the period.
A friend of ours spent a lot of time on Martha’s Vineyard and suggested a writing shed like that of historian David McCullough there. While McCullough is in the shed at the bottom of the garden he is at work. When he comes back to the main house he interacts with other people.
I rented an apartment for writing in my way into town back in 2001. Jo began caring for our grandson out of town and I didn’t renew the lease.
All of these are reasonable choices if rigidly adhered to by all parties in the house. At the moment we’re trying a rigid separation within the existing house. We’ll see how it works if we apply the course seriously.
Our cat died of old age and Jo didn’t want a replacement. Last week we were watching TV in the evening and a mouse nosed into the TV room and Jo decided we needed a cat. A friend who does rescues happened to come over in the morning, and we now have Kudzu, an active young cat, named for the weed patch where he’d been tossed in infancy. He’s settling in.
So, a lot of the recent past has seemed bleak but there’s hope. I hope there’s hope for all of you.
I haven’t commented on the capital riot. I don’t talk much about patriotism and don’t think of myself as a patriot. I am very much a citizen though. What happened in DC was really wrong, whatever your politics are. It wasn’t the work of Americans acting as citizens and I am really sorry it happened.
I have said I was very sorry to vote for Hillary in 2016. I now feel that even if she’d been as bad a president as I feared she would have done less harm to the country than Mr Trump did by egging on the rioters.
As I said. I don’t think of myself as a patriot; but I went to Nam instead of staying home with bone spurs.
–Dave Drake
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