My dentist always twits me about my chewing my teeth into oblivion. I do not think I grind my teeth at night, but she thinks I do. And there are the ruined sites of three of my long lost upper teeth. two bicuspids and a molar. She also thinks I live on a diet of jalapeño chile peppers.
In truth, there is something violent about my visage. Take my sneezes: They are so powerful that I have to be prepared to go to the bathroom after a sneezing fit. I find facial tissues to be useless, as I tend to blow them to smithereens. Like my father, I frequently rupture a capillary when I erupt. In my case, it’s usually in my left nostril.
Then there are my sinuses. Whenever there is a major change in the weather (which in L.A. means just about always), I turn into mucus man. I frequently wake Martine up with my snorting, sneezing, and nose-blowing. As she has a tendency to be insomniac, she usually requests that I transfer my drainage to the couch in the living room.
Then, too, my eyelids are constantly irritated with blepharitis. In certain times of the year, usually winter, spring, summer, and fall, my eyelids itch and generate an annoying discharge.
What’s next for me? Great gobs of earwax sticking out of my ears? Saliva that roars like a waterfall? Is my head just too damned loud?
This happened at some point during my high school years, sometime between 1958 and 1962. I had a cavity that needed to be filled, so my parents took me to see Doctor K who had an office at the Southgate Shopping Center at the corner of Libby and Northfield Roads. My parents sat patiently in the waiting room while Dr. K drilled away at my tooth.
The time was late afternoon. Doctor K put the suction tube in my mouth and stepped out. For a very long time. In fact he left the office and went to dinner while all the moisture in my body was being sucked through the tube. He must have taken another exit, because my parents didn’t see him leave.
When he returned an hour later, there were sand dunes and cacti in my mouth. He calmly finished drilling and filled the cavity. When I stepped into the waiting room, my father and mother were annoyed at the time it took. When I told them Doctor K had left the office for an hour, my father told him he could whistle all the way to Warrensville if he wanted to be paid for his rudeness.
We never went back to Doctor K. I was all right with that.
I arrived in Los Angeles at exactly the point when the Hippie movement was reaching its height. Many of my acquaintances looked much like the poseurs in the above photo. Oh, I had long hair all right, but nothing that was radical for the period. I went around dressed in chinos and a Jeans jacket, usually with a black cowboy hat which I bought at Disneyland.
In fact, I never really got close to any Hippies: I regarded them as not quite real, more like play actors.
There was another even more compelling reason I never became a Hippie: I had just undergone brain surgery for the removal of a pituitary tumor and had no desire to experiment with recreational drugs. In the late 1960s, I did not think I was long for this world. I had no desire to rush my exit from this life.
Though not drawn to the Hippies, I was something of a political radical. For a brief time, I attended meetings of the Progressive Labor Party at UCLA, but found studying Marx’s Surplus Theory of Value breathtakingly boring and the girls in the group heartbreakingly ill-favored.
Due to the influence of my late friend Norm Witty, I hung out for a while with The Resistance, which protested the Vietnam War by attempting to interfere with the draft process. In fact, I sent my draft card back to my draft board in Cleveland, fully expecting to be arrested for two felonies ([1] Returning my draft card and [2] Refusing to carry a draft card on my person) and sent to a Federal prison. It turns out that so many of my fellow students returned their draft cards that the Federal Government decided it was too expensive to prosecute and imprison the offenders.
Why do Americans shower their billionaires with a level of adoration normally reserved for deities and saints? I think back to the Medicis and the Borgias during the Italian Renaissance. As J. H. Plumb wrote, “Commercial capitalism, struggling the the framework of feudalism, learned, through Italy, not only how to express itself in art and learning, but also how to make an art of life itself.”
Not so today, however! Donald Trump has given us golden toilet bowls, ornate golf courses, and tried to take away our democracy. Elon Musk managed to convince thousands of Americans that he was a genius—until he spent $44 billion buying Twitter and running it into the ground. After his latest anti-Semitic tirade, I think even most Tesla owners are rethinking their allegiances.
I cannot think of a billionaire today who has done anything but engage in self-aggrandizement. Instead of a Renaissance, we are now in a period that can only be described as Anti-Renaissance.
What ever happened to patronage of the arts? Oh, it still exists at the millionaire level; but not among the Trumps, Musks, and Bezoses of this world. The think the last billionaire to show any moves in this direction was Bill Gates of Microsoft fame.
My apartment is home to my collection of books, five to six thousand volumes in all. In addition to my library, which is dedicated to my collection, I have crowded book-cases in every room of my apartment, including the kitchen and bathroom.
There was a time when I could not visit a bookstore without buying several new or used books. In addition, I purchased books from EBay, Abebooks.Com, and a fair number of other Internet book dealers.
Right now, I am reading with great enjoyment Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer (1815), the second of his Waverley Novels. Forty or fifty years ago, I would think nothing of trying to find the complete works of any author I liked. In fact, at one time I owned a complete hardbound set of the Waverley Novels. Now I only have some twenty selected titles—but in nice editions. In this, I resemble Dominie Sampson in Guy Mannering:
The lawyer afterwards compared his mind to the magazine of a pawnbroker, stowed with goods of every description, but so cumbrously piled together, and in such total disorganisation, that the owner can never lay his hands upon any one article at the moment he has occasion for it.
Guilty as charged! But now that I am approaching my eightieth year, I would like to find a good home for most of my books. It helps—sad to say—that bookstores, in disappearing from the landscape, furnish less of a temptation.
Tomorrow, I will travel downtown to return some library books (and get some new ones). I will be strongly tempted to visit the (appropriately named) Last Bookstore at 5th and Spring Streets and check out their more obscure Sir Walter Scott titles, such as Peveril of the Peak, Count Robert of Paris, Anne of Geierstein, and The Fortunes of Nigel.
But, really, who am I kidding? Will I really read all of Scott’s novels? If I live long enough, I sure would like to try. But why buy the books when I can check them out of the Central Library or download them on my Amazon Kindle. Old habits die v-e-r-y hard.
Life is strange when you don’t have a pituitary gland. Mine was removed by surgery in September 1966. On Wednesday I woke up early to go to the bathroom. After I did by business, I got up and … and … and …
B L A C K O U T
When consciousness returned, I was bleeding from a large bump on the left of my forehead and I felt as if one of my ribs was broken. Imagine Martine’s surprise when she woke up to go to the john about an hour later! There I lay, covered in blood and unable to raise myself due to (1) pain from my broken rib and (2) general weakness due to adrenal insufficiency.
Without a functioning pituitary, one has no thyroid function, no sex hormones, and—oh, yes—no adrenaline. All those have to be supplied from outside the body. Those early morning hours can be killers. Ingmar Bergman had a good reason to call it “The Hour of the Wolf.” At my request, Martine got me a glass of water and five 10mg tabs of Hydrocortisone.
Eventually Martine has to call 9-1-1 to get an ambulance. I couldn’t just lie on the bathroom floor forever. The emergency medical technicians took one look at me, hoisted me up, and trundled me of to the UCLA Medical Center, where I spent a couple of days in the intensive care unit and an observation ward.
I strongly suspect that this is how I will leave this world. At some point, the adrenal debt will be too high; and there will be a general system shutdown. Not a particularly painful exit.
Hazleton “Terry” Mirkil III, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth
In the Winter Trimester of my freshman year at Dartmouth College, I took the second of my two math courses, which were required of part of the college’s “distributive requirements.” The term refers to courses in fields that don’t interest you so that you could become a well-rounded person. The course was called something like “Introduction to Probability and Statistics,” though it was mostly the former.
There are only two things I remember about the course. The first is that in any random group of thirteen people, there is an even chance that two of the party share the same birthday. (That was more than I can recall about my previous math course on Calculus.)
The other thing I remember were Professor Hazleton Mirkil’s wild eyebrows. In profile, they stood out like wild antennae reaching up to an inch from his brow. His eyebrows come to mind because I seem to have developed the same antenna-like eyebrows. When I get a haircut, my barber trims them for me, though they always grow back thrusting in all directions.
Thinking about Professor Mirkil’s eyebrows, I decided to see what I could find out about him on the Internet. What I found was not much, inasmuch as he had committed suicide in 1967, the year after I graduated from Dartmouth. According to the West Lebanon Valley News:
Hazelton Mirkil III, 44, associate professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College, was found dead Wednesday afternoon in the woods back of Chase Field. Dr. I. A. Dinerman of Canaan Grafton County medical referee attributed death to suicide by shooting. He said that Prof. Mirkil, was “dead at least a month or two,” was shot through the head and found with a revolver in his hand.
Prof. Mirkil was on leave from Dartmouth for the current academic year and had been at the Veterans Hospital at Northampton, Mass. Having obtained leave from the hospital and not having returned, he was reported missing March 17.
Very likely, my Math prof received a bad diagnosis from the VA Hospital. The above photo was the only one I could find except for a tiny picture in uniform during WW2. That’s typical for people whose lives have ended well before the advent of the Internet.
I never was much good in math. I received a C+ in both Calculus and Probability. I am certainly not a graduate that the Math Department at Dartmouth would be proud of. (Nor the English Department, as I ended that last sentence with a preposition.)
If you fear that I, too, would blow my brains out because of my unruly eyebrows, don’t worry. I am too funny-looking on a number of counts to worry solely about my eyebrows.
It didn’t used to be this way, but now Halloween is now a portal to a ten week holiday season that includes Halloween, the Day of the Dead (All Souls Day), Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Day, Martine’s birthday, and my birthday. Fortunately, I don’t take it as seriously as most people do; and I even try to enjoy bits and pieces of it.
In past years, I spent much of October reading horror stories and watching horror films. This year, I’ve not been feeling well, thanks to a hideous attack of bronchitis and asthma. Fortunately, I am feeling better now. And the only horror stories I’ve read were in a collection by Robert Aickman entitled The Wine Dark Sea. I particularly recommend the short story of the same name that opens the collection.
Tomorrow I get my Covid and flu shots, to be followed in two weeks by a vaccination for RSV. I know that the whole issue of vaccinations has become politicized, but I just don’t feel like dying of negligence.
Anyhow, I wish you well during he upcoming HallowThanksMas season. Just don’t let it weigh you down.
Speaking as a retired person, I am happy to say I don’t have to kowtow to any megalomaniacal bosses any more. I put in some forty years of work, retiring only in my seventies. And not once during that forty years did I deal with a boss who did not behave like a tinpot dictator.
What I would have like to have seen is a company owner who would consider himself as the first among equals, not ruling with the divine right of kings. Although I consider myself a good writer, everything I wrote was “corrected” in such a way that it was worse than my first draft.
Within a year after I retired, my health improved markedly. My blood pressure, glucose readings, and weight all were better. That’s because I was no longer under stress. Had I continued working, the stress would have killed me before 2020. Treat me like a boss? No, I am not a prisoner in a concentration camp.
The funny thing is that my bosses were also under quite a bit of stress. But why is it that that was the only thing they were willing to share with their workers?
As usual, I have delayed in getting a haircut. So now I look like the Tim Conway character in the Carol Burnett Show when he’s acting the part of the Oldest Man. It’s appropriate, after all, since we’re both from the Cleveland area.
The only difference is that Tim Conway, whatever part he plays, is usually more fashionably dressed than I am.
Tarnmoor 
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