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Yesterday, April 9th, was not the best day of my life nor was it was worst, but it was certainly more painful that I had anticipated.

With a scheduled dental appointment to get a crown, the final step in the dental implant replacing one of my molars, I had taken the day off. The procedure I expected would be fairly pain free and I could use some of the time off to see The First Omen at a matinee screening.

Sadly, I awoke with a headache. Well, that has happened before and they usually dissipate on their own. Without much concern I went to my early morning dental procedure and listened to podcast while the doctor and her assistant took care of my troublesome lack of a molar.

The headache grew worse. Enough for the doctor to notice and inquire about it. I made it home and realized that this headache was inf act a migraine.

It had been months since I had one and needed to take my prescription. Luckily, I still had several tablets and doses myself. Unluckily the migraine had grown so large and so intense that it would not be easily dislodge from my skull.

I did not make it out to the movies. Instead, I stayed home, trie3d to distract myself with Call of Duty and YouTube videos as I waited for the medicine to achieve its victory over my agony.

Late afternoon, just before my sweetie-wife return home the pain finally began to ebb and while the evening wasn’t totally back to normal, I was at least exiting the dark migraine forest.

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Back in January 2024 After dodging the damned virus for nearly 4 years, I contracted COVID-19. Because I has stayed up to date on my vacations, to quote the Operative from Serenity “I am not a moron,” the case was quite mild and even less so because I took the Paxlovid therapy.

That said the week following my illness I developed a deep chest cough. No material came up with this hacking, but it was intense and fairly constant.

The docs gave me inhalers and pills and ‘pearls’ to deal with the cough, but nothing has really worked. Prednisone kills the cough but only while I am taking the medication. Once I stop a couple of days later its back.

I am not sick. There is no fever, no body aches, no congestion, just a cough that make any sort of extended conversation impossible. This has forced me to put my Tabletop Role Playing game of Space Opera on hiatus.

We have done chest X-rays, and nothing abby normal has shown on them. There have been lung function tests and those do not indicate any loss of function or impairment. Next week there will be CT scans, but I expect them to come back clean.

Now, this is just the lingering, and honestly fairly mild, repercussions following the COVID infection. There are people, some who I know, that are suffering the debilitating effects of ‘long COVID,’ so I am not crying for sympathy here.

My life is mostly unaffected, it is just forking annoying.

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I seriously cannot think of a time in my life, no matter how young, when I did not think of death. Oh, I don’t mean that it is every though in my head or that it is even a daily thought, but I feel certain that a week has not gone by that I can recall where it did not enter my mind.

I was nine when my father passed away. A terribly early age to have such a crashing trauma visited upon you but even before cancer took him I had repeated thoughts of death, so that tragic terrible event is not the genesis of my morbidly.

I don’t know how young I was when my puppy ‘snowball’, was killed by a passing car but that was my earliest encounter with death in the real world. Yet, I think, I feel, that the repeated visitation by thoughts of death preceded the dog’s passing.

I think my thoughts, my fascination with death, and with ghosts which have always been my most love form of horror, started before watching my puppy die on the road in front of me.

What I think really started this line of thinking, one which continues to the very day, is prayers.

As a child I was raised Southern Baptist, but the religion didn’t take hold. As an adult I have a lot of favor for a friend’s take on religion; “It’s Santa Claus for Adults.”

As a child in the 60’s I was taught a prayer say each night before climbing into bed.

Now I lay be down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I was boy with an active imagination that phrase If I should Die before I wake, proved to be a powerful catalyst.

My memories are very clear on this. Me in bed, wondering if I was going to die before I woke up. The clause had to be there because people did just up and die in their sleep for no reason at all. To this day I can be drifting off to sleep and the that seed planted when I was far too young to understand flowers, and I wonder about dying in my sleep.

Be aware of what you tell children, particularly those with powerful imaginations and vivid dreams for you may be implanting concepts that they will never shake off.

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I have been absent from most online activities because I took a week and a half off from my day job and just used the time to do mostly nothing. I wrote nothing. The past weekend was the Southern California Writers Conference here in San Diego and I did attend that for the first time since the damnable pandemic. Because I was and still to some degree was inflicted with a barking hacking cough, I did not stay late into the morning hours taking part in the rouge read-and-critique session, something I truly adore, but I still had a good time and enjoyed myself.

Thursday, amid threats of rain, my sweetie-wife took the day off to share with me and we did our usual Sunday Trip to the zoo on that morning. Then a second on Monday, President’s day. Both days saw pretty high attendance.

Feedback from my WIP, The Wolves of Wallace Point, have been trickling in and, so far, nothing is indicating that I should kill the book. Soon query letters will be heading out to prospective agents. My next project combined the structure of a 70s disaster movie with a story filled with ghosts. I actually started that one but now realized it’s on the wrong first foot and I need to rethink a bit.

I had hoped to go out and see a few films during the at home vacation, but the persistent cough made that a non-starter as I refuse to be that inconsiderate to my fellow cinephiles.

My vacation ended yesterday with a trip to the dentist for the next steps in the long procedure of getting some implants to replace a couple of teeth. I was in the chair for about 2 hours, and I am ever thankful for both the skill and consideration of the team as well as for the podcasts that kept me from losing my mind to boredom.

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The three words that comprise the title of this post are often used nearly interchangeably when discussing a person, group’s, or nation’s behavior but to my mind hey carry very different and important connotations.

Justify, which clearly comes from ‘justice’ is about making an argument that an action needed to be taken and was ultimately right to have been taken. You can justify taxes, the taking of a person’s property, because the social benefits are so large so important that the taking is ultimately a good and necessary thing. Other cases can be more edge case and will depend on the moral standing, philosophies, and such of the people involved.

Excuse to me carries the burden of acknowledgment of wrongdoing. This does not have to be a major or in any way a serious wrongdoing. We ask to be excused when we burp loudly because the noise of generally considered unpleasant and upsetting. In asking to be excused we admit that the sound was unsettling. We bump into a person on the train or in a crowd and again seek to be excused because uninvited touching is a violation. To excuse carries the knowledge of wrongdoing and the admission that it was wrong. One does not excuse malice because malice rarely carries any sort of admission of transgression.

Explain is a revealing of cause and effect absent moral judgment. That is not to say that the transgressive acts one might ‘explain’ are absent of moral weight or judgment but merely that understanding how they came to be done, the cause and effect that created the chain that bound the participant in the event are described and understood without judgment. We explain serial killers by understanding that childhood abuse and trauma has warped their minds and desires creating monsters. This is not excusing or justifying but understanding how they came to be.

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This throwback Thursday reached into the primordial ooze of that distant date Oct 29, 2023, when my sweetie-wife and I went for our weekly trip to the San Diego Zoo.

This is a Bee Eater and in its beak is a bee, a Carpenter Bee I think but I can’t be sure as it wasn’t singing, We’ve Only Just Begun.

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Last night I learned that a friend I had known for nearly 40 years died. Brian’s passing was a not a shock or a surprise but hurts just the same. Last year he was tragically struck with a degenerative neurological disease that robbed him of motor control and the ability to speak. Such diseases rarely allow for people live very long.

Brian was a good and close friend. We had played many a board and card game together, attended several science-fiction conventions, including the one where I met my sweetie-wife, and we even wrote together. Two feature film scripts, a thriller and a period adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Of course, the script went nowhere but I learned from them, and I learned from Brian. A piece of advice that he passed on I carry still in writing characters stricken with grief. People don’t cry, they try to not cry. That is so true so often and trying to capture that struggled of someone trying so hard to not cry and failing makes such moments more powerful.

He was a historian by education and without a doubt I learned so much from knowing him. Before he moved away and before the damned disease, we often went to movies together, though there was a run where every film he picked for us to go to turned out to be a stinker.  When I was laid up for two weeks in the 90s recovering from surgery, he came over every day with a fresh VHS tape and we watched them together,

He was not a perfect friend, no one is, and I learned all too early in life that in the end death comes for us all, but he will be missed.