The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.
🤫 The Secret’s Out
As of this writing my wife has cancer. The good news is - depending on when you read this - she may no longer have cancer. Today is surgery day. I’ll be with her in the hospital today, tonight, and likely again tomorrow. I’ll have to leave to take Kiddo to a birthday party and pretend that nothing is going on, how are you?
Thoughts and prayers don’t cure cancer any better than they keep bullets out of schoolchildren, but I know that ain’t gonna stop you all from offering them, so my pre-emptive thanks. One of the “downsides” of being apatheistic is that when shit like this happens, you’re stuck just raw-dogging the horrors of existence.
Again, the good news is that this might all be moot by the time you read this, but it has been very not-moot for the past few months. The benefit of this happening on Halloween is that I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of my sexy nurse costume.
📚Book Bits
Slowly working through The Woman Lit by Fireflies by Jim Harrison. I’ll likely finish this today based on how long I’ll be in the hospital. I’m gonna bring The Big T (Clancy Steadwell), To the Moon, Darkly (Pablo Báez), and Hallucinations
(Hamish Kavanagh) with me as well.
Recent Book Haul:
Ablutions by Patrick DeWitt
A find at the supermarket free bookshelf
Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff
Big DeWitt Week.
Hallucinations by Hamish Kavanagh
An ARC courtesy of Drek Death and Doom
Southwest Review - The Horror Issue
Featuring stories by Charlene Elsby and elle nash
💡Substack Spotlight:
Tom said it better than me, so I’m stealing his words:
Zani D “is a string puller, a connection-maker, a Machiavellian altruist, a ferocious, blood-spilling storyteller, an agent of magnificent comedic chaos.
She is Five Ducks in a Trenchcoat.
She is also a mother of two with a terminal liver condition that keeps her from being able to work a regular job, so she relies on SNAP—which is not coming right now. And her state’s plan to cover that shortfall isn’t going to work effectively for her family.”
Fuck our oligarchical two-party system of feckless cronies and spineless shit-heels keeping food out of kids mouth so they boom different kids halfway across the world. Helping one person that needs it will make you a better person than all three branches of our federal government with room to spare. So please help if you can.
📰Substack Headlines:
nico durán has a piece of short fiction “two in one” that you should check out.
I got to catch the tail-end of PM Dunne interviewing Andrew Boryga. Check it out for yourself here. And make sure you check out PM’s poetry and Andrew’s Victim which I reviewed for Substack Summer.
If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.
🖋️Writing
I dredged up something I wrote 13 years ago, pretty much entirely because it was titled “Ducks” and that’s the only reason I remember it existed.
🍁Fleeting Thoughts
This is a short one this week for - you know - the obvious reasons. I’d like to say something classy and inspirational, but that’s just not my style.
Take care of yourselves, and each other.
Happy Halloween... 🤙
Damn, that's heavy stuff Vinny. Sorry your family's going through it. Lost my mom to cancer five years ago, it can be a brutal journey. I hope there's good news on the way for you all 🙏.
sorry about your wife. godspeed, good luck, and I am glad you have the company of books in such a time. Substack community is the best.