My wife and three children just returned from a 10 day vacation. I stayed home and held down the fort.

While they were gone, I drove the family car a couple of times when I was feeling lazy and also to remind myself of what it was like.

I hated it.

It felt to me like I was swathed in layers of gauze wrapping, insulated from all that I was moving through. Hard to breathe in an iron-lung sort of way.

This isn’t an environmental thing; I have just transitioned out of an automobile lifestyle. It’s no longer in my DNA.

If I don’t ride, it seems I don’t live.

I had known something of Hitchens because of his adamant atheism and his connection with Richard Dawkins. When I saw that his memoirs were available on Kindle Books, I took a chance and bought a copy. I loved every word of it. He is a powerful personality and writes the same way. For me, very wonderfully with interesting stories and anecdotes throughout. Everything from English Boarding School travails, the discovery his mother was Jewish after her suicide, his fondness for P.G. Wodehouse (which I now share), his strong affection for the United States and his evolution away from Socialism to outright support for the war in Iraq. His prose really made me reevaluate my own thinking on the subject. I also love it when I need a dictionary to make it through every other page.

Anyway, I was not quite finished with the book when the news arrived that he is being treated for esophageal cancer. With the timing, I felt a bit as if I had lost a friend.

From his memoir to, “God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything”, I there find reference to one of my favorite, albeit arcane, books by the late SJ Gould, “Wonderful Life”. Hitchens weaves Gould’s evolutionary ideas in with his own and, again, leaves me blinking at the page with the feeling that I would really like to hang out with this guy.

So, this post is in lieu of an email to him (which would just end up in the “Anonymous In-Box”), describing my appreciation for his mastery of the English language and his reference to a book that I had thought perhaps another 12 people had read. Topping it off is that I work for a company that is refining a product for the early detection of esophageal cancer. I know the odds.

I wish him the best during his course of treatment.

It isn’t often, but I was drug from a bad dream into this twilight. One of those where in the initial conscious stupor one is relieved that it was just ephemera – thankfully wrong.

From Gizmodo today ….

Why would this have been left out of the New Testament?

Then, ………. ZAP!

Hit by a lightening strike and burning to the ground.