Just in from my friend Danny:

What strikes me first in this email is not the email but the To: list. First, it evinces that you are a collector of people.  I’ve been hearing about some of these people for over 20 years.   Second, I notice in the list a few curious and bold names, particularly David Eisele and Jeane Quivey.   This is an interesting stratagem, to include the yanker and the zapper, in your update.   They either will despise you for trivializing their life’s work (which in both cases is momentous and unachieveable by 99%+ of humanity), or bond with you for your irreverence to their acheivements.

He’s right on that.  I guess I am a collector of people, in the same way that people are collectors of things.  We treasure the memories that we have assigned to things (all those tchotchkes in our houses are mnemonics intended to remind us of different events we’ve experienced in our lives.  Except some times we cease to see them.)  And resident in people are all those shared memories.

To lose people is to lose a part of oneself.

But beyond that, people are so friggin’ cool.

Regarding the bold inclusion of my surgeon and radiation oncologist, I guess it’s symptomatic of the experiential Tourette’s that I’ve been expressing of late.  Do something bold and unqualified regardless of consequence.  At the same time, I feel I need to cc them in the interest of full disclosure.  And I also hope it will keep me honest.

Dr. Eisele, Dr. Quivey, Dr. Shiboski, Nurse Tang – if you do choose to read this, I’m counting on you to keep me honest.

And lastly, I have only the utmost reverence for the yanker and the zapper as practitioners, but more importantly as human beings.  Any trivialization of their life’s work and their persons in part reflects my own inability to communicate the immensity of it, as well as the responsibility we all have to keep one another humble.  In the end I’ve chosen to place my well being in their hands.  I doubt there’s any higher commendation.