This all sort of came to me this week when I was journaling, and it’s something that’s often on my mind–ruminations on time.
The things we spend our lives doing. Are they worthy? Will they make us proud in the end? Are we building things? Feeding people? Educating people? Saving people? Healing people? Delving into the secrets of the universe? Touching people with art and music?
I’m hoping to have a good few decades to go, but you never know. In the last year, I’ve lost two friends younger than me to cancer. I could get COVID-19 from a trip to the supermarket and be dead in two weeks, like more than half a million Americans. (Yes, the disease has now depopulated a city the size of Kansas City.)
So the older I get, the more I feel the accelerating approach of the end. The pressure it creates to get things done, to finish what I started, to pursue dreams I’ve been reaching for since I was young, is a powerful thing.
That’s probably why I have so many irons in the fire. Currently those irons consist of four novels, two comic books, a short film, and scripts I’m still shopping around, scripts still to write. Books still to write.
Thank you for being here to read them.
As you may recall, I’m a huge fan of the HBO series Deadwood. This weekend I finally took the opportunity to watch the Deadwood movie, which came out in 2019, thirteen years after the show was unexpectedly cancelled in the middle of its third season. I’m not sure why I waited so long to watch the movie, maybe wanting to savor it?
It’s rough, it’s gritty, and it’s not for everyone, but Deadwood is some of the finest writing ever produced for television. The dialogue just sings, Shakespearean in its wit and pathos. The characters are fascinating in their depth and complexity, taking real historical figures and making them come alive.
Deadwood: the Movie was a shining capstone on a story that ended before its time, a powerful story beautifully told.
I think the reason it resonated so strongly with me is because its central theme was Ruminations on Time, something that shows up in my own writing, probably most of all in The Hammer Falls.
We have an entire cast of characters–and they were all back–twelve years later, older, sometimes wiser, but all of them with a rough set of extra miles on them, all there to confront the greatest of the story’s many villains. There weren’t many white hats in Deadwood.
It wasn’t just the story that struck me, though. As I watched the special features afterward, I kept thinking about how the series creator and writer David Milch looked really frail, and several people talked about how what he was going through was reflected in the story, and how working with him this time was so different than before. He had lost much of his vigor.
It turns out that David Milch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about the time this movie was being produced. And then I kind of lost it, and all I could think was, “What an amazing mind to be lost to such a horrible disease.”
Milch has been around a while. He made his career writing Hill Street Blues back in the 80s, a series that revolutionized cop shows. Even as a kid, I recognized how good it was, without being able to put my finger on why. I just knew it was different from every other cop show in all kinds of ways, and so much better.
Knowing that he had entered the long, cruel, tragic twilight of his life, I was even happier to know that he was able to put a beautiful capstone on an amazing, artful TV series.
So, ruminations on time. The power of Milch’s stories, the quality of his writing, the depth of his characters, these are things for a writer to aspire to. Now, with his light fading, it falls to writers who admire his work to pick up the torch and carry on.