In the three decades I’ve been drawing Claudio Mahoney, to my astonishment, he has never fallen in Love. He’s been on dates, he’s been dismissed, he’s been forgotten. But never in Love.

Poor devil.

…I’m not going to talk about America, during this Independence Day blog post. Instead,  I’m inclined to talk about something much more basic. Something we Americans legendarily embrace.

I woke up thinking about a funny little trait called Wisdom.

That was enough to send the students into a jeering frenzy: “Humbug! Humbug!” an event which would eventually lead Wells to a colorful doom involving acid, prostitutes, and a shaving kit. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was as if we’d sewed up an operative patient with a few sponges and the scalpel still inside. 

It was a damned embarrassment.

Most days, I wake up wanting to write an essay.

For today’s post, I was going to write a longwinded, yet witty meditation on the zillions of stories all around us, and how sometimes we can only see the dark ones, and the law of attraction, and yada yada.

Then I decided to draw a cartoon.

I want to discuss a single sentence in Dr. Walker’s book, the sentence that launched a thousand panicked phone calls. The sentence is this one:

“…it is equally possible that sleeping pills do cause death and cancer.”

This thought blew the top of my head off, flipping it into a triple-summersault, landing thickly back in place at a slightly skewed angle, accompanied by an unhealthy-sounding PLOP!

Some of the biggest brains in the business are working on this issue. They’ve tuned into the signal that the secret to success lies in a trusting alliance between provider and patient.

As I reflected on the journey that my patients traveled, with me as their guide, through this crazy place called Sleep Apnea, it struck me that there was no one better-suited to help tell this story.