I must have seen hundreds—heck, maybe even thousands—of folks like this. Left behind, by a system that did things mechanically, each step of the way determining what happened next, resulting in the same dumb failure, over and over again, like a person falling down the stairs in slow motion.

And what she said next contained several words which I will not repeat here, though all of it was delivered in a very measured and reasonable-sounding speaking voice.

I’ll leave it at this, dear readers: she enthusiastically declined.

I stepped into that beartrap nearly every day, trying to figure out how it works, and sometimes I got pretty banged up by it.

For some of us, the Hut may be the most important place of all.

If my sister had one super-power (there are many in her life who would claim she had several) I believe it was an innate core belief that every human being was beautiful. She was like that, ever since she was a kid.

Woody Guthrie famously said of his guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists. Along those lines, I think the cartoon caption underneath the hand-knotted bowtie is this: This Machine Resurrects Ghosts.

When it rains, it pours, the saying goes. Also this: sometimes, it rains so much that it feels like it will drain the landscape out from under you.

In the world of SLEEP, if there’s one specialty that gets it, it’s myofunctional therapy.

Oh, but as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here’s a pro tip: if you want to suck the life out of everything that you do, try telling yourself that you’re going to make it perfect.

Small, fulcrum moments like these, however, can trigger seismic changes. A life can be reborn. A soul can connect with meaning.

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.