Happy Saturday, my dearest reader.  Yesterday I was pulled away from the Dissolute Desk on urgent government business, and I regrettably missed an important day on the D.P.S. calendar.  Yesterday, August 22nd, was the day the cosmos decided to bless us with one Raymond Douglas Bradbury.  And I, due to the aforementioned government business resulting in a catastrophic failure of my moral obligations to the literary gods, completely and utterly whiffed it.  Blew past it like a bat out of some very strange and beautifully rendered hell.

One hundred and five years, or thereabouts, since the man first started inhaling oxygen.  And where was I?  Engaged in some deeply unimpressive, bureaucratic rescue mission.  How embarrassing.  The sheer, uncut, high-octane shame of it all is a heavy coat, dear reader.  I’ve missed deadlines, flights, and the occasional dental appointment, but missing the birth-date of the guy who basically invented the poignant sci-fi liver kick?  That feels like a special category of personal failing, a stain on my already questionable permanent record, governmental callings be damned.

To be clear, we’re talking about the architect of Fahrenheit 451, a book so prescient it feels less like fiction and more like a user manual for the last decade.  He’s the guy who took the simple, Rockwellian canvas of the American Midwest and splattered it with alien loneliness and the quiet terror of a passing carnival.  He saw the future, not as a chrome-plated utopia of flying cars, but as a place of profound human longing, where technology mostly just gave us newer, more efficient ways to be sad and isolated.  And he did it all with prose that could make a poet weep.

To have built entire worlds – worlds that are now permanently etched onto the collective cerebral cortex of anyone with a library card and a soul – and for some over-caffeinated scribe to neglect to raise a glass on the proper day…well, it’s a cosmic joke of the highest order.  A real something-wicked-this-way-comes level of disregard.

I picture Ray, somewhere out in the great, starry expanse he wrote about so lovingly, looking down and shaking his head.  Not in anger, but with that signature blend of knowing sadness and wry amusement.  He’d probably get it.  He understood human folly better than anyone.  He knew we were all just a bunch of flawed, forgetful apes running around, trying our best not to burn the books or miss the important things.

So here it is, 24 hours late and a dollar short: Happy Birthday, Ray.  Thanks for the Martians, the witches, and the firemen.  Thanks for making us look at the stars and feel a little less alone, and a little more terrified, all at once.  I’ll be over here, trying to recalibrate my entire existence and setting approximately 17 alarms for next year.  Forgive me.  Or don’t.  You’ve earned the right to be picky.

N.P.: “Let It All Go” – Beats Antique, Preservation Hall Jazz Band