There are dates that feel like cursed tattoos on the calendar, inked in blood and morphine and television static.  November 22 is one of those days.  A quadruple death day.  A day when the literary cosmos and the political circus conspired to remind us that The Grim Reaper is the only editor who never misses a deadline.

☠️ Morning: Jack London Checks Out
Let’s start the clock in 1916.  The morning breaks over a California ranch, and Jack London – the ur-American writer, the platonic ideal of living too hard and too fast – cashes in his chips.  Age 40, which is basically toddler age for a writer who lived like a demolition derby.  Checked out with a belly full of pain, a system screaming from uremic poisoning, and a little morphine to grease the final slide.  He died broke but still the most famous writer on the planet.  His last completed story, The Red One, is a savage cosmic horror tale that reads like Lovecraft on steroids.  London’s exit is the kind of brutal punctuation mark that makes you wonder if the universe edits with a cleaver.

Afternoon: Aldous Huxley’s Psychedelic Curtain Call
Fast-forward to 1963, the year and the day the cosmic shit hit the fan.  2:20 p.m. PST out here on the West Coast, Aldous Huxley, the high priest of cerebral psychedelica who gave us Brave New World, has his wife, Laura, inject a final dose of LSD, and his last reported words are a whisper: “beautiful, beautiful.”  He dies tripping, writing his own psychedelic postscript to a life spent mapping the outer limits of the human mind.  Huxley’s wife later publishes the letter he wrote her from the edge, pure psychedelic literature composed while dying.  It’s the kind of exit strategy that makes you wonder if death is just another altered state, a trip with no return ticket.

Evening: C.S. Lewis Slips Out Quietly
Meanwhile, across the pond in the quiet damp of an English afternoon, the clock hits 5:30 p.m. GMT.  C.S. Lewis, the tweed-clad titan of Christian apologetics and the architect of Narnia, collapses and dies exactly one week after finishing Letters to Malcolm.  The man who wrote The Problem of Pain – the definitive modern attempt to square a good God with a world of suffering – succumbs to renal failure.  He dies while the world is too busy watching the leader of the free world get shot in the head.  And for hours, nobody even notices.
His obituaries are a goddamn footnote, drowned out by gunshots and grainy film reels.  It was like the Universe, in all its perversion, decided to bury a theologian and a president in the same frame just to see if anyone noticed.  Of course, they didn’t.

The Shot Heard Around the Poets
And then there’s the main attraction, the centerpiece of the whole godforsaken day.  JFK.  Dallas.  Dealey Plaza, the Zapruder film – the most analyzed text of the 1960s.  Within hours, American poets start writing.  Robert Lowell’s “Fall 1963.”  Anne Sexton’s “The Assassination.”  Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems, and HST’s letter to Paul Semonin: “I am trying to compose a reaction to the heinous, stinking, shit-filled thing that occurred today.”

November 22 sits on the calendar the way a loaded revolver sits on a table..  Jack London in the morning, C.S. Lewis in the evening, JFK in the crosshairs.  Yowza.
If I make it through the day, it’s not because I’m braver or smarter or more deserving.  It’s because the Cosmic Editor hasn’t found a way to cut me yet.  I look at today as a dare: live loud, write harder, and don’t flinch.

N.P.: “Don’t Crash” – Leæther Strip