Hey y'all, watch this...

Just kidding.

Photo by Marcus Wöckel: https://www.pexels.com/photo/silver-colored-heart-lock-bridge-883466/

The title is from a classic joke about a redneck’s last words. I’ve always found it damn funny because I could immediately hear one of my male cousin’s voices in my head excitedly saying those words.

This is really just a thank you post for all subscribers. I’ve seen a recent influx of paid and free subscriptions to this newsletter and True Crime Report, and it’s been very encouraging. I have a writing/editing job with Entrepreneur.com, and one of its many advantages is that it leaves me more time to do my personal writing.

I plan to publish this newsletter and TCR more often. I’d planned to write a couple of new editions by Friday, but my mom, Margaret, is in the hospital in Tennessee, and I confess I’m so distracted and worried I find it hard to do my regular job right now, less anything else. Focus is tough for me on a good day without medical intervention (thanks a lot, Adderall shortage). However, I can still do it if something isn’t weighing heavily on my mind, and as you might imagine, one’s mother being in perilous health a thousand miles away is a very heavy thing to think about.

Though I can say that mom’s challenges — at 85 and already in very poor health, she acquired both COVID and the flu, and even though she was fully vaccinated and boosted, that combination can be pretty terrible for the elderly — do qualify as an obsession. I marvel at my mom’s toughness on the one hand but also wonder how she got hit with such a bad double-whammy after three years of being careful.

Plenty of other things go through my head, too, the worries you can easily imagine, I’m sure. My two oldest siblings died years ago, my surviving sister has special needs, and while his mind is still as sharp as ever, my father is 86 and has already survived a stroke and cancer. I’m 55, reasonably fit, and mostly doing fine, so the family responsibilities that might come if the worst happens will fall on me. I can handle them, but no one wants to face those challenges, especially while grieving.

That’s a lot of personal stuff, but I have enough subscribers I feel I owe some explanation if the pace of publication doesn’t pick up the way I want it to.

I can tell you a few things I have planned for this particular newsletter:

• A look at Mattoon's Mad Gasser, a strange story from the 1930s that still haunts me. Was it a case of mass hysteria or a weirdo who liked to flood people’s homes with gas in the middle of the night?

• I’ve renewed my fascination with ancient catastrophes and want to zero in on one to write about and look at how such events have influenced civilization.

• The story of Thaddeus Cahill’s Amazing Telharmonium. Let’s just put it this way: The concept of streaming music is older than you know.

Again, thanks to all subscribers for Obsessions & Digressions and True Crime Report. As I publish more, please spread the word. I will make more content pay-only in the future, but I have learned there’s an art to choosing what to make available for folks willing to spend a few bucks a month (or a chunk of money each year), and I’ll work to find a balance as I go.