I just had an epiphany.

Thank you very much, bartender. I’ll have another.

In this festive autumn of doom, it occurs to me that my career has been in thirds.

In the first I was a reporter covering rock stars and their fabulous deaths.

In the second I wrote novels about jolly New Yorkers who killed one another.

In the third I’m covering medical research designed to keep people from dying.

Thank you, commie (well, sort of) Dad for telling me, at age 10 in 1953 at the heart of the McCarthy-inspired purge of red- and red-leaning newspapermen like him, that “the fascist takeover of America is imminent” and that he would be one of the first taken out and shot.

Thank you, Dad, for my career. And my sense of humor.

Yes, this is the heart of the memoire I’m writing. Now I have an outline.

Thank you, Donald Trump, for being the man my father warned me about.

Thank you again, bartender. Keep ‘em coming,