As I type this I’m struggling through a pretty bad flu, which I am convinced I contracted on Thursday. That’s when I went for a job interview at the World Financial Center, a hermetically-sealed office and mall complex sandwiched squarely between the Hudson River and the now-cavernous World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan. I’m unsure whether it was the biting winds or the horrendously long “pedestrian walkway” past the gaping hole of Ground Zero and back to the nearest subway that could get me home now that the Cortlandt Street stations are, it seems, permanently closed, but I haven’t been the same since I shrugged off the interview suit upon my arrival home. The next day Robin met his latest deadline, and we were looking forward to a somewhat active weekend — and then it hit. And it’s still hitting me, and has started hitting him. Funny how, at my age, “lucking out” translates into “thank goodness Robin and I got sick whilst I’m unemployed and he’s between issues!”

But you know, in the back of my head I can’t help but wonder whether I got ill, in part, from breathing in dead people. After all, we all know how the EPA of a government renowned for its repeated lies about everything else also lied to citizens about the air quality in that area. I know it’s over seven years later, but there’s still a ton of construction kicking up dust in that area, and the “walkways” offer scant protection, particularly on a cold and windy day.

Living through 9/11, being in the city the day the towers were attacked, one learns never to take life for granted. This is my 50th It’s All Good column for ComicMix, a milestone number of sorts, and so it seems fitting that I come back around to a subject touched upon in my first column here last February 15, scarcely a month after I’d lost my best friend. In fact, this would have been It’s All Good #51 but for the untimely death of my father. Sometimes the Reaper seems inescapable. Because in the end, of course, it is. And as it touches us all in real life, personally or otherwise (as with Heath Ledger’s recent demise), some of us find much less entertainment and amusement in its fictional counterpart. (more…)