There is a countdown in the other direction too

Luke O'Neil

17 Aug 2026 • 13 min read

My wife said my sister was texting her to tell me to call her back so that wasn’t great right off the bat. You wouldn’t imagine she was doing that to tell me something urgently good. I can’t even think of an example of something that is urgently good. Almost all good news can wait. I guess maybe if someone had been born but people are very rarely born out of the blue. There is usually a pretty distinct countdown involved.

I had just poured myself a drink so I went outside to smoke and to enjoy the last few minutes of my life before I had to have some kind of news broken for me.

There is a countdown in the other direction too obviously. The opposite of being born. Especially when someone has been sick for years. Which is what this call was always inevitably going to be about.

I didn’t cry when she told me I just said oh no in a soft voice. Not until I had to tell someone else and then I wept big gasping tears. I don’t know why it works like that. Maybe if I never spoke it aloud to another soul I would never have cried. If someone tells you something you can hold it like a secret but once you tell someone else it’s not that anymore.

Every year at Christmas I would make a point of informally interviewing my uncle. At a certain age you realize your aunts and uncles are real human beings and have done things you would never have known about or bothered to care about before. I would ask about being at sea when he was young and how much of the world he had seen and about all the concerts he had been to and in the later years about the developments in his suffering. Neither of us mentioning that I was worried it was mine to inherit as well.

One year I would say I should interview you about your life one of these days and one year he would say you should interview me about my life one of these days and we both agreed every time we would do that and then never did.

I forgot there was a countdown. I forgot the one true thing.

Later that night I sat outside back in my same sitting outside spot and took videos of two sleek bunnies dancing around one another in the street light shadows for ten minutes. Their courtship was taking forever.

That doesn’t have anything to do with my uncle. I don’t think he was particularly interested in rabbits one way or the other. I guess I could have asked him that in the interview.

Our family has had all of the home movies from the 1960s-80s transferred over and again throughout the years onto different formats. I haven’t looked at any of them in a decade or more. My grandmother used to make us sit and watch them and joke about her kooky son for having pointed the camera at the dark ocean in Maine for twenty minutes or at some birds nesting in a rocky cove or some flowers blowing in the wind. I didn’t realize until last night that I do that too now with my phone. I don’t know why it is exactly it’s just that it all looks so beautiful. The impulse is to capture it forever or at least for a little while.

Long time readers will have heard of my beloved “wacky uncle” Robby. Robert Madden of Massachusetts, not yet 70 years old, died from complications of Parkinson’s. He was a merchant marine, a postal carrier, and soccer player and fanatic. He saw Santana 50 times and smoked loud. He has also appeared in many of my stories throughout the years.

I read a bunch of the typical posts about Thanksgiving Uncles and it dawned on me that I was lucky to never really have that kind of uncle. All me and my uncles ever really talk about is how insane my grandmother made us all and how cool it was to go see Santana all the time in the seventies.

I posted something to that effect when I got home and someone shared a video of Santana playing Soul Sacrifice at Woodstock and it just consumed me for the next hour.

Everyone in the band is five seconds away from collapsing but just so in the pocket and on the moon at the same time.

I read a YouTube comment:

“The whole band is battling quantum realities but the drummer is keeping the portal open.”

Speaking of music thanks to our man Dan Ozzi for the nice Hell World shout out in this piece. There are also recommendations for a bunch of more properly music-focused newsletters in there you should check out in the wake of the gutting of BrooklynVegan and a number of other sites.

Dan reviewed Danny McBride's book of short stories for Hell World a few weeks back.

If you're visiting from Dan's link here are some recent-ish music related pieces in Hell World.

It is Hell World's eighth birthday this month. What a great time to buy a subscription to support this place. Thank you as always for being here either way.

50% off one year of Hell World

Something that I said around January 6 that I think about often is that I don't want the cops to shoot them too I want them to not shoot us like they do not shoot them. I've had a similar thought about the Luigi Mangione case this week. I do not think it would make for a society we would want to live in where powerful people are assassinated regularly I just want them to also extend that courtesy of not killing us to us. It is already very illegal to kill someone with a gun but not by policy or for profit. Just sort of an unfair bargain we have going here!

Related reading:

United decided also that if we’re going to deny claims, the best people to deny claims to are alcoholics, drug addicts, and the mentally ill. They’re not real good at following up on their options. The chances of getting an appeal from one of them is close to zero.

Is that something they said explicitly in documents that were uncovered or are you just characterizing their general way of thinking?

That didn’t come out in the trial, but I do a lot of this stuff, representing health care providers with insurance companies all over the country and I see that a lot. They’re weighing risks. They’re like this is low risk for us to deny this because the odds of getting dinged on it… They also have death tables, and they say, you know what, in two or three years this person isn’t insured anymore. In two or three more years they’re probably not alive. Dead people can’t make claims.

This is the most ghoulish cynical capitalistic nightmare shit I’ve heard in a long time!

You know what’s amazing about it? Think about how much money is involved. Behavioral healthcare and psych treatment is really only about 5-10% of the entire medical expenses in the U.S. 90% is medical-surgical, cancer, heart stuff, broken bones, whatever. It would be like a rounding error for them to fix this. United is not going to lose money because they’re suddenly covering all this stuff. They’ll still make a profit. They may make less, but this is not a huge sector of the claims they pay every year.

Good taste haver of the week!

I had a few new pieces go up at Flaming Hydra the other day. Paid subscribers can keep reading for one of them down below plus some News to Piss You Off and the song of the week and some funny posts I liked.

Ruination

Me and the boys had grown tired of noticing addicts existing in our general proximity so we finally said to hell with it and rounded them all up in our trucks and drove them to the cages in the pit we had set up. It was honestly surprisingly easy due to most of them were rather sickly and disoriented. On account of all of the drugs they had been doing you would imagine. From everything we had heard on the news we had figured they would have put up more of a fight.