I was listening to Vic Chesnutt last night and was missing him something awful. He was pretty much a quadraplegic after an automobile accident he had when he was eighteen. He was from Zebulon, GA, but hung around Athens, mostly. He overdosed on muscle relaxants in 2009, $50,000 in medical debt, without health insurance, delaying surgery. It was his "third or fourth" suicide attempt. Kathleen Tyner, my old Strategies for Media Literacy pal from San Francisco first told me about Vic back in the 90s. She sent me a video about him called Speed Racer which is great. It's about the recording of his second album West of Rome, which Michael Stipe produced and is also great. This video clip was from one of Chesnutt's last concerts, in November 2009, at a house in Montreal. It's one of my favorite live performances of all time. The song is from the album North Star Deserter. RIP Vic Chesnutt. Also, in case it wasn't clear from the above: everyone should have health care.

Reading tonight with David Joy and R Dean Johnson at the world-famous Apollo Pizza in beautiful downtown Richmond, Kentucky. Joy is a North Carolinian with a hot new novel about love and drugs called Where All Light Tends to Go and R Dean teaches writing at Eastern Kentucky University and has a new book called Delicate Men, a topic of endless interest to many of us. 8 pm, baby. Beer, books, fried ravioli. Killer pizza. Ale-8 and craft brew galore on tap. All on a flipping Thursday. Crazy.