Read on Twitter
Yday: listened to fab podcast of @craigtimes and @Carl_Hiaasen & thought: September is Suicide Prevention Month! How often have I been close to the edge & backed away thanks to rererereads of peerless CH +, erm, Philip Morris (deffo slower than, erm, OK, delete alts)? 1/n
Started thread w key quotes of the peerless CH. TIL that Twitter, while claiming to save my unsent tweets (had more, so much more to say about the Hiaasen oeuvre), had done a Hadley on Hemingway on this Thread In Progress 2/n
Highlights of this excellent podcast: Hiaasen& #39;s research for Chemo& #39;s weed whacker prosthetic (quoted in the original TIP, cusses, Twitter, cusses), CH on Stranahan and Yancy and Skink, sorry Samaritans you& #39;re out of your league 3/n
Asked my sister (whose selfless part in looking after our mother includes rererewatching Now Voyager) if she& #39;d read CH, & she said No, but some of her students had (she teaches 2nd grade). I sketched out the premises of Skinny Dip & Razor Girl, must reads when things are BAD 4/n
And said the word that encapsulates Hiaasen is condign. Bad things happen to bad people. REALLY bad things. It& #39;s glorious. IRL, one reason you end up close to the edge is that there are OTOH VERY bad people & OTOH people who don& #39;t want to get involved. 5/n
In Hiaasenworld, there are VERY bad people and people who get involved (do they ever). NB quite a lot of the VBP are racist morons, if you& #39;re close to the edge you need a kind of feel-good that helplines seldom provide. 6/n
Suicide Prevention Month somehow calls to mind National Brotherhood Week, but hey. The great thing about owing a debt to Carl Hiaasen is it& #39;s easily repaid by NOT GOING TO FLORIDA. Thereby dodging 6-inch flying cockroaches ("Palmetto bugs") and banana spiders. So good. 7/7
