Warren Zevon in the Times

A great piece on the still-with-us Warren Zevon. You show 'em, man.

In His Time of Dying [NY Times, via amygdala]

"I'm on the periphery of a lot of despair, of course," he said. "You'd have to be stupid not to be. I have my moments when I'm not too thrilled about this whole deal. But at the same time, the songs have never come like this, so I'd have to feel more gratitude than anything else. I'm probably in the intensest creative period of my life."

...Zevon can calmly itemize some of the things he doesn't have to worry about anymore. High cholesterol. Getting fat. Going bald. "Technology's on the decline, and that's a comfort to me," he says in a staticky phone conversation.

...When he got the diagnosis, Zevon told Hiaasen: "This is a lot harder for you than it is for me. If you had gone to bed as many nights as I did in the old days knowing that you had taken so much stuff that could kill you and not knowing if you would wake up, this is not as shocking as you think."

..."People write because it seems like it'll be an easier job than carpet laying, that they might meet more girls," he says. "And they write because the world strikes them as being a marvelous place, and they want to keep bringing that to everybody's attention. You know, a scary place, a menacing place, an exciting place because it's scary and menacing. But mainly, kind of glorious."

A valuable article, worth reading all of.