Crab Diaries

A new one for the blogroll: Crab Diaries, the serious, scary, witty, and laugh- out- loud funny journals of... well, she prefers to remain anonymous for now; let us just call her "My friend the Oncologist" and add, since she reveals this in a particularly funny post, that she is a (we met because she is a) Dog Friend.

Who has the best stories?-- and no, I am not talking about writers at the moment. I would answer, in my personal experience, E R docs, street cops, ambulance drivers, veterinarians, zookeepers, ranchers on remote spreads; people who are right up against it, who cannot waste time whining or wringing their hands or moaning "Whyyyy?" but who must get up and deal with life and death and accident and wreck, people who must Get The Job Done.

Then they go and tell the most mortal and hilarious stories about it. Long ago Betsy Huntington and I christened a whole sub- genre "Dead Animal Stories", born at the Zoo (Ask Annie D, who once wanted to call her memoirs Death and Diarrhea), grown to maturity in our hard ranch country. It was no accident that the night she died rancher John Davila (use the search box upper left for a few John tales) and his then- wife Becky showed up with an un-capped bottle of Jack Damage to tell them and remember her...

So it is no wonder that an Oncologist would have such stories, but such writing I have seen by her peers tends to solemnity. Hers loses no ground in seriousness, but is so much better than that. Get over there and read her, not just on death and life and Cancer but also on lying and perfectionism and whether you want your kids to be doctors and even Taking the Dog's Medicine...

I now officially begin to harass her to write a book.