Don't know if any of you ever followed my link to Blowing Shit Up With Gas but he stopped writing on September 19th and might never return. It's really sad. Patrick Hillman was one of my favorite writers — and don't you dare refer to him as a mere blogger, nay, not that composer of novels, screenplays, memoir and piano music — and I'm feeling the loss of any new work from him.

If you have any sense you aren't even reading this entry anymore, having followed the link in the first line, but in case you haven't, his last entry refers to his personal 9-11: 9-18, in which he learned of his mother's breast cancer as well as something else so big that it shook him to his core and made writing a blog seem pretty damn silly (my words, not his, though that's the gist of it). He hasn't posted anything new since then, and 38 people have commented with well-wishes.

My point is, there's not much worse for a writer than to go through something that you can't, for one reason or another, write about. Especially after keeping an online repository for years. For this reason, and many others, I feel for the guy.