A friend dropped dead today: massive heart attack. One minute, he was here; the next, he wasn’t.

Randy Shields.

He and I met because we both have the writing disease. A few years back he published a fine little volume: Wear Your Love Like Heaven. You can find it in the tubes.

Today, a mutual friend, another writer, she, of Randy, wrote this: “He was always reaching for the stars and romancing a future utopia that was such a dynamic and enlightened place, with a superb view of the entire cosmos. It was a recurring visual mood in his writing, regardless of the topic. If you clicked on one of his essays, there was a chance you might be pulled into his utopia where you would scroll and scroll while love would fall like rain and peace would break out across the sky—because that's how nature rolled in that place. I never doubted that he had somehow caught a glimpse of this exuberant utopia, across time. And I don't doubt that's where he is now, wearing his love like heaven.”