Friday 21 August 2015

Jeff Seiler: Dave Sim & Me

JEFF SEILER:
Eleven years ago, when Cerebus ended, Dave Sim decided to answer all of his back mail. A month or so later, he had his "Jeff Seiler Day" in which he answered multiple letters I had written over the previous year. After I received that letter, I decided to keep writing, and he kept his promise to answer every letter he received. And now, I have a foot-high stack of letters written and received over 10 years or so. I will be posting full paragraphs or pages of interesting excerpts from those letters every Saturday.

From a letter dated 13 November, 2004, from Dave to me:
The VeriChip article was interesting in a vague and distant sort of way. I think I’d be the last one to actually undergo it, because of my rock-solid conviction that all health concerns are the hand of God. I don’t know of any good medical stories. [Ed: He does now!]

Gene Day had a check-up and was given a clean bill of health the week before he died of a heart attack at the age of 31. I tend not to read any medical stories because of my belief that good health is a matter of taking as good care of yourself as you can and accepting that only God knows when your "best before" date is. There's a part of the Koran which describes the ambivalence about going to war -- those poor fellows who would be alive today if they hadn't gone to war. This is sharply corrected by the observation that, if they had chosen to stay home, they would've walked to where they are lying right now because it was God's will that that was where they were going to die. Sounds like fatalism or predestination, but that's my view of life. When your number is up, your number is up.

Thanks for writing.
Best, Dave.

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