■ The Affordable Care Act saved my life. At my wife’s hectoring, I got it right before I had my heart attack. Every time I criticize Obama, I preface it with, “Besides the fact that the guy saved my life …” What I felt after my heart surgery was that I wasn’t done yet. It made me determined to work harder. There was an acknowledgment that there’s more behind you than ahead of you, so use your time wisely.

■ I hadn’t had a drink for 33 years, but after I got out of the hospital, I was told that red wine would thin my blood and keep me healthy. So I had a glass or two every day. Then, during the pandemic, my best friend died, and two or three glasses turned into two or three bottles. I slipped and fell in a restaurant on North Avenue after a few glasses, and as I was standing up, I saw this look cross my son’s face and thought, He’s ashamed. I said, I’m done with this shit. I’m sober now and in a recovery program.

■ Albert Camus said that artists always circle back to the one or two images that first opened their heart. I loved cartoons as a kid. I loved Dick Tracy. I loved Mad magazine. The first art I ever saw that made the hair stand up on my arms were holy cards, religious Mass cards — the ones they hand out at a funeral. There are some really grim ones, like the one of St. Sebastian. He’s got like six arrows in him. All of those things blur together in my work.

■ My dad was a World War II veteran. He invaded Okinawa. I think he had PTSD, but back then, we didn’t know what to call it. He was a tough disciplinarian. Let’s just leave it at that. But he also had an amazing sense of humor and a remarkable sense of how to talk to people who were grieving. He sold burial vaults, and he would say, “I speak for the dead.”

■ There’s a Marc Smith poem about when you get to the top of the mountain, pull the next person up. I think of how Ed Paschke held out a hand to me — opened doors, made introductions, just went out of his way to help me. I’ve always owned a gallery that took no percentage of sales from other artists. I make an embarrassing amount of money for a democratic socialist, but if you subscribe to a kind of elitism, that Ayn Randian fucking notion, it erodes your humanity.

■ Haiti changed the way I thought about everything. The artists I met there made art because they absolutely had to. And that’s what I tell young artists: If you feel you have a choice about this, go do something else. Collect stamps, play the fucking trumpet, I don’t care. This is a hard thing to give your life to.

■ There’s a certain kind of rebellion that was born into me. I still struggle with that. But before, it was a kind of nihilism about where I was in the world. Now I think I’m rebelling against the right things.

■ Jack Kevorkian was a saint. There’s no more fundamental human right than to end your own suffering. I remember when a friend’s father died, the priest said something about the value of his suffering. I gave a eulogy, and I almost said to that priest, “You’re out of your mind. There’s no value in having this good man suffer.” I want a perfectly chilled Bombay martini and a hundred Valiums.