A commercial airliner courses through the sky at 30,000 feet on its way to Los Angeles. On the plane, a 56-year-old professional comedian has the sort of heart attack that most people don’t survive. But this guy does because he wants the chance to craft the windfall of material that dying will provide. 12 medically miraculous years later, our hero’s heart is attacking him again and this time it’s in cahoots with his pacemaker, his liver, and his age. Learning he cannot live without a new one, he chooses to fight. What’s it like to be told the only way you can live, is if someone else dies? If he gets these previously enjoyed organs, will it feel like someone else’s heart beating in his chest? Can he hang on long enough to know? Why, how, and if he hangs on is answered across 82 diary entries chronicling as many days spent in the Transplant Center at Cedars-Sinai, waiting, hoping against the odds for a perfect confluence of circumstances to grant him resurrection. They say a dying man’s life flashes before him. But for our Tin Man, it’s more of a meander. 78 excruciating days of looking back, in slow motion, at a highly unusual life lived in wonderment, drama, fear, a dash of shame...and enduring love. The Tin Man Diaries leads you on a life or death quest through a postmodern OZ, in search of a heart.
