I know he's not going to read this, but I'm going to wish Harlan Ellison a happy 75th birthday anyway. Kathleen David has an appreciation. And an online search shows I wrote about this same thing last year. But I'm still going to write about it and send the best wishes.
I found out last week that the documentary about him Dreams With Strange Teeth came out on DVD yesterday. I tried to add it to the Netflix queue, but it's listed as having an unknown release date. Then I found out Sundance Channel was showing it Monday night, but I don't get Sundance. And the local versions of the chain stores aren't carrying it. I went ahead and ordered it on Amazon, as it has extras that wouldn't be shown on TV, plus it looks like something I'd come back to again and again, and it wouldn't just sit on the shelf after being watched.
And I have a lot of his books I haven't read yet, but it comes back to the subconscious fear that it's a finite resource and once it's read it's all over. I think the unread book is preferable to one you've read (even if you want to read it again) so that's why I've got such a stockpile of books and videos. I even have a couple of his shows on the TiVo, the last "Masters of Science Fiction" adapting one of his stories and an "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" adapting his tale of going undercover in the gangs of Brooklyn. I guess it's like WC Fields being so afraid of poverty that (as the story goes) he'd jump off a train and set up a bank account in towns he'd never been in before, leaving a trail of accounts even he didn't know about.