The premiere of “Deadwood: The Movie” on HBO this weekend offers cause for poignant celebration. Followers of the series have longed for a resurrection since its final episode aired in 2006. From critical reactions, the warning “be careful what you wish for” does not apply, so trust it will be as satisfying as advertised. Please do not call Friday night after 8.Accompanying the coverage has been the revelation that the show’s creator, David Milch, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Stories linger over his articulation of the symptoms as Milch describes, in as much detail he considers digestible by the listener, how the disease has reshaped his working habits and his life, which are pretty much the same thing. I would recommend reading the pieces by Alan Sepinwall in Rolling Stone, Mark Singer in The New Yorker, and Matt Zoller Seitz in New York Magazine.The stories have in common a kind of disciplined idolatry, which Milch deserves but does not encourage. They also include the grisly details of Milch and his money, which, according to what has become urban legend, was mostly gambled away on horse racing.The amounts mentioned are so massive as to be daunting to even the whitest of pari-mutuel whales. There is a table by the window in Santa Anita’s FrontRunner restaurant which was Ground Zero for David’s playing days, and which should have been bronzed long ago, or revamped as a horseplayers’ shrine on the order of Fatima or Lourdes.Equal time, though, must be granted to Milch as a lover of all things Thoroughbred as an owner, breeder, and a passionate fan of the physical act of horses racing for the profit and pleasure of their very fallible humans. Milch has left the one season of HBO’s “Luck” as ironclad evidence, and this writer was among those privileged to be part of the show.The series speaks for itself. No one really likes a magic trick explained. But here is where I would like to share a few examples of what it was like when, during story meetings, Milch would hold forth on the machinery spinning beneath the tale. It was important to him that we not only knew what we were doing in ushering our group of characters through a racetrack saga, but why.“We have made it a choice about what our approach is gonna be in terms of discovering the logic of these seemingly disparate events,” he said one day in September of 2010, “and that choice is that there is a spirit whose pulse is the pulse of the individual heart, but whose manifestation is only identifiable only in the aggregate. That’s kind of an exotic premise, but it is one we’ve announced and we have to stay true.”Which is what he tried to do in brewing together those trainers, jockeys, agents, hustlers, track officials, and horseplayers not simply with plotlines and dialogue, but with the steadily pulsing theme that they were drawn together by the spiritual lure of the animal.The idea was unstated but played, as Milch set up one day in the writing, by colleague John Perrotta, of a memorable scene in which a trainer dictated business terms to the pack of gamblers who had just claimed a horse.“And what he might do is,” suggested David, “as he watches the first of them pet the horse and the viewer sees the sort of radiance that begins to utter itself in the physical being of the human, you could see that sacrament begin to work too in Escalante. If he says to Miguel, ‘Go get four carrots.’ ”Milch had thought about a racetrack series for years, even as he was winning Breeders’ Cup races, and how the invested owner-horseplayer-fan comes to feeling either undeserving or physically incapable of embracing the moment. Office interns were force-fed replays of Milch’s Val Royal winning the 2001 Breeders’ Cup Mile at Belmont Park.“And he was only eight wide the whole way around, saved every [expletive forgiven] inch of ground,” David said. “And what you’re thinking about when you’re watching this is, ‘Regrettably, I’m going to explode before he finishes. And I think he’s got a good chance. It’s intolerable.’ That’s what you want in the scene.”As far as writing the horseplayers was concerned, Milch simply opened a vein and bled on the page (thank you, Red Smith):“Someone, like a degenerate gambler, organizes the externals of his life to legitimize essentially the barrenness of his inner landscape,” Milch said. “He wants to do exactly the same thing every day, no variety. Everything has to be physically in exactly the same place. He has to be there at the same time exactly so that he can operate unimpeded to choreograph whatever sequence of self-defeating gestures culminate in his being able to go to sleep at night. So, he’s got to be able to gamble. He’s got to be able to feel betrayed by the horses and by the people that he is associated with. Anything else he experiences as something that is going to kill him, because a person compulsive like that believes himself unequal to anything except executing the obsessive pattern of his days.”The pattern of David’s days has changed, and not necessarily for the better. But take it from me – Milch could spot the rest of the field half a mile and still get there first.