New Adventures In Senior Moments
The store was pretty hopping yesterday. Authors Cat Delani, Cassandra Celia, and Paul Michael Anderson all stopped in, along with significant others, family members, and friends. Longtime reader Z was also on hand, and he gifted me with a first edition hardcover of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt, which I was immediately super excited about. So excited, in fact, that when I began excitedly explaining it to Mary (who recognizes and acknowledge’s HST’s impact on my own writing, but is not a big HST enthusiast like myself)…
…that I began explaining The Curse of Lono to her, rather than The Great Shark Hunt. And in thanking Z profusely, I told him twice that the only edition of The Great Shark Hunt I own was the big Taschen coffee-table sized edition — an edition which doesn’t exist for The Great Shark Hunt, but rather — once again — The Curse of Lono.
Mary, Paul Michael Anderson, and me. Photo copyright Paul.
See, The Curse of Lono is HST’s last book-length long form bit of writing (unless you count The Rum Diary, which was written decades earlier but published long after). In it, he and Ralph go to Hawaii to cover a marathon, all on the dime of Running Magazine. As you might expect, things go terribly awry. The Great Shark Hunt, meanwhile, is a 600-page collection of HST’s essays from the 1950s through the early 1970s. They are vastly different books, and only a novice, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, a drug-addled illiterate, or possibly Grok or ChatGPT would confuse the two. And yet that’s what me, one of the world’s biggest HST enthusiasts and a writer in my own right, did repeatedly yesterday.
I didn’t even realize my mistake until this morning, when I woke up at 4am and sat down with my first cup of coffee and fired up the computer for a day of writing.
So, yeah… that was… unnerving.
They ran all sorts of tests and scan s on me earlier this year, trying to get to the bottom of my cognitive stuff. The doctors ultimately said it was stress and sleep issues.
Which is all the more reason why I’m looking forward to retirement.
The good news is that my back is feeling marginally better. If you read yesterday’s newsletter, then you know that I seriously jacked my back last Monday evening, while working out, and movement this past week was an exercise in agony, particularly after sitting at a computer and writing, or sitting on a stool at the store.
At 58, I don’t lift for bulk. Those days are long behind me, and in truth, I’ve never been able to bulk up much, regardless of what I ate or how much protein powder I consumed. The only area I’ve ever been able to increase in mass is my waistline.
I lift every other day. Partly because it is an activity I can do with my youngest son when he’s not busy with band or school (and given that he’ll be heading off to college next year, I’m happy for any activity that lets us spend time together). But I also lift because definition and strength-training are important to me. Especially the latter. You lose mass and strength as you age. It’s important to keep that strength up, much as you can.
The problem with that is (as others my age can attest) you can do something like lift weights or get out of bed or pick up your cat or twist open a bottle of beer or hug your kid or sleep and performing any of these actions will sometimes put you in traction for a month.
I haven’t been in traction, but my entire spine — from the base of my neck down to my tailbone — let me know all last week that there will be no more lifting of weights for quite some time, and it made everything from writing to sleeping an exercise in pain.
I spent the last 7 days subsisting on gin, bourbon, and Ben-Gay. (I try to avoid Advil, Tylenol, and the like, but Mary forced some on me this past week, as well).
It’s ridiculous, this getting older thing…
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Got word from Pandi Press last night that the November Pandi Pack, featuring THE BEST OF BRIAN KEENE and FOUR PAST MEAT NIGHT, is now sold out. The boxes began shipping on Saturday. About half of them have gone out. The other half will ship after the Thanksgiving holiday. Thanks to everyone who ordered one. Hope you enjoy them. And if this will be your first introduction to the work of Gemma Amor, Laurel Hightower, RJ Joseph, or Hailey Piper, then I particularly hope you enjoy them.
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Still having some problems with Red Sonja’s radiator, so I plan on spending much of today at the mechanic, drinking tepid Keurig coffee while they fool around under her hood. That will put a serious crumple in today’s writing, but there’s no helping it. I need to drive to New Jersey, Virginia, and West Virginia in the coming days, and I don’t want to do that while my truck is leaking antifreeze.