Gettin’ Old

 

Argh. Stress at work has given me heartburn; I’m waking up so often during the night I’ve taken to taking Tums proactively before bed. And yesterday, while doing nothing except turning my torso gently to the right, I seemed to have pulled a muscle in the lower left spinal region. While laying on the floor last night watching TV with the ladies I rolled over and it erupted in a piercing bolt of painful lightning all up and down my poor back that I could hardly move. Last night I slept terribly; woke at 2:15 am and went down to the basement office and watched, among other things, 1963’s Godzilla vs. King Kong on the internet.

I have been eating well again, and I think I lost a few pounds. I walked a few times and hurled the weights early in the week, too. But it seems like it’s one of those one-step-forward, two-steps-back kinda things. The more progress I make towards living a healthy lifestyle, the more work I find I need to do.

Or maybe it was just a string of bad luck. The work stress seems to be solving itself, and I should have some resolution Monday. Hopefully it won’t affect my weekend circadian rhythms. That is, if I’m going in to work, as we’re expecting snow here in northern New Jersey Sunday night into Tuesday morning.

On a better note, I finished Craig Nelson’s Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness. What a fantastic book! In my World War II readings, I discovered that books in the subject generally fall into two broad categories: those that take a bird’s-eye view, focusing on strategy, battle tactics, the big personalities, the massed movements of armed forces, global repercussions, and those that focus on the man-on-the-ground, the soldier and his experiences, the awful events faced by civilians caught in the crossfire, and how such battles and policies affected the populations involved. Bird’s-eye view versus man-on-the-ground. What Nelson’s book does is create the best balance between these two angles of the twenty or so books I’ve read to date. I highly recommend it, and will keep an eye out for more of his work. There are a couple of lectures of his on the internet I listened to during my commute to work that I’d recommend also.

On the other hand, I’m having difficulty making headway into Red Mars. This is the book that’s lived the longest on my shelves, the elder statesman of the forty or fifty SF paperbacks I have on deck. I first cracked it around 2001, two decades ago, and only made it through the prologue. Now I’m around 160 pages in, almost a third of the way through, and it’s still slow going. But I’m keeping an open mind and will review it later next month.

My youngest daughter, age twelve, alternates indoor soccer with weight training at a local gym. Last night after dropping her off, my oldest and I drove to B&N, where I picked up, entirely on whims, two slim water-themed SF paperbacks (I’ve been reading too many time-consuming epics of late). One is The Maracot Deep, a tale about Atlantis by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the other The Water of Thought by Fred Saberhagen, something about alien water that gives people weird psychological powers and/or makes them go mad (?). They’re now the newest denizens of the On Deck circle, and may their shelf life be, uh, a fraction of that of Red Mars.

I also unearthed a high school notebook of mine, a record of what was going through my head forty years ago. Thumbing through it, I realized I just hit a gold mine. I discovered dozens and dozens of character names, perfect for the novel I’ve been planning out these past couple of weeks. Bad guy names, good guy names, background guy names. (It’s a novel based on World War II, so there are lots of guys as opposed to chicks.)

Broke out the electric guitar a couple times this week. Wrote another composition – I now think I have something like six albums worth of material – three CDs in today’s lingo. (Do the young ’uns even buy CDs anymore? Don’t think so …) Couple new things I’ve been fiddling with is “Motherless Children” – known to people my age as the theme from “Not Necessarily the News,” and the Dio-led Black Sabbath song “Neon Knights.” Among other stuff.

Well, that’s enough of an update. More meaty stuff to follow in the next couple of days.