Reading: The Devil's Guide To Hollywood by Joe Eszterhas
Music: Great Big Sea
TV/Movie: MST3K: The Movie
Link o' the Day: the Official Willie Nelson webpage

There are two things that bug me about entering my 40s. One, I don't seem to be able to digest peanuts as well as I used to. I love peanuts. Always have. Now they do hurtful, mean things to me.

Two..cultural heroes keep dying. This isn't even anything that new. Every year I tick off more people I'd have liked to have met, or at least seen perform, who died before I got the chance. The most recent being George Carlin who was scheduled to come to Newport this summer. I always considered him a spiritual mentor of sorts--we both having very similar philosophies on religion and life in general. I even wrote a poem once about having to kill George Carlin. It was a goof. I really had no plans to do him in myself, but I wrote it as a 'what if' scenario. It made the usual rounds of poetry journal submissions, but it's not a very good poem, so it was never picked up. I've officially "retired" it from the slush piles. I've yet to decide if I'm going to post it anywhere at all, or just leave it be as a bad job best forgotten.

Still.

What brought out the whole topic of cultural heroes shuffling off this mortal coil is that Pretty Maggie and I are off to see Willie Nelson tonight. He's on my "list" of people to see--and let's face it--he's the Keith Richards of country western. I hear the Grim Reaper is now his bass player. But like Keith Richards, he's still going strong.

I'm excited to be seeing Willie. And I expect it's going to be a terrific show and he's going to put on a stellar performance.

So now I'm keeping track of the touring schedules of BB King, Sam Moore, Earl Scruggs, Ralph Stanley, Pete Seeger and a host of others. (No, I'm not making a death watch list. This is just a list of folk I'd like to see who still tour, but could retire from the road at any time.)

I'm lucky that I've gotten a chance to meet many of my favorite authors over the years, but I still need to get over to Ireland to shake JP Donleavy's hand. He's geting up there, too. But still churning out books. (Yes, B&N and Borders, Donleavy is still writing new books.)

And Stan Lee. I'd like to meet him at some point. Thankfully, he looks unkillable.

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Okay, enough of that. Borderline depressive topic. Just going to enjoy the show tonight.

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Productive day. I got edits to the SFWA Bulletin done. The medical journal has been sent to the printer. Getting the Hank Moonjean cover worked out. It's all good. And my recent explorations of Facebook have made me some interesting contacts. Some old college friends. (Hi Bill! Hi Mary! Hi Brian! Hi Rory!) And some new writing friends. (Yo, Stefan!) And many others from around the globe. (I even get to practice a little Japanese now and then.)

Gotta love the internet.

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In honor of tonight's concert, today's link goes to the Official Willie Nelson webpage. Articles. News. Videos. Much goodness.

Cheers!