signs, signs, everywhere signs.

This should save me a lot of time and effort: I think Paul Auster already wrote this book, about getting old. I just thought of that today. But I haven't read it, because I was still young when it came out, yes, all the way back in last year or something.

Put another way, or possibly just the same way again less effectively: besides me just generally being an illiterate punk who doesn't turn to non-fiction books for answers, me not having read Auster's book is the reason why it didn't occur to me sooner that I should read it.

Which is also pretty elliptical, as Vatcher would say, but what I am holy living shit trying and failing to eventually get at is: at the time Winter Whatever came out, I didn't really care at all about Paul Auster getting older, literally couldn't give a fuck (ok probably not literally but you know, discursive writing breaks rules), even though I like one of his books enough to have read it very carefully with undiminished appreciation three or four times, or more, and two others I find OK (and a few others I didn't finish. And quite a few I didn't even start, etc).

But OK, so even when I first heard about this author whose one book I really really like's new book about his own aging process, I was just still an asshole young person yawning a droll and mostly-uncaring "hmm, yes, that's not terribly exciting, is it...too bad"....I didn't even think to think "Poor Paul", which was nine-tenths (I'm counting the space but not the apostrophe, discursive writing breaks etc) of the name of a bar I used to go to in Tallahassee quite often. It might've even been spelled "Pour Paul's", in fact, which is simply unforgivable.

Anyway then I first noticed my old-person neck about three months ago, and now I can barely stop looking at it. And then today I thought of Paul Auster's book about getting old. I realize that this particular kind of bodily obsessing is what women do starting at age 21 or something, with any random part of their body, and yes ageism is a shitty thing to perpetuate even if I'm talking about my own saggy neck, but the problem with it is: it's no longer my neck there in the mirror.

What I mean is, the NYT review quotes Auster as saying, "Some memories are so strange to you, so unlikely, so outside the realm of the plausible, that you find it difficult to reconcile them with the fact that you are the person who experienced the events you are remembering.”

That's just it: fucking all of my memories are completely plausible to me right now. In my mind I'm still the same stupid kid who did every bit of it: it's my present reality that's becoming increasingly difficult to believe. What with the neck and everything.

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And then, because writing about aging is still turning out to be so fucking boring (reallly need to check out that Auster book for some tips, although that NYT review isn't so so favorable is it, maybe there's hope), here's a slightly less boring herring recipe. Actually it's pretty completely boring too, on paper. But when I first tasted it in Sweden oh so long ago, it seemed pretty genius and I just assumed it was their Abba-brand herring or Nordic light or general Swedish quietness or whatever that made it great. Something unexportable. But it's not that at all: it's simply the globally-available genius of butter and hot potatoes that make it great. See? "You're never too old to etc".

Here's where I got the instructions from.

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