Alcoholics commonly report that, unlike non-alcoholics, they have an amazingly vivid, powerful memory of their first drinking experience. They knew as it was happening to them that they were encountering something that was forever going to alter their lives. Their surroundings still glow around them, in memory. The virgin taste is strong and sweet and pure. They are transformed.

I drink little, and I only barely remember my first beer. But I remember my first word. I was six years old, in the first grade at Escuela Anaco, a small school run for the children of the Americans who worked the oilpatch in the Venezuelan highlands. The word was ‘look’, and I was rendered instantly and permanently intoxicated by the sudden realization that the black squiggles on the page meant something.

I remember the book resting on my little desk in front of me. I remember the light coming in the windows. I remember the sounds of the other kids around me. I remember it all, like it happened this morning.

I was transformed.

–Excerpted from an essay I wrote in 1989 for the ‘Visions’ fanzine. (Yes, I’m plagiarizing my own self.)

My family moved every couple of years, and I quit trying too hard to make friends, because I’d just lose them soon. No matter where we lived, I grew up in libraries, news-stands, and bookstores. I think a lot of addictive readers suffered social isolation as children.

I would read books about everything, blitzing through uncontrolled crack-head runs with various authors and subjects. Baseball novels (don’t see those much any more), archaeology, astronomy, paleontology, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden. The Bobbsey Twins. Even the Freddie the Pig series, for Ghod’s sake.

Then the damn science fiction and fantasy books crept up on me. I read the complete L. Frank Baum Oz series, the Mushroom Planet series, the Rick Brant series, the Tom Swift, Jr. series.

I read everything I could find by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I never, never join organizations. I joined the Burroughs Bibliophiles. I still have the membership card.

I hung out at the K-G Drugstore when we lived in Houston, when I was in the fifth and sixth grades. Every afternoon I came in and read all the new comic books on the rack, until they kicked me out for the day. I learned many years later that my parents had had a quiet chat with the owner. I’m not sure, but I think they bribed or begged him into letting me stay, because they quit kicking me out.

Doc Smith, Andre Norton. Asimov’s Lucky Starr series.

Then I mainlined Heinlein, and was transformed again. Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke, egged on by John W. Campbell at Astounding Stories, created modern science fiction as we know it. Heinlein also created me, in many ways.

There’s no turning back after you’ve injected some pure Heinlein into your mindstream.

This research asserts that 38% of all US adults read books less than once a week, or even never. Bet they never shot up any Heinlein when they were teen-agers. Buncha prissy goody-two-shoes mundanes.

I have no idea how many books I’ve read, but it’s likely to be well over twenty thousand, because I used to burn through one almost daily, usually reading multiple books at a time.

I still go to the Bryan Library at least once a week and load up. I’m still addicted to words, and now I struggle with it. The internet has made it worse, almost unmanageable, because now I don’t have to go anywhere to encounter an endless stream of words.

I still remember the voluptuous, warm flavor of the word ‘look’.

I bet I’m not alone here.

I can’t vouch for these figures but they sound right. In any case an interesting series of extrapolations for us SF writers. From my Mom.

Like so many of the other musician’s I’ve written about here, Chris Rea is a survivor. His wisdom and depth are hard-won, and there’s as much sorrow as joy in his music.

He’s a superstar in Europe, but never broke big in the U.S. After a lengthy life-threatening bout of pancreatitis, he decided to quit making pop music designed to maximize his income, and returned to his first love, the Blues. In 2005, he released ‘Blue Guitars’, a mammoth project combining his painting with 130 new songs on 11 CDs. I don’t have it, because it’s so damn expensive, but it’s supposed to be incredible, and I hope to end up with it eventually. He’s said that he’s retiring for health reasons, but I hope that’s premature.

In the meantime, you might try ‘Blue Jukebox’. And here’s the ‘Blue Cafe’ vid, from the album of the same name.

And let’s not neglect ‘Nothing to Fear’, with some mind-melting slide guitar work and an Arabic theme.

And ‘Cry for Home’, which is about the African slave trade and its connection to the heart of American music and culture. Deep, rocking blues.

His early masterpiece is the album ‘The Road to Hell’. Los Blues Guys performed it, and I may re-master the tape that survives of one of those performances. In the meantime, check out Chris’s version.

He’s one of the most soulful slide guitar players alive. And there’s a Texas connection, too. On ‘The Road to Hell’, we have his song, ‘Texas’. I like the conceit in the video that it’s possible to drive from England Germany to Texas, if you just want it bad enough:

It rocks much harder than ‘Road to Hell’, incidentally.

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