If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta [...]

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…as I was earlier:
In this case, however, the subject isn’t “bad memory” in the sense of “Huh? Did I just say something?” It’s more along the lines of, “Holy sh!t. Did I actually live through that?!?”
Via the MAD about Words blog (discovered, in turn, via DCWYTBMA), we have word of a definitive list — from [...]

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During an… odd few years in my younger life, my friend Dean and I became absorbed in experiments involving a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The brand name which Dean and I both “owned,” in those days when electronics were still manufactured domestically, was “Recordio.” (And yes, all right: we didn’t own them; our fathers did.)
What “odd [...]

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The New York Times reported the other day on the frenzied efforts among Boomers to sharpen their minds — particularly the parts of their minds involving memory.
When David Bunnell, a magazine publisher who lives in Berkeley, Calif., went to a FedEx store to send a package a few years ago, he suddenly drew a blank [...]

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(Here’s the first excerpt from the first booklet in the How It Was series. I do not plan to post the entire book this way, in regular blog posts spread out over time; what I do hope to do, I explain here.)
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Deep in his being, The Boy knew that somewhere out there existed a world [...]

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I know, I know… I said, “In my next post on How It Was, I’ll include an excerpt from ‘Book 1: Spring.’” It’s coming.
In the meantime, please check this page. It describes how I’m hoping to make the whole process of posting, downloading, and reading excerpts easier for both you and me. Eventually, it will [...]

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As I’ve mentioned, the events of the How It Was series of booklets took place in the real world as well as in the world of The Boy’s imagination (then and now). The real town where all this happened is in southern New Jersey, on the Delaware River and a few miles north of Philadelphia.
The [...]

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The year was 1990. I’d taken a leave of absence from work, and moved from New Jersey to Virginia, to a little town where no one I knew lived and only one or two people I knew had even heard of. (I’ll tell that whole story later.) I’d been in Ashland for a few [...]

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