This is me, Craig Ferguson.

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See you on the road, my DearS.

My name is Craig Ferguson.

The name of this podcast is Joy.

I talk to interesting people about what brings them happiness.

Welcome to the Joy Podcast.

Welcome to the Kids Super Studios here in Brooklyn.

I am your host Podcasts Craig Ferguson.

My guest today is a great American writer.

If you don't know his work, you're in for a tweet.

And if you do know his work, you're in for a treat.

His name is Lawrence Block.

He's a friend of mine, but more importantly than that well, it depends how you look at it.

But he's just a great writer and you should read him if you like to read.

And if you don't like to read, then just listen to him talking today.

And if you do like to listen to people talking and like to, I'll let you get on with it.

Here's Larry Block.

You told me like.

Five minutes ago, ten minutes ago maybe when we were walking outside in the intense feet while why we've got a lot of beverages right, because we had got the dates wrong for this recording.

Specifically, you said it was Thursday.

I said it was the eighteenth.

But Thursday is the seventeenth, and so you were right about Thursday and I was right about the eighteenth.

I think we can agree that that's fair.

We're here now, that's the main thing, all right, There you go.

So you said to me outside as we were walking towards the subway to maybe go home and come back tomorrow, that you are retired.

You're not going to write anymore.

Is that right?

That's true.

I haven't written in gee, it's just about three years now.

I feel like I've heard that from you before, though, No, no, no, there have been times I thought I was probably done writing novels and that, but this is categorically different, and it's it's curious in that in twenty twenty two I wrote two novels in the course of the one year.

I wrote a book called The Burglar, The Burglar Who Met Frederick Brown, which is a nice way.

I think.

I haven't read that one.

Oh well, what a treat.

You haven't a treat.

I haven't stared, right, don't tell me it.

No spoilers, all right, no spoilers.

But it's it's a fitting volume, I think, to conclude the series.

The Barney series, the Bernie series.

Yeah, yeah, that's and you've done with Scudder.

Scudder, you finished a wild back, right, no.

I wrote, I wrote a final volume of that in twenty twenty two.

Also, I haven't read that either.

I thought the Scudder one that you finished with was a drop of the hard.

Stuff that had been the last one.

But then, so.

That's why I thought you'd retired before, because you said, okay, that's Scudder done.

That well it seemed to be.

But this the new book, I thought i'd send it to you, and I clearly did not.

Sorry, maybe I go I'll get it tomorrow.

It's called the Autobiography of Matthew Scudder.

I do not have that.

And what it is is a fellow that approached me about doing a short like three or four thousand word biography of Scudder, to write about the character.

And I thought, I don't want to do that, and I thought about it a little more, and I thought, if Anyone's going to write Scudder's biography, should be the man himself.

And I thought, I thought about it a little more and realized that what I wanted to do was a full length book and it would be Scudder telling his story.

And the premise was that I've been approached to do this, that I the Lawrence Block for years has been writing books about Matthew Scudder which have represented slight fictionalizations of his cases and that and this is his Scudder giving his own memories.

Do you go back over the books that you wrote for Scott particularly, some of them are referenced, certainly, but it's more filling in blanks than about his life and background and everything else.

It's it may be the most enjoyment and satisfaction I've ever had sitting down, sitting down and writing it, and it's you know it's it's kind of meta, which is a word I generally avoid using because I don't think I or anyone else knows exactly what it is.

No, it doesn't, you know.

And and once it became the marks up Zuckerberg's new name for uh, for Facebook, it was even more reason not to use the word.

But that I kind of kind of is what it is conceptually, it's a divice.

I've seen before though a few times people use it from tank time in literature.

I remember, uh Carvonicet used it with Kilgo Trout, didn't he the other way around?

All kind of kind of yeah, there was an awareness, uh that way, But I think this is I had thought that this was the first time that a writer had who after a long standing series, had turned the the I think it probably is not quite Oh, it turned out that Seminon did something similar with McGray.

Yeah.

I got a hold of a copy of that to see what it was like.

Unfortunately, well fortunately for my ego, it was lousy.

It was it wasn't real.

Honestly, a bit of Simon and a lot of those make Gray books.

I'm like, you've that could use a rewrite.

Yeah, a lot of a miss company out like one a week, you know, but.

This it wasn't terribly interesting.

But anyway, I did have a good time with it, and when I finished, I thought, well, gee, that was nice.

I wrote two books in the course of a year.

I'm pleased with both of them.

I had a good time doing them.

I'll probably write more.

And as the weeks passed, it became clear to me that I was wrong about that, that I was done, that I felt really complete.

This was a nice capstan for this Scudder series.

It was a nice ending to the Bernie series, and I didn't want to write anymore.

I've been doing this all the time for sixty five years.

I've written more books than anybody could should read let alone.

Have you any idea how many of there are?

Do you know?

Yes, because a fellow has done a marvelous job compiling a bibliography for me, and his list of book titles individual volumes of mine, which includes anthologies that I edited, and that they're probably about close to a dozen of those.

It comes came to about two hundred and ten titles something like that.

That's a lot of It's a lot of us.

That's it's enough, you know, I feel I've written four.

Yeah, well I think that's enough.

Yeah, I think four is enough.

Well, come to think of it, if I had made that decision early and I just saved myself a lot, a lot of work.

Yeah, But it's interesting these two characters, Bernie rodenbar who's the kind of gentlemen burglar, and Matt Scudder, who's the in many ways an archetype for a lot of detectives who came after.

Yeah, you know, the hardbitten, New York reformed, drunk, bad past detective.

Both of these eyes.

I have have a long history with you.

When did you start writing because like, you started writing these guys in your thirties, right.

I've thought you meant the nineteen thirties.

Nineteen thirties.

Did you start writing them in the night?

That would be sure.

I'm a detective shape, right.

I started writing them in within about a year of each other.

The characters were conceived, and I started writing about them in the the the mid seventies.

It's interesting because I was I was a very I was a huge fan of Scudder right away, and Bernie was a slower burn for me because Bernie felt like it was a little more kind of almost PG Woodhouse and it's kind of like light on his feet type fun character.

And because I'd come to you through Matt Scudder, I was like the grimy the New York streets and the yeah and the bad people and stuff.

And then Bernie was was kind of I was kind of looking for that there and it wasn't there.

And it wasn't until I had the same thing with with Woodhouse though.

The first couple I read, I was like, what the hell is this?

And then once you get into it, you go, this is actually great and actually in a weird way, is brilliant, unbelievable right, and contains an odd skewering of the British upper classes that I didn't spot at first.

I mean, but it's it's so wonderful.

Yeah, the kind of like the way he cuts up, the kind of doubt Nabby set is fantastic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also heah evidently had a real resentment against older female relatives, Yes for sure.

Yeah.

Do you do that in books?

Do you put people in books that you're angry at, like if you run across somebody?

Did you ever do that with Bernie or with No?

No, I don't think I ever have.

If I have it's it's uh slipped.

My mind has so many things too.

But do you ever read the book?

And I have no recollection of write now.

No, well that's not entirely true.

Early on, I did a lot of erotic paperbacks, you know, under pen name.

I did tons of those.

That was the way to earn money, right, it was like your only fans page.

No, it was you liked erotic.

It was what I did, and you know the it was it was to make money.

But they're all to make money.

Yeah, I guess that's your job, that's what you did.

But some of those, in uh, later years, I've because I'm shameless and because Ego and Avarice are my two motivators, their stoken horse, for sure.

Yeah, absolutely, I've I've reprinted, both electronically and in print printed form, all my early work, right, and and I figure, why not.

There are people who like them, and that's that's fine with me.

But doing that, I've had to determine what books were mine.

And there was a stretch there where I engaged other people to write books under my pen name.

Really yes, yes, this was back in the early to mid sixties.

Okay, and some of those, you know, I don't remember immediately if I've written them or not.

But it never takes more than reading a page, you know, for me to know what it's my worthy or no.

Yeah, I suppose if you if your output is it like it's a fairly prolific output.

You can't remember all that.

I look at old episodes of Late Night, so was if something comes up from my old Late night show on the internet, I'm like, I have no recollection of that.

None.

I remember most of them, But there were stretches late in the game, in say nineteen sixty four or so, when I there was one time when my second daughter, my daughter Jill, was born and I had to pay the abstetrician.

This was long enough ago so that people did not routinely have insurance and so that you could live without it.

Yeah right, Yeah, So I had to come up with one thousand dollars to pay the abstetrician.

Now, of course that would be the Copey right if you had really excellent, excellent coverage.

Yeah.

So I called my agent and I said, how can I earn a thousand dollars in a hurry because I want to pay this fellow's bill.

And he said, well, I think Bill Hamling, who was a publisher of mine on outfit called Nightstand Books.

He said, I'm sure he'd take an extra book for me this month.

So I found three days and wrote it.

You know what booking three days I did?

Was any good?

I have no idea.

Were you taking any stimulants?

It was the sixties.

No, I did occasionally, but not then.

It was a little later there that I started using dexamil occasionally when I wrote.

But this time I wasn't using any stimulants, and I just I just went to the office and typed for about eight hours the first day, and about eight hours the second day, in about five or six hours the third day, and then the book was done.

That's amazing.

By twenty minutes after the book was done, I'd forgotten the names of all the characters.

I mean, they didn't they didn't occupy space in my head for very much time.

There was no way to remember that.

It's do you remember the name of the book, because I'd like to read it.

I don't know which one that was, Oh, because I.

Feel like that would be a fascinating kind of almost like automatic writing, you know, the old spiritualist automatic writing thing that I mean, be kind of a.

Real in them were written at not at that speed, but frequently in a week.

I find that fascinating because they're especially the detective books in particular, are very complicated.

The police were not detected right right.

Hello, this is Craig Ferguson.

And I want to let you know I have a brand new stand up comedy special out now on YouTube.

It's called I'm So Happy, and I would be so happy if you checked it out.

To watch the special, just go to my YouTube channel at the Craig Ferguson Show and is this right there?

Just click it and play it and it's free.

I can't look.

I'm not going to come around your house and show you how to do it.

If you can't do it, then you can't have it.

But if you can figure it out, it's yours.

You have a very emotive style, though even even Bernie first, I it was a mistaken identity for me with Bernie Roden bar at first because I thought there was no depth to that, and there's an extreme amount of depth in Bernie, and I feel like that You're very emotive as a writer.

There's big sweeps, big human emotions in there.

I remember in particular, Actually, what was the small town?

The one you wrote after nine to eleven?

Is an extremely almost like you were heartbroken when you wrote that book or something, or you were terrified.

That kind of was.

Yeah, that was That was a time that imprinted itself rather deeply on one's consciousness.

Were you in New York, Georgiana eleven?

Did you see it all happened?

Yes?

Actually we were in the line of sight, yeah, because you're downtown.

Yeah, yeah, on the high floor we saw.

And that book.

Did that book happen in the aftermath of nine to eleven?

Was it like in the space of weeks, months, days.

It was a curious thing because it was a book that I had started before that, right, and I'd written a chunk of it, introducing several of the couple of the characters.

I probably wrote about it and twenty pages of it before, and then after nine to eleven, I thought, well, I can throw this away because the world had changed in some fundamental ways, and certainly the city had changed.

And a little time passed, and sometime I think it was in the spring of two thousand and two, so maybe six months after after I thought about it, and I thought, because what my object there was to write, for the first time for me, a big, multiple viewpoint now bill set in New York, with as much of New York as I could fit in it.

I thought, gee, I could still do this.

I would probably want to rewrite almost everything in the beginning portion, but there's there are scenes there that work, and there are characters who I find interesting.

And I thought, I don't want to write a book in which nine to eleven happens.

I want to write an aftermath book.

And and did and it it was no to what extent the book succeeds or fails?

I don't know.

I rarely know with my own stuff.

But what would that?

What's the metric you use for that?

How do you know if a book succeeds or failed?

I don't.

So once you write it, it's done.

It is what it is, and there's no kind of judgment on it.

There isn't really no I you know, I want them to do well.

Sure, you want to do a real justice and may be well received.

That's incidentally brings to mind a very interesting effective the retirement of not doing this anymore.

Okay, And it's not just that I'm not writing anymore.

But that I'm detached from the whole career in a way I wouldn't have anticipated.

Is that product of aging?

Do you think everything in my existence is so one way or another product of aging?

But also it's no, it's part of it is that my life as a writer feels like a closed chapter.

Right.

And I'm very grateful that I got to spend those years doing that, like sixty five years, right, yeah, And I'm very grateful that I got to write all those books, the good, the bad, and the indifferent.

But but I'm detached from them in an odd way.

I don't too much care now what anybody thinks to them.

I know they won't outlast my lifetime by any substantial margin.

Nobody's due, really, and I don't know.

And that's fine.

The thing, the thing is, that's that's fine.

It kind of I kind of feeled with with a book.

I remember because the first time when I the first book I wrote, I remember you were very very.

Kindly read an early draft of.

It and and you let it was interesting because it's a it's the only novel I've written so far, and it's an unusual book.

And you said, it's an unusual book, and you sent me a copy of a book that you had written years and years ago, which is also a very.

Unusual book called The Long Walk, The Random Walk.

Random Walk.

That's right, and random Walk is such a weird, out of time, out of style book for you.

I know what was going on with that?

I mean, it's a very it's almost like magical realism or something going on in there.

It was something, it was.

It was a very strange experience.

Yeah, Lynna and I had gone on our first really adventurous trip.

We went uh on a trip that was under the auspices of the Institute for the Advancement or something of no Weddics Sciences, whatever the hell it was it was.

It was it was an outfit founded by Edgar Mitchell when he came back from the moon.

What isdics science?

I don't know, Okay, I forget.

It's fine.

Somebody in the internet, right, I at one point could have supplied a definition of the word.

But it's it's remarkable enough that I can recall the word any idea.

What nouetics science is?

Yeah, all right, okay.

So disciplinary study that brings scientific tools and techniques together to basically solve the subjective inner knowing study of nature of reality.

There we are, there we go, there we are.

Anyway, they had this trip to Africa, right, that's where you go, with just about just about eight or ten of us on the whole trip, and we started.

We spent a lot of time in Togo, and one thing we did in Togo was we met with a fellow named Akoite, who was I think he had a German father and Togule's mother, and he'd grown up there.

He'd gone to school some in Germany and at the Sorbonne he qualified as a doctor.

He decided that that wasn't really where he was, and he became this spiritual healer and conductor of Voodo type ceremonies in Lomay in Togo.

And we met him and he was a powerful personality and he did this whole thing with Afterward, one of the things I'd sort of hoped for was that a new direction in my writing would come out of this.

Okay, so it ended, and then we went to other places in Africa.

We went to Cote d'avoir and we went to Mali.

We had a good time, and we came home and I had booked a session a space at a writer's colony, the first time I'd ever done that, or retreat where you can go for two weeks or a month or whatever whatever it is, and what do you do.

You like, you hang with other writers, or you hang with other writers to whatever extent you want.

But what it mostly is is that they supply a room for you to work in, a room for you to and three meals a day, and you go there to work.

So I've met some people I've become very fond of at Reuter's colonies, but that was never the point.

The point always is to go there to work.

And I had the spacebook, and I thought, I have to go there.

It's my first time at a colony.

What the hell am I going to write?

And I thought, well, there was a Burglar book I sort of had in mind.

Had you started the Bernie series.

Oh yeah, the Bernie series had gone on for a while.

This would have been seventy seven.

Okay, no, pardon me, this would have been eighty seven.

Okay, yeah.

And I so I thought it would be nice if there was something else that I could write that I had more firmly mind.

And I was sitting one day, we were living in Florida at the time, and I suddenly had this vision of people walking through the mountains.

Of course whatever, and bits and pieces started coming to me over the next several days, and I thought, well, you know, I don't have a book here, because this is a complicated book, but maybe I've got enough of a beginning so that i can spend my time at the colony roughing it out, you know, making some sort of outline.

And it was about two weeks from that time that I drove up to the car.

He was in Virginia, and I'd been thinking about the book throughout, and it wasn't so exactly that I'd been thinking about it as things were coming to me.

And I got to the colony, I was assigned my room, I was assigned my office, and I went to sleep.

I got up the next day, I went to my office and I wrote twenty pages of a novel.

And I did that every day for the next twenty three days.

I'll do it twenty pages a day.

It's a low.

Every day I woke up knowing what would happen in the book that day, still not necessarily the day after that, and and when I was done that was under walk I've never had an experience at all like that before or since.

It's an interesting thing.

And it's funny because you the way you describe it.

The novel that I'm talking about that you were there, it was called Between the Bridge and the River that I wrote, it's a very similar experience.

I would wake up in the morning not knowing what was going to happen, but interested to find out.

Uh huh.

And so I would have these characters and there was disparate plot lines, and I was like, I wonder, what's going to happen today, and I would write it down to find out.

Yeah, And it was an.

Odd excuse me, an oddensation of not having planned out the book.

Yeah, at the end of it.

Because anything I've written since then has been autobiographical or anecdotal, with the exception of a short story I wrote for you for that Edward Hopper collection and the so I know what happens because I was there when it happened, you know, and elaborate the story, or if I tell a little bit of this and that about it doesn't really you know.

It's it's me doing what I want to do as I embellish a story which I know has already happened, but I didn't have that experience with that book.

It was it was a very odd thing.

And I talked to.

Stephen King about that experience and he said that he when he was writing The Shining he was also getting sober at the same time.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, And it was very interesting because you go back and read that book with him just flippantly saying at the time, I was getting sober at that time, having gone through getting sober myself, and I know you were sober doing that that that it's like it takes on a completely different perspective.

Even looking at the movie, which I don't think he likes, but the it's all very different.

If you look at the lens through.

The Monster of of Alcoholism, it's like, oh my god.

Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating.

But he said about that that he felt there was all this stuffie waiting to get through and he just had to kind of get it through for that book.

I thought it was a fascinating way to look at it.

I wonder how often that happens to people, even like if you write two hundred and ten books, wherever it is, and it's happened to you, once that way.

I frequently don't know where I most of the time don't know when I started a book exactly where it's going to go when it evowws.

But this was as close as I ever came to having, oh, what you might call a channeled book.

Right.

It's not as though I felt this felt like I was taking celestial dictation.

It was very clear to me that I was making the choices and everything else.

It was somehow categorically different from other writing experiences I've had.

It gave me like you're.

Talking about the Nouetic Science trip to Africa, and clearly there was there was some kind of you were, uh, you know, I'm gonna say it sounds dismissive, but but but you were, you know, in some kind of spiritual search at that point in your life.

Yeah, is that, you know if I was.

But it worked certainly worked out that way.

I was the process.

Of that translate state.

Where there were there stimulants, where the drugs were.

There were there was alcoholic a verbal thing to take, but it didn't feel that it was a drug experience.

And there were lots of people's around in there and dancing and things like that.

It's hard for me to remember of that clearly.

But in ways it was transformational.

Lynn had had not a delusion, but a sense for years that just out of the corner, in the corner of her eyes, there would be a huge snake.

Okay, and she knew, like in her life, she was thinking that all the time.

Frequently what happened, she knew it wasn't there, right, you know.

She was never like directional or anything, but she just had the sense of a presence, you know.

And so she mentioned that to a Quoite, and he said, you know, he gave her something.

He said, take this and participate in the ceremony, and you will possess the snake, the serpent, the power whatever.

So she did, and and she never had the sense that there was a snake again.

Yeah, and she did feel a kind of empowerment after that she realized that she hadn't before.

So I'm I'm willing to believe that he did things, you know, I keep an up in mind about it.

I wrote a story, the hell did I call it?

I wrote a story in which there's a character like based on a Quoite.

I hardly ever pattern characters after specific people, but here I felt comfortable doing it.

I called him a twilee I think in that and again it's set in Loma in Togo, and it's sort of a a piece of spy fiction somewhat, but it's in a big collection enough Rope.

I'll send you an ephile of the story.

Yeah, I must have read, because the given enough Rope, I've I've read that collection.

Yeah, but but in context it might be yeah, yeah, I'll send that.

You know, one of that springs to mind as well.

And I think this might this might be a story that's in that collection, The Merciful Angel of Death.

The Yeah, that was a scudder story, right.

And it was in the It was a scudder short story though, right, And it was the kind of fascinating look at a period.

And that's why I think your your idea that that the canon of your work will not outlast you by much is perhaps not as accurate as you think it is from my perspective, because there is a huge sweep of time.

You know, those sixty five years that you documented some very you know, profound moments in the history of that time, the Age Crisis nine to eleven, the changing of this city, that goes through the life of Matt Scudder, the detective who's is crushed by a mistake he makes, and you know, and like it's you know, taken.

In the context in New York, and I'm amazed.

I haven't read the autobiography of Scudder because I've thought I'd read everything, so that is a trait.

But I will send, I will send you.

Do e books work for you?

Yeah?

Yeah, I actually read a kindle, Yeah.

I will.

I will send all those.

Do you self publish this stuff?

Now?

Yeah?

I think more and more I talk to authors like, yeah, why would I bother with?

Yeah, you know, the big publishing industry now, I think may do a good job with commercially important books.

But on a level that I that I don't play it anywhere or doing it.

And I just found it so much simpler and more straightforward and everything to publish the books myself.

And that way, you know, they don't you don't make much money that way, But you don't make much money anyway, no, I know.

It's kind of a it's kind of a.

Thing though, that it has rewards, because listen, I think I made as much on that novel as i'd make for a Wednesday night in a casino in Ohio.

You know what I mean.

But it's but I don't remember the Wednesday Night casino.

I remember the journey on the novel.

It's a difference.

So no, And it's hard sometimes, especially when I think when you're young and you want to make your bones and maybe I'm just being for myself, but it's hard to appreciate it, or it was for me, hard to appreciate the value of something that had no real intrinsic financial value.

And I remember you said, you and I.

Had had lunch once and I was talking about money, and you said that because I was getting hosed down with it at the time.

I remember it was during the end of late night and all that kind of stuff.

And you said, the danger of having a lot of money coming at you is you start thinking that it's the only thing that mars.

Yeah, And it was for a little while I thought about it, and.

It's kind of stuck with me.

Do you ever do you ever think I I.

Could have should have would have made more money, or should have been more.

But the thing is, I've often had the thought, yeah, yeah, because you know, I I look at my career and there were there never were any big dramatic financial successes, not even when the scudder sies like the Mascutter movie.

I made a decent living, but never, you know, never there were no I think one book inched its way onto the Times best seller list, but that's that's that's all, you know.

And lots of people whom I've known and been friendly with, you know, have have made big money, right ah, they keep it in proportion.

Most have made nothing.

But and I've thought about that, and one thing that struck me was that if I'd had big early success, I'm sure I wouldn't have kept writing for sixty five years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also it's hard to know how much you tell yourself because you want to hear it.

But I'm I'm kind of I'm happy with the way things turned out.

I think I reached just about the level of success that was best for me.

Yeah, yeah, I understand that.

I think because I, especially people like us who you know, have have taken the kind of the alcoholic bronkle for a while, that I've seen people who succeed so much after they get so bored that they don't do so well with it.

And there may be I mean, there's been decisions I've made when I thought, I don't I don't care enough about this, and I feel like it might be dangerous and every and there have been times when I have been achieved, and it's usually some financial or or some kind of kudos that makes me forget something I heard in a meeting in Glasgow when a woman said, an old lady said to me.

That she's probably amazing as I am now.

But like you said, but she.

Said, I son, if you forget what you are, if you get what If you forget what you.

Are, it will not matter who you are, because you won't be there.

Like it's okay.

And I think that the idea of the success that's appropriate for what you can handle is a nice one.

Yeah, it's a it's a way of maintaining some kind of gratitudinal equilibrium, which is a phrase that I picked up in my nice one.

Yeah, in my where did I get that?

In the science thing?

What do we call that science thing?

Nodic science?

It's my noetic science phrase, gratitude and the equilibrium.

But what about now?

You said to me when we.

Were hanging around outside, you said, do you feel like you're happier now than you've ever been?

Is that you think that's right.

I think I'm having a better time these days than I can recall, and I'm enjoying the life I'm leading in retirement.

As I think I mentioned before, I've become an absolute gym rat.

I'm at my local gym.

What do you do?

You left weights and walk around?

I do.

I do weights work and I generally put in about a half hour on the trap.

Wow, and you know I'm I'm in and out in about an hour and a half.

Is that something you get into after the old the heart thing?

Oh?

No, I got into you know.

I don't have many regrets, but one thing I can find myself regretting is that I didn't get into working with ways when I was a teenager because I was a terrible athlete.

I was hopeless of sports and all of that.

But lifting weights that I could have done, and I think I could have enjoyed it and stayed with it and things like that.

It is.

I got into it finally when I was about forty and and have you know there have been times when we didn't live in a gym, or I didn't go that frequently, but I've I've been a member where I am now for about almost twenty five years.

I joined this gym shortly after nine to eleven, and I'd been going to another one in the neighborhood before that, but it closed and and I really enjoy it.

You know, I.

Started lifting weights.

I hadn't done it for years.

I really love the sensation of having done it.

Yes, you know that, Yes, it body feels good.

It does.

It's kind of it has a kind of parcascet vibe, you know what I mean.

It's like you get to the other end and you go, sure, I feel kind of everything's okay, yep, yep.

You don't get high so much.

It's kind of like, oh, okay, I can handle it.

Absolutely.

Also, the feeling of.

Serenity that comes after physical exhaustion, it's pretty good, true.

Yeah, And I still I find myself even now I've been sober.

You've been sober longer than me.

I've been sober thirty three years.

I don't know.

You've been sober like one hundred or something, forty seven years, right, so the bard forty forty eight years a long time.

It's a long time for anything.

Yeah, really, But you know the thing is about it is that even now.

After all this time.

I don't know about you, like if I have to go and get any kind of medical procedure done, which kind of as one gets older, you know, it kind of like clicks up when they they have that that moment when they're going to put you under.

But there's I can see the drip in my arm and the anistasis says, Okay, you're going to feel a little dizzy or woozy, or you'll feel this.

I want you to count backwards.

That moment when that drop goes into the IV live.

For the fucking.

I live for that fucking moment when they say, oh, you're going to need a scope or a thing.

I'm like, okay, is the propofile involved because I'm there, and and that when they drop that thing, because I can't have it.

You know, I can't have it unless you know.

But but when they dropped that, I remember, I even said to the guy.

The last time I had have done it was a couple of years ago.

I said to the anistatist.

He said, okay, you're gonna I'm just gonna drop the sanamony.

You count backwards and actually the dropman and I said, can I stay here?

Just before I just before I left.

It's funny, I still feel the call of it, you still feel It's not the call, No, Booze doesn't call to me, not in that kind of a way.

I don't.

But but the idea of some kind of.

Relief sometimes calls to me, some sort of altered state.

Yeah, a little bit like maybe maybe it's time for me to go to Togo and and transit up.

Oh he's gone, jeez.

So let me ask you now then, because we're about out of time.

But I but just before we go, I want to ask you, what is given the fight?

You wrote books for sixty our story, you wrote everything for sixty five years, and now you don't write at all.

What do you do?

Well, as I said, I go, of course, go to the gym.

You go to the gym, I read, I listen to music.

I hang out with my wife, who's a lovely woman.

So that makes sense.

That's uh, that's a delight.

Patient I would imagine as well.

Patient she would have to she fucking would a saint, she is kind of yeah.

Uh.

And we travel.

We travel quite a bit, not as it enterest as in the past, because no Africa trips more or what mostly mostly cruises, but we spent I think two weeks in Tasmania on a cruise around Tasmania earlier this year.

That's a long flight, yes, And I decided, even though it was a perfectly comfortable flight, we had a decent enough time.

And I hate flying.

I hate airports.

I hate the whole.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I love it and hate it.

And this one was I don't know, sixteen hours, however long it was.

I thought, I don't think I have to do that again.

Yeah, yeah, especially if you get this somewhere.

I am.

I've never been to Tasmania, but I can imagine you could probably get a similar effect geographically by not leaving the continental United statef am.

I right, uh, probably.

We did.

Like Saber, it's a very livapool city and we enjoyed we enjoyed the GA Cruz and everything.

But it's too far away, not for the Tasmanians, let's be fair.

From their point of view, it's right there, it is, it's right there.

They're fine, Larry's great to catch up with you.

P Uh, have more power to you.

They keep going to the.

Gym and I'll speaks excellent.

It's so good to see it's lovely to see