I think I've accidentally killed a few famous writers and musicians.

I don't mean I accidentally ran them over in my car or shot them by mistake with an uzi or something.  This isn't a confession of an actual crime or anything.  There's just been a few weird coincidences involving the deaths of famous people.

The first one I can recall was Douglas Adams, a writer who I really like.  I read the whole Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and then the Dirk Gently books and I was definitely interested in reading more.  I remember finding this book by him at a yard sale or somewhere that I hadn't heard of.  I remember it involved endangered animals.  Looking it up on Google right now, I'm pretty sure it was Last Chance to See.  I only paid like a quarter for it.  I got home and set it down on an end table.  And then I didn't get back to it for a while.  I probably had other stuff in my reading pile I was getting to first, but I remember I kept seeing that Douglas Adams book sitting there and thinking I really need to read that.  Or at least, like, put it away.  My apartment was kind of permanently messy as I recall.  Anyway quite a few months passed and the book remained exactly where I had first set it down until eventually one day I decided "Damn it, I'm going to finally read this book."  The very same day I grabbed it to start reading, Douglas Adams died of a heart attack.  Needless to say, I felt really guilty even though intellectually I knew these two events must have been completely unrelated.

About a year later a local band I sometimes sat in with asked me to play in an upcoming show.  They were renting out space at a practice facility once a week and they asked me to come to their practices for a few weeks.  There wasn't a designated room for the band, you just kind of got whatever one was available at the time.  The first time I practiced with them we were put in a room with this little wooden crate in the corner.  I noticed there was a cassette tape of the album The Who's Next sitting on top of it.  At the time I hadn't heard it, and I was kind of interested to, but I figured the tape probably belonged to someone so I left it where it was.  The next three weeks or so we were in different rooms, but eventually we ended up in the first room we had been in.  I knew because that Who cassette was still sitting in the exact same spot, clearly untouched since the last time I'd seen it.  I said to myself, "Screw it, I'm taking it," and shoved it in my pocket.  The next day I learned that John Entwistle, the bass player for the Who, had been found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room.  If only I'd left that cassette where it was...

I think I had a couple other incidents that weren't quite as direct.  Maybe once or twice I just mentioned something about a celebrity and then they kicked the bucket.  I tried to see if I could control this strange ability I seemed to possess by focusing my attentions on particular people, but as of this writing both Michael Bolton and Justin Bieber are still with us.  It seemed like I could only do it randomly and usually only after not touching an object created by said celebrity for some period of time.

My powers appeared to lay dormant for a long time, but just recently I struck again when Anne Rice passed.  This one is slightly convoluted, but here goes.  I had read Interview With the Vampire a couple years ago and I liked it pretty well, but it hadn't totally occurred to me to read more of her stuff.  Then about six months ago I was browsing at my local library and I saw Queen of the Damned on the shelf and I remembered I wouldn't mind reading some more of her books, so I went ahead and checked it out.  But then I realized it was actually book 3 in her Vampire Chronicles series and I hadn't read book 2, which I found out was called The Vampire Lestat.  I didn't know anything about the rest of the series or how important it was to read them in order, but my general rule of thumb is to read books in series chronologically.     

I'm a big fan of the library.  If they don't have a copy of a book at your local branch you can go online and request it and they'll get it from another branch and bring it to the location you want to check it out from.  It turned out they only had one copy of the Vampire Lestat in the entire library system, which seemed a little odd to me since I thought this was a pretty popular series.  Nonetheless, the copy was available so I requested it and it arrived more or less immediately.  The other cool thing about the library is they let you renew stuff indefinitely unless somebody else puts in a request for that item.  A lot of times this still isn't an issue because they have multiple copies of the same books or movies and you can often hang onto the copy you have, but as I mentioned they only had one copy of the Vampire Lestat and, wouldn't you know it, someone else had requested it before I had a chance to get around to reading it.  Thus, I was unable to renew it.  I figured this was no big deal.  I'd just return it and then request it again and I should have it back soon as the other person wouldn't be able to renew it either since I had put a request in for it.  I decided once I got it back I would bump it to the top of my reading list so I wouldn't have to go through this debacle again.  

Well, I've never run into this issue before, but the book never came back.  You're only supposed to be able to check out books for three weeks at a time and it shouldn't have been renewable because I had a request in for it.  What's more I could see online that I was first in line to get it so nobody else should have been able to cut in front of me and check it out.  And yet months passed and it kept saying it was unavailable.  I had other stuff to read, but it was still kind of annoying.  Especially because it had been in my possession and I had to give it up and now for some inexplicable reason it wasn't coming back.  Had the person who requested it after me just taken it home and never returned it?  I finally inquired at the library and the librarian couldn't figure out what was going on either.  The records showed it had just been checked out a few days earlier, which shouldn't have been possible because my request had been in place for months now and I had supposedly been first in line this entire time.  I was starting to suspect I was never going to get the book back.  And in the meantime I still had book 3 in the series checked out and I couldn't read it either, because I still hadn't read book 2.  All of this was a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but an annoyance nonetheless.

Well, on December 11th, 2021 we were visiting some friends we hadn't seen in a while and it turned out they owned the whole Vampire Chronicles series and would be happy to let me borrow book 2.  Yay!  Minor annoyance finally resolved!  I took the book home with me and guess what I saw on the news the next day?  Anne Rice passed away on December 11th, 2021.  I freaking did it again!

Apparently I need to just read books and listen to albums as soon as I first lay my hands on them.  Otherwise I'm hazardous to their creator's health.