Birthdays

"Only a fool believes that he is different from the birds in the sky
All those birds go chasin' some better sunny days
You can't hear them singing 'cause they've all gone away."

-- The Flaming Lips, "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion"

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May is the month of birthdays. My mom's is on the fifth, mine is on the ninth, Teresa's on the tenth. Mother's Day is always somewhere in there, too.

I've mentioned the hectic weekend before. Plans are still gelling. Luckily, Hertz's reservation system doesn't charge you for changing your itinerary.

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I've hit a stride with Life of Pi, a surge forward through pages, a reader's second wind.

Happens to me sometimes, not because I'm tired of a book or want to move on to another project, but just because maybe the writing is better, or the story. Maybe these are parts of the book that took longest to write; maybe they were easiest, I don't know.

I like thinking to myself about the whole idea of making stories, the combination of words in just the right order and proportions. I like to think about how stories are really strings of words in sentences and boxed in paragraphs and shipped in chapters, and if you look at it from a strictly mathematical perspective, you can make infinite combos, incessant strings, eternal strands. You can tell the same story in many ways just by changing the combination around.

And I really like to think, after reading a really ripshit passage, "In all the centuries people have been reading and writing English, it took X number of years for someone to come up with this, to create this. And then, in all the years I've been reading books, it has taken another Y number of years for me to read it."

Books are journeys, man, epic trips. They've come a long way to reach for your fingertips, for those words to sail through your eyes, into your mind.

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People, too.

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Tomorrow, I finish moving into the New Place. (I kind of want to call it the "Launch Pad," or something like that. What do you call a pal's pad on the third floor of an apartment home? I'm taking suggestions.)

Just a stuffed chair, some clothes, a suitcase load of essential junk, and a couple boxes of food, and then I'm in. Electricity's supposed to get turned on tomorrow. I'm buying light bulbs and dish soap after work.

And I'm on the market for a futon. Couches probably won't fit up the narrow staircase.

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Places, too.

Except it's you that did the traveling a long way to get to them, not the other way around.