How's my year going? Good. I tip my hat and thank you for asking. [1]
I got to the 23rd day of the year without finishing a single book. This happened in part because I decided to slow down my reading to focus on writing. Also, I started tightening up my Algebra II to prepare for my math certification test. I think I was only past page 80 of the only book I was reading. But around the 20th I realized I was starving for information. I can't describe the feeling much differently than that. It was the kind of tingling you get when something is lacking. So I ended up at the library. First I wrote like a good boy, and located the quotes from the Peter Korn book I used in my essay Wise Words. Then I walked around the magical land of print access, eventually seeing The Lives of the Surrealists.
Oh hell yes. I felt a back tingling of I-want-information-but-grounded-in-humanity-(particularly-those-who-want-to-explore-life-and-its-possibilities) signaled before any conscious narrative was formed. My hand held the book still before the narrative's arrival.
Hypothesis: information lust, particularly information as adventure, is so deeply ingrained in this "me" you speak of that it is habit. It is muscle memory. It is very close to the metal indeed. Time distorted around a new interest, more pages read in a day than the rest of the month combined. Read a bit to go to sleep, and read a bit when waking up.
Perhaps I overdid the binge or (perhaps and) [2] I was making up for sleep debt, but I was left with a really crappy zombie day. A multi-hour nap in the middle of day which was in the middle of REM cycle was broken by Happy (we didn't name him) the sad cat expressing his loneliness and/or existential dread by repeatedly crying out in a room away from both me and the other cats. Also, it was cold and rainy. So I had a no-account day and I felt guilty about how little I had done. `
The next day I went off to a coffee house to get back to working on math. A former co-worker of mine, now retired, came in and we began a "small world" conversation built on the lattice-work of coincidence. I had previously noticed that his wife and sister-in-law were the artists featured on the wall display, so I could give my regards there. His daughter works at the school my "teaching baby" (student of mine who became a teacher) taught at. And he had a photo of himself and Elizabeth Warren recently taken at a local restaurant on main street. While she was a great celebrity of the hour with the Iowa caucuses coming right up, it probably wasn't that odd that she would be seen in Norman, Oklahoma. For one, she went to high school in Oklahoma City. It very easy to imagine her having friends in the region. Also, Norman is a common enough fundraising stop for Democrats.
Two nights before, I guess partially buzzing from the surrealism book, but also thinking about On the Road, I had given thought to going to Iowa and spending a few days on the ground there. It is anti-democratic and ridiculous that one state has so much leverage, but the fact remains that they do, and going there would have put me in the scene. The planning never got much past the impulse phase. However, I did look at the prices of flying in and renting a car.
After my acquaintance left, I switched locations to the new central library. Just as I was writing the first draft of the paragraph above a group of VIPs was being shown around the library. The congressman for our district, Tom Cole, stood not ten feet away from this locus of perception (me).
Before that, but after my conversation with the old acquaintance, I had been buzzing on caffeine, math, and print access, and grabbed two more books: The Grapes of Math and The Joy of Mathematics with the intent of tearing through them. I had positioned myself at the large wooden tables, simply wanting to write about the feeling of elation, I guess you could say I try to be a documentor (or philosopher) of feeling alive. But this is what you get when I am in a manic state. And in that state I noted: "thank god I have some stuff to read or I'd be insufferable to my wife when she gets home."
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[1] I wanted to avoid simply saying "Thanks for asking," because that wording has become to easy to parse as sarcasm, along with any "Thanks for ___" or "Thanks ____." We really do have a problem with gratitude in our culture. Thanks, hipsters, and each of the assorted irony-mongers repackaged for each cohort of consumers who want to believe they are different than the ones before. Assholes.
[2] "and/or" has become fossilized and/or leads with and, so it is too often parsed as simply "and."
