A Venus flytrap can eat a whole cheeseburger. I learned this fascinating fact #880 from under a Snapple cap. Committing it to memory is not going to stop the Great Recession or save the whales but it got a chuckle out of me. I'm into random musings. Maybe this is why my mind drifts off too far to be a good journalist and I am fiction writer. Maybe I'm a born spin doctor.
I love books where wild sheep chases take place which is why I appreciate Haruki Murakami, Italo Calvino, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delilo, and on. In Veronica Nicolas Christopher's protagonist's whole life changes taking a wrong turn through a hallway. William James calls this stuff the way of the Pathfinder.
Philip Roth notoriously penned a good chunk of his novels from headlines he read out of newspapers. The point I'm driving at is you never know where that glimmer of story, as Pam Houston says, comes from. For me though, I think there is something more. Not to get Cartesian on you, but for me I want to discover an indubitable truth. And in today's world, cobbled from spin, it's no easy task. This is by the way why blogs seem to be spawning healthy, independent lives from the mainstream front.
I still believe a bit in Lincoln's old adage to know 90% of your opponent's argument before forming your own. Something to that extent. And this is why I keep putting various, disparate pieces together in the hope that someday I will have my own Eureka moment.
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