7.7.04

Heat Way

It's hot.

It ain't Hotlanta but none the less its hot.
If I were an animal (huh, like I'm not) but if I were a less bipedal, maybe more furry, maybe a less wordy beast of an animal, I would totally hibernate during the Summer. I like swimming but that's the best part of Summertime and that's about it. I get sluggish in this heat. It ain't even hot like it has been in the past. In the summers of 2000, 2001, and 2002 there were at least 30 days of over 100 degree temperatures recorded at Camp Mabry. And the summers of 2000 and 2001 had over forty days of over 100 degree temperatures.
This year we've only had one.
That's pretty sweet but it's still hot.

And then come the skeeters, get away from me you fuckin' skeeters.
To deet or not to deet that is the question.

I finished The Book of Illusions last night. I know I started it a long time ago but during that time I had surgery and I was on vicodin and I finished a different book that I was halfway through when I started the Auster book and so it took me a while to complete. Honestly I was savoring the Auster novel cause I love his writing so much and I hadn't read a new work of his in about three years. His shit has me captivated and it has for about a decade now. Someday I might work through the kinks in my writing and become a modern day master like him. Everybody has their dreams, right? I will now go out and get a copy of Oracle Night.

There are common themes that run through all of Auster's work. There is death, loss, travel in the US, depression, redemption, coincidence and synchronicity. All those things are in all his novels not necessarily in that order. It seems to me that he constructs his fiction around the skeleton of his personal experience in a way that although the different novels appear to be different beasts they all have the same endoskeleton, plus or minus a zyphoid process. There are these moments in his stories where the events seem mundane but all of the sudden something happens that is both expected and unexpected and that dichotomy of events takes the reader to a place where they can see the story as a universal experience. A mundane series of events suddenly becomes a model or allegory for something much greater. There is always lot's of interlocking mysteries in his work. I can't wait to pick up the next book.

This will not be the last time that I write about Paul Auster in this blog.

I was driving by a Pentecostal Korean church today. I knew it was a Korean assembly from the Korean writing on the billboard and on the side of the churchhouse. I knew it was Pentecostal cause I can read English and it said Pentecostal right out front. It occurs to me that I like it when Asians praise Jesus. I like to praise Jesus myself but I don't think its for everybody and I don't push it on anyone. But whenever I see a Chinese, Vietnamese or Korean house of worship (I have never seen a Japanese Christian church) I always think...
"Hey Look at that, Jesus is just alright with them too."

Course I also really dig the teachings of the Tao Te Ching and the Buddha so then I think.
"I bet they would tell me that I was going to Hell if they knew how liberal my beliefs are..."
cause I know how churchy people think.

See what the heat will do. It will drive you right off your topic.

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