Tidal waves and strange sequences.

"Before electric light, you paddled through the soup of darkness as a crocodile..."

It's raining on and off, like it has been the entire week. It's been cold, though. And not in a temperature sort of way, just cold. The world gets distant when it rains. Everyone is in a hurry to avoid the elements, and no one wants to talk. Everyone just wants to get where they're going.

Being exposed to the elements alone, though...well, it's almost refreshing.

There was no one here Monday. The fountains were running, the rain was pouring, and no one was here. To hear your own boots echo off the ground in the middle of a place like this just doesn't happen. But it was nice. For the first time in almost 21 years, I actually kind of enjoyed the rain. It was a strange echoed combination of me, the rain, and the wind, and it was peaceful. Tuning out the world to the sound of music and singing is something I do fairly often, but tuning into the world as well as the music at the same time...they interacted so interestingly.

It almost makes me like the rain. Almost.

"While we're tidal and flexed on a full moon, it'd be a sure sure shame to not do..."

I found a small book last week, written by one of my favorite authors and the title including one of my favorite creatures. The library was telling me to check it out. So I did. I wasn't expecting Joyce Carol Oates's Triumph of the Spider Monkey to be quite what it was.

That is, I wasn't expecting it to be exactly the sort of book I was looking for.

I've been writing several short stories on this character, Akira Nozaki, for some time. And something small inside me told me I should collect them and make an overall story out of it. I was not expecting Triumph of the Spider Monkey to be in exactly the sort of format that I had considered putting the stories in. I was not expecting it to be so unusual, yet engaging. I was not expecting that there would be such an element of non-understanding to it.

I was not expecting to find direction in a book I knew nothing about.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep writing soon. I haven't felt like writing much lately, but I blame that on the loss of my computer, which is not back from the shop and is not showing signs of being back from the shop any time soon...all the same, I have paper and pens if something should strike me. There is a lot to Akira, and this structure of the stories should allow for a lot, most of which I hadn't even thought to explore before. It's exciting.

"Do it for all the times we wished we had!"