I'm not entirely sure what I want to know, but I'm so damn sick of living in stasis. I want a revelation.

***

I've been reading a lot, again.

D. convinced me to read the first DragonLance trilogy. It was a lot better than I would have thought. Now I've gotta read more of them. I'm really wondering about what happens to Raistlin.

D. and I talked about the book, which was nice. He doesn't read nearly as much as I do, and our tastes so rarely converge.

One thing I couldn't bring myself to tell him. He was going off about how yeah, Tanis was a Hero, but Raistlin was a real person, with flaws. I was thinking about how much I wanted Tas to be real, so I could take him to the mall.

I spent most of one afternoon caught up in a fantasy about bringing the DragonLance folks to Cowtown. I knew it was silly, but it was also amusing the hell out of me. Raistlin became an internet junkie. He's got 'l33t skillz, you know.

It ended up being kind of depressing. I got wrapped up in the idea of what Modern America would look like to Epic Heroic types. We don't have heroes. We have a lot of plastic decadence.

You're all giving me that look again. I was going somewhere with this, honest. The point is, I haven't been impacted by a book enough to want to meet the characters since Little Women. I've read a lot of good books. But as a kid, I used to go through a few days of imaginative extrapolation with nearly every book I read. That hasn't happened for a long time. But it happened with DragonLance.

***

Then, with my mind already in kind of an irrational place, I read Last Call by Tim Powers. That book messed with me too, but in an entirely different way.

It's about assuming the mythical powers of the Fisher King by playing poker with Tarot cards. Essentially, when you win money, what's actually happened is you've sold whatever the cards in your hand represent.

Funky idea, and I spent a few days with it wandering around in my brain. I don't play poker; I play bridge. So then I had to spend some time working out what "really" happens during bridge.

Eventually, I figured out that although, hypothetically, it might be beneficial to study what cards showed up in your hand again and again and again, you can't really have the whole giving and receiving of power thing. Four twos in bridge is kinda grim. It means nothing at all to have four twos when your opponent has two kings. Besides, bridge would get very silly very quickly if you went out of your way to not take a trick just because there was a five of hearts involved.

***

You know, I hear about people who have ideas, and get caught up in weeks of brainstorming, and they're actually useful thoughts. These people, so I've heard, can sit down and come up with concrete ways to make the world, or maybe just their corner of it, a little better.

I wonder what that's like. All of my thoughts amuse me, but they don't do much else. I come back from my daydreams and castles in the air, and I can't help but wonder if I'm completely unsuited for real life.

***

Anyway, now that I've finally gotten the stuff percolating in my head all last week cooled down to where I can talk about it semicoherently, maybe tomorrow I can come close enough to what the rest of you call reality to explain why yesterday was such a shitty day.(Pun intended! Stay tuned!)

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