"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact." -Sherlock Holmes
Evidently, a number of people in my family like to use the word "evidently." My mother's been driving me crazy by peppering her speech with it overmuch for months. Too much peppering. Sneezing peppering. Now this morning, my grandmother, recounting the boring events leading up to the finding of her lost keys, saw fit to goop on copious doses of "evidently." Where the hell did this come from? I'm starting to hate the sound of the word from my own mouth.
Last night I went to bed at the peculiar hour of 12. I woke up at 6:30am. This must be the most normal night of sleeping I've had in years. Certainly it's the strangest in recent days, which've seen me sleeping from 9am to 6pm.
So I walked to Starbucks, drank a mocha (with an add shot), ate a scone, and read a few chapters of Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor. Really a good book. It never occured to me that I'd have so much fun reading about a couple of guys starting a restaurant. But fun it is.
I don't talk much here about what I read, do I? Well! I've just finished James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Before this, the only other Joyce I'd read was the novella The Dead, and both works had something very concentrated about them. I was struggling to describe it to Trisa one morning, and the image that comes to mind is of Spider-Man's web shots--how they come out in a very neat violent line but kind of fan out at the end, suggesting that the cord is made up of many strands concentrated together. That's kind of what reading James Joyce is like for me. In any case, wonderful writing. There's actually nothing wrong with it. Almost too much nothing wrong with it--well, not really. What I mean by that is just that, er . . . Well, there's no fringe uselessness, or even what might seem to be uselessness in Joyce's work. Every line is so much the straight dope that sometimes I need to stop and catch a breath.
Anyway. I'm not used to being alive this early. I've an optimistic suspicion that I'll be more productive to-day. We'll see!
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