July 5th. Asleep in your thought.

Writing Windswept has taught me a thing or two about novelry. It's amazing how working on a 2-years-plus project will erect a framework for interpreting the world around the parts of you that collect and analyze sense data. What I mean to say is, stuff that might previously have occurred to you as a charming, if quaint, curiosity, can, under the influence of a novel, suddenly become the seed for something enormous without any warning whatsoever. Case in point, this little segment from one of the chapters near the end, which grew from a play on words on a strange two-word combo—"carrion dawn"—I stumbled across in Mark Z. Danielewski's mind-eatingly good House of Leaves into a paragraph about certain beautiful aspects of nature, and then into a bit about the early stages of hard drug use; sort of a Requiem for a Dream split-second montage in word form. Lemme think what you know.

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He let the heroin, the miracle drug of it, into him. It was ice cream childhoods all over again. He was on another plane, another plane of mind, he was crossing state lines, he whipped through insanity and unconsciousness and Florida and grace and landed in play, in playful dreams of artless theatre, in lines of dialogue he had memorized in the womb, all those summer moons ago. All the universe's thoughts were laid bare to him, stripped without tease, naked without shame, clear and plain as all the faces he knew in the floating darknesses he was privy to when he closed his eyes to blink. He had the floor-plans, the blue-print, the key-ring to everything.

He smiled, lunar landing, in celebration of things; he gloried the way the guitar's six-stringed theory made madmen and madwomen of us audience all. The way every atom waited for the fall of Troy, for the rise of day. The way we kept inculcating the buzzes we felt in our veins not to stop. The way the highest starkest snows were fragmented yet unimpeachable. The way we loved. The way water ran and jumped when it was asked politely. The way the sky opened up like a breaking origami at the first fold of sun.

So carry on, dawn. Carry on.