The literary mind:

I’ve been colonized by a canonical suckerfish, a well-informed lamprey hanging off the side of my consciousness.

I am in the grocery store and I say to myself, “Jesus, it’s crowded in here. Do you remember when we first moved back to St. Louis and we had to get used to crowds?” and my literary mind says, “HCE – here come everybody - from the beginning of Finnegan’s Wake – Joyce had gone from trying to write the stream of consciousness of the individual to the stream of consciousness of the world. That’s what this store is like right now: a diversity – here comes everybody.”

“Clever boy Joyce, I wonder how many other people are thinking about that right now? Writing in the style of the stream of consciousness and becoming integral to the actual flowing stream in countless minds. What’s up with the eye patch in that picture of him that I see everywhere?”

“He is a literary a pirate, he could be Odin the-all-father, or maybe just a guy with a bad eye?”

I am getting dressed this morning, pulling on yesterday’s blue jeans. “Everyday we get dressed. It’s like putting on armor.”

The literary mind says, “Athena on the beach – from Ong and Foley’s analysis of the oral tradition and the origins of the Odyssey - not with a historical Homer, but in that ancient tradition. The tales have repeating rhythms and structures and one of them is the arming sequence like the one where Athena shows up and give Odysseus his weapons.”

Does your mind keep up a constant patter like this? It’s like living in a who’s-on-first skit.