I'd just allow a fragment of your life to wander free.

Elton John, "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me"
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I scrambled onto my bus this morning to shield myself from the sudden blustery Conejo Valley winter. When the wind gusts like this in LA, it blows away all the smog and it allows for a high amount of visibility all across the basin. It's quite stunning, as evidenced by the fact that from Porter Ranch, well north of the San Fernando Valley, you can peek past the Hollywood Hills to see the First Interstate Bank building downtown.

But it's a bitch when you're riding your bike.

I no longer stop by the Kwik-E-Mart to pick up coffee before I wait for the morning bus. I found out that when you buy coffee and take the bus, the only thing you can really do on the bus is drink that coffee. You can't nap, and you can't read. You're stuck holding this paper vessel of hot liquid, of which you only really wanted a couple of sips to warm up your insides while you were outside waiting, and now that you're inside the bus, your insides are already plenty warm.

So I stopped buying coffee, either to the effect of getting more sleep or getting more reading done. But lately I haven't been cracking open the book on the morning ride (or the afternoon one, truthfully). I pack it almost out of habit, as if I know that if I really wanted to read, I could, but I almost always choose not to do so in the morning. I stare out of the window, accompanied by the rising sun as my bus travels east to Calabasas. It's become quite meditative for me to sit and plan out the day and stare out the window at all the developing tracts of land. (As a business aside, the reason why the Thousand Oaks real estate market will be sheltered from an LA bubble burst is because the Conejo Valley is still expanding.)

Staggering Genius took a while to appeal to me; it started off with a mixture of humor and poignancy, which always makes for great material, but I'm always looking for something different, otherwise I would pick up another Gabriel Garcia Marquez book. Eggers' writing style is a printed form of neurosis, and at times it's difficult to read, much less enjoy. It's like a Woody Allen movie with Woody just sitting and whining without a character arc or plot change.

And then, it happens. Character arcs. Plot changes. Staggering Genius takes a long time to set up, but I think it really is worthwhile. He continues to write in a neurotic style, but in a form of controlled chaos. A film analogy would be the Woody Allen movie, "Deconstructing Harry", which is one of my favorites. It's unfortunate that it required me to sift through three hundred (see how much more epic it sounds when it's written out?) or so pages just to get to something really worthwhile and memorable, but that doesn't take away from it's ultimate worthiness or memorability.