Simultaneously spiraling and towering

You remember Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead? You remember Christina Applegate's stoner brother? Do you remember him on the roof, friends nearby, plates flying through the air, exploding over the lawn? Do you remember what he said? I'll tell you what he said: he said, the dishes are done, man, and that's stuck with me, ever since I saw that, the first time, a long time back.

Replace the roof with my kitchen table, a table I did almost every stitch of high school homework at, which I've come to be reacquainted with over the last handful of months, writing, reading, working; replace the open space under the sky with my brain; replace the stoner brother with me; replace Christina Applegate with...no, don't replace her, let's bring her into the fantasy, because she got really damned adorable every time I've seen her since the last time I saw her on Married With Children. Replace whatever else you need to make the metaphor work. Frog's done, man.

I marathoned my way through the last 170 pages tonight. I'm dizzy. The book towers, the book spirals. It races. It takes its time. It's looking at the sun through a microscope, an ant hill through a telescope. Sometimes it loses you. It always takes you back.

Its protagonist is a man. (A male. Horrid and normal.) Its antagonists: life. death. living.

There's a conscious stream of consciousness narration throughout but it goes beyond that: it reaches down, it becomes less literature than a deep primal force, a guttural series of utterances speaking of and to everything that's great. everything that's fucked up. everything that's.

It's rounding a corner, meeting yourself reflected in someone else, wishing you had started carrying a pen the whole time so you could underline the moment and come back to it. But it's too late for pens and the moment's stuck in you. it's buried in you. it's four words in 769 pages.

It's loving bafflement. Its heights. It's heights.