The part about fate

I'm feeding my Bolaño habit again, this time with 2666. Have finished The Part About the Critics, and The Part About Amalfitano, and will finish The Part About Fate tomorrow, likely. That'll get me about a third of the way through - my days are spoken for.

So... I'm a pretty impressionable reader, and tend to pick up the writer's cadence and patterns (not on display here) and run them through my head, extending the writer's story with my own, as though it were being told by the writer. I kind of assume everyone does this to some extent, and that's the why and how of being mesmerized by what you're reading. It's a way of entering fully into it and it's a way of it entering fully into you. When I'm tipsy I maybe do it more than when I'm not.

In this vein, sitting out back one night last week before our little jaunt out west, somewhere in the middle of the part about the critics (although it would have made more sense in the part about Amalfitano). Maybe it was.), I had this quick split vision - a young me meeting the current me and thinking, I kind of like that older guy. The young me feeling warmly about the older me, but having absolutely no inkling that he would become that person. Not even thinking he would want to. Because, just like in real life, the younger me's vision didn't extend into that haze of years. The whole idea of becoming was over the horizon. (I'm not sure I've reached the horizon yet.)

Anyway, Oscar Fate's just gotten the call to go to Mexico to cover the Count Pickett fight, and I need to go with him.