Sunrise over Florida, Japan, South America

I’m sitting out on my Mom’s patio, in shorts, flip flops, and a black t-shirt. Warm sun reflects off my white arms and legs. My face feels hot. The breeze is nice. I listen to the metallic ping of drivers launching golf balls down the fairway of the second tee. I listen to the thud of golf balls landing on the green. Not many birds around, but sometimes the drone of a plane in the distance.

I can hardly see the laptop screen due to the sun, but does that matter? I used to write as though words formed a painting; the appearance and the order of the letters ranked high in my valuation of good writing. I think it was the purposefulness and laboriousness of typing on a typewriter that slowed me down and forced more thought into my choice of words, and subsequently, the direction of my thoughts. Now writing is a race to keep up with the internal narrator, and I pay less attention to the ascetics of the words on the screen. So it doesn't matter now if I can see the words on my laptop screen because of the sun. My fingers race across the keys like a blind person reading brail. When my fingers grow tired, I pick up one of the many books I've brought with me.

I’m really enjoying Haruki Murakami. His style of writing keeps my interest, or is it the voice of his characters? They are like the brooding eccentrics from college that you wished you knew, but you are limited to watching from a distance. Or the eccentrics we all thought we were, in that intoxicating conceit of college writers and musicians and artists. Part of his story turns to narrative with a unique perspective on the world, but I wouldn’t put him on par with Marquez, whose writing takes on the tone and magic of a South American mythology. Maybe I’m aggrandizing somebody who I haven’t read in ten years.

Murakami writes of a character that picks a few classics and reads them over and over again. Dickens, The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare; each time he reads them he discovers something new. Remember as a child reading the same favorite books repeatedly? That pleasure of repetition and returning to the same familiar place? What would my books be? The Great Gatsby, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Tin Drum, Shipping News, Peter Pan? Who knows. My list of favorite books changes from day to day. Some books lend themselves more readily to re-reading; I think it’s their complexity, or just the sheer beauty of the way they are written, like poetry. Will Murakami become one of those for me? Maybe. I dog-ear pages I particularly enjoy as I go along, and Norwegian Wood is starting to look like origami.