Children's books

The writer keeps meeting himself in strange cities as if by chance, in a cafe, a bar, a train station, and keeps melting, as it were, into and out of himself, so that he is able to pass back and forth between everything foreign to him and everything familiar.

A trickster--all writers are--the writer is able to enter a place immediately and leave that same place almost as quickly as he entered, knowing, simply by poking his head into the space he's entered, whether or not is for him or against him.

The writer feels as if he's questioning the bedrock of literature when he asks himself, as he does so often these days: what's so good about storytelling? Is there something intrinsic to it that is inherently noble? 

Later, in bed, the writer asks his partner, 'what are you reading?' and she answers, 'I'm reading The Thing About Jellyfish." "I've never heard of it," the writer says.

She then asks him what he's reading. He says he's reading, "a book by a German man" and that he guesses it's a novel though he can't qjuite be sure. What he is sure of is that the narrator has a voice that sounds exactly like the German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who narrates his documentary films in sonorous English with a heavy accent.

His partner says, "The Thing About Jellyfish is a children's book. I gave it to T____", her 11-year old grandson, "so that we can talk about it next time we meet."

"Every book ever written is a children's book," the writer says, finally saying something worth writing down.

 Hot fudge sundaes, Clement Street, San Francisco, February 14, 2020. Photo by author.