The Five Burroughs

You know how when you remember part of your childhood, or something that happened a long time ago, the parts of that memory all seem to bleed together, as if they weren't discrete sections that you experienced separately, but one big mix of stuff? (Do other people feel that way?)

I love that feeling, and I think I try to dive into it when I write something.

Last night Johnny told us a good name for a band he'd thought of: The Five Burroughs. (As in, spelled like William S. Burroughs.) I said it sounded like a punk band, and he said he'd probably never change his band name from Secret Cove, so it didn't matter anyway, and I said he could use it in the book he's writing. That is another thing I love about writing: if you think of something awesome that you won't do, but might have done in another life, then you can imagine the world you'd want it to happen in, and create it.

Someday, looking back, my whole life will be a big amorphous flowing memory of all the things I did - maybe, far enough away, I won't remember whether I lived in NYC before South Bend, or if I went to Ghana or only imagined going to Ghana. And I think that in that mix will be all the things I wrote about. Maybe they'll even be as real as things that really happened. So for that reason, I owe it to myself to right great things, and to write a lot of them, and to write them well.