Sleepy in the bus...

Salut,

sitting in the bus for my first morning ride in almost two weeks now. Got back from California Tuesday night, and did a little detour to GG's place until the wee hours... Hey... I had not seen her in about 10 days, come on, gimme a break... So I went home and went to sleep a little before 4AM on Wednesday morning, woke up at 8h24 to catch the 9AM train (I find the train more comfortable, but the schedule is not flexible enough for me to take it often... I could have used the train this morning, it is 9h23 now and the bus is just starting, so I would have been sitting in the train for the last 23 minutes as opposed to freezing my ass out at the bus terminal, but since the earliest train back is at 15h40, arriving home at 16h20, it will be a bit tight for my Thursday taxi night, there is a kids dance class that starts at 17h15 and I must have time to get some grocery, prepare dinner and eat it before, so out of the train at 16h40, at school 5-10 minutes after, kids out of school another 5-10 minutes later, this doesn't leave me much time...

Anyway, sorry for the information overload, but hey, I don't think you would be here reading this if you didn't crave for more... :-) But I must admit, it might not be as interesting to read about my public transport timing issues not being well synchronized with my kids school and leisure, but it's not just about what we say sometimes, it is how we say it that makes it interesting or not.

One of my literature teachers once said (and I say that, like if I had many of them when I only been to 3-4 creative writing courses at UQAM :-), most if not all stories have already been written. We simply tell them differently now, but all in all, they are the same stories told again and again and again and again... And we are not only talking about Hollywood movies here (and don't get me wrong, there are lots of good movies made in Hollywood, I just use it to make a point). We have been telling each other stories for a few hundred thousand years already, and there is only a finite set of them...

This reminds me of a very good short story from Borgès in his Fiction collection about an impressively large library that contain all potential books of 410 pages, each having the same number of lines and each lines with about the same number of characters. Every possible combination of characters was there, so there were lots of books. Only a small portion of these books were actually readable, and even fewer actually made sense. Yet, since all the possibilities of combinations of characters were there, all possible stories (that could be told in this given number of pages) were somewhere to be found, including the exact story of your life, or mine or anybody else, whether real or fictional... This is kind of impressive... mind boggling actually... Can you imagine finding one of these books? Wow...

So the point is (yes, there is a point to all this, even though it isn't always clear to me when I start writing a post, I always end up converging to something kind of interesting, and it is rarely on purpose :-), I didn't want to believe it then, but I do agree now that all stories have been told, all possible lives have been lived, yet, we keep on kicking, and I keep on writing... because, it is not only about the story itself, it is how it is being told, it is not about the life that you have to live, it is how you live it, or again, as I quoted Mr. Randy Pausch in a previous post, it is not about the cards you were dealt with, it is how YOU decide to play them.

So even when I simply tell you stuff that might not seem interesting in itself, ask yourself why are you reading? How come you want to keep reading? Is it just curiosity? Or is there something bigger, something harder to explain or even understand, that keeps us all together, like the force. May it be with you!

BYE
MAD... Obi MAD Kenoby :-)