Tozerboy

I woke early this morning, very early, 4:30 AM. Of course I fell asleep around 10:30 PM, three hours earlier than normal, so 4:30 makes sense. It has been a long week, fruitful, but long. I think I’ve been using both hemispheres of my brain equally this week. The past, present and future seem to preoccupy me at once. My days are filled with work and conversation, my nights with writing and dreams. I was tired last night, but in a deserved sense.

I decided to use this quiet morning time to do some research and writing. I had two blog entries that I’ve been imagining, so I was writing one, that I was going to call Fat and Skinny, about yesterday (March 31), the most beautiful day of Spring we’ve had yet. The other one, that I was researching for later, I was thinking titling Etymology. It was/is going to be about words and labels. This of course is motivated by my recent choice of a new label, Gay, and what that word means to me and others. All of that will have to wait.

The net can be such a time suck. I love doing research and the internet can turn into my own little Glass Bead Game. When I get riffing on a subject, playing with and finding overlapping relationships, I can spend hours with no net (pardon the pun) result. This morning I was researching the word, “Word.” If you’re going to talk about etymology, I figure you start at the beginning. Word is not a new subject for me, I’ve been fascinated by it since my college days, when I was a Philosophy minor. You can translate “word” into Greek and come up with logos and logos was the tangential device I was going to use in Etymology.

As I was about to stop my first hour of research, I decided to check a few other blogs. Tapping down my bookmarks, first I went to Jeremiah’s, then I headed toward Steph’s and I came upon her latest entry titled, of all things Logophilia. “Hair-raising” is the only way to describe my reaction. Her entry so overlapped mine that is scared me. Of course she didn’t exactly explore the same themes as I plan to explore, but the coincidence was uncanny.

This is not the first coincidence from her blog that has happened either. The first happened on my very first visit to her blog. Arthur, her roommate, told me about her blog, so when I finally got around to it a few days later I read this post, “I do believe in commas, I do, I do!” The coincidence? Arthur and I had discussed a documentary about James Thurber that I wanted to do and Steph mentions Thurber in her entry. OK, I know its small, but her next few entries all had similar coincidences. All posted on the same day that I had written about the subjects in a personal journal.

What does this mean? Hell, I don’t know. I can’t deny the phenomenon and I guess I have to see what happens next.