But panels don't always have to be in a straight and horizontal line, so what's your point?³

Yeah, one week in and still working on that 52 Books in 52 Weeks resolution. I'm guessing I shouldn't have started off with something by David Foster Wallace. They are just essays though so it's going quicker than expected. I still remember how pissed I was that the year I decided to move from Normal, IL back to Chicago was the same year D.F.W. started teaching at I.S.U. and a number of my friends ended up hanging with him over that year (1995) while I re-acclimated to the "real world" up north and rediscovered the unpleasant (at the time) fact that night-life often ended at 4am instead of always spilling over into the daylight hours. I've stated it before and am afraid of it becoming a looped statement that loses its impact but that was truly a time when time blended the days and nights and sensations and made it nigh impossible to remember events in anything even remotely resembling chronological order without some insane amount of help from outsiders or chroniclers that lived on the fringes of our own little social maelstrom.

I was reminded of the sensation yesterday when watching eXistenZ and -- four minutes into the movie -- realizing that I had already seen this particular Cronenberg film but I honestly could not for the life of me remember what happened beyond a mild intuiting of events perhaps three to five minutes ahead of the moment I was presently viewing. This sensation continued through the rest of the movie and didn't abate until the very end when Jude Law and the strangely sexy Jennifer Jason Leigh employ an Irish Wolfhound¹ in a most unusual manner.

I feel like I walked off a cliff here. Seriously. I got all excited because what was intended as a brief notice that my reading exercise was in fact off to a slow start seemed to be building into something entirely different and it felt as if I were actually building to release (or come to grips with) some sort of realization². I actually had another half a paragraph following the above but after reviewing it I realized I had veered way off track and it was time to allow my little internal copy editor the freedom to actually scream, "STOP!" Then I sat and stared at the screen for a few minutes. Once I realized I was spending more time trying to remember where my Yellow Note CD was than actually musing over the point I thought I was trying to make it became pretty obvious it was time to throw in the towel on this particular line of thought.

And now I think how if I could only boil this all down to a few well-placed strokes of India Ink within four panels on a sheet of newsprint it would probably make a pretty funny, if somewhat usually dire, observation on the "blahs" a "bad case of the Mondays" or just a general Dilbertian view on the effect of the impending work week on the over-oiled gears in a dreamer's head.

Maybe I should have stuck with cartooning. It takes a lot less time to say what you're trying to say when you've only got a few inches to say it in.

¹At least I think that’s what kind of dog it was.
²Or “grand message”, either one works for me.
³No, this isn't a mistake. The three is in the right place. Think about it for a second.