three baths and 241 pages later

i have thoughts about what i want in a novel
in a way this is not new
i sort of knew this
but
a novel
for me
needs to tell me something about the person who wrote it
not anything about them, as such
but, rather, about how being a human is for them
like the planetarium of their synapses

really
i'm not talking about realism

murakami does this really well for me in wind up bird
or kafka on the beach
even though, really, what happens in those books
how much of that is real
none of it
all of it
who cares

it's all real

so, anyway
i was reading, i read something that made me stop
it was maybe trite, hackneyed
maybe something put in to explain away character development
maybe this wasn't him at all, but research
but
that isn't why i stopped
i stopped because it made me think of myself
like a verfremdungseffekt
suddenly i wanted to ask you what you thought

perhaps i have been going about our relationship all wrong
but no
i think i know what you get from me
no
but maybe i'm wrong

to the point where
no matter if it's trite and hackneyed
effective has got to count
to engage the reader directly
to relate the context of the work to their own lives
surely this was working for me, anyway

so here's the jist of it
[i'd like to run to you wrapped in a robe of some kind
ahhh but what to draw upon the robe]

men do not really want from women what they think they do
they want neither sex nor companionship
what they want
mystery
like the mystery
not
like a mystery

so
hmmmm
it seems to me
that what you want from me
is more like the unbundling of the mystery

although
that's a rather techno meta phor

which is why i don't describe the robe

maybe it's a mental dance of the seven veils