The Map Collector

Before I go too far into the misty abyss of abstraction and dancing shadows of my own mind, it’s important that I restate the basic purpose of these essays, in effect to tether myself to something simple and concrete, grounded in the reality of everyday experience, as Eric Cartman famously did before entering the smug-filled city of San Francisco where people are lost in the vapor of their own farts. I like learning things. The problem is often that I’m not sure how much I actually understood. I can read a book and feel I’ve made total sense of it, but ask me to explain what I got in a few crisp sentences, and I fall apart. That’s not necessarily to say that I didn’t get anything from it, but that whatever it was is still in gaseous form, not yet distilled into something you can put in a mason jar and share. Of course, when it’s in that gassy form, there can also seem to be much more of it than I’ll get from the drip. In other words, half the time I know what I mean but I can’t say it, and the other half I have no clue what’s going on.
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