I am now used to the questions (plural) about what book is the book I am writing now like.

The question is, I guess, inevitable. I smile and nod.

Gravity’s Rainbow. But anyone born after 1987 will not have read it. Or they’ve read it but they are all in nursing homes in their pajamas having cocktails. I was born in 1986. Which means I read it. I have read it a dozen times. Each time I manage to squeeze something new out of it that I had not been aware of before. Before what. For writers like me, the idea of before is this space in which I can create a timeline that begins with what. All physics begins with the Big Bang. The people who question the reality of the Big Bang (I am not one of them) ask what came before the Big Bang.

Ummm.

The answers are varied. Something from nothing stuff.

My favorite answer is: I don’t know.

Is it a crime now among the Normals to say: I don’t know.

Are there trillions of Big Bangs.

I don’t know.

What kind of book are you writing now.

I don’t know.

Is there a book like it I might know.

Gravity’s Rainbow.

Why Pynchon.

He was not afraid. He saw through many of the things I have seen through. There is always a price for this.

Is it worth the price.

No.

It is what we are left with. The humility of hubris.