Nope, I'm not poignantly homeless.

Did a little lite reading this morning. Read "The Wandering Scribe's" blog (lite; get it? LITE! As in: No-Paragraph-Breaks-For-Pages-At-A-Time-Written-In-A-Style-That-Reminds-
Me-Why-I-Had-Trouble-Finishing-The-Classics-In-High-School kind of lite).

Had long, deep, "I-feel-like-superficial-pondscum" moment, then pulled back out of it.

I'm sure Ms...Wandering is perfectly, legitimately homeless. I'm sure she really did sneak around hospitals to bathe and libraries to write, I'll assume the best, but in the wake of so much highly publicized literary...uh...misrepresentation, I'm taking her with a few grains. Because it's just turning out to be a little toooooo lucrative. Call me cynical (or perceptive enough to suspect that she had a larger audience in mind when she began writing...she wrote with a self-awareness that seemed - to me - slightly out of sync with what I'd expect a homeless woman unfamiliar with online journaling to crank out).

Here's an exerpt:

"And looking up through the window screen at the still deep-blue sky at almost 2:00 am. A high blue, star-studded dome. I'd never seen the sky like that before, like a funnel way high up in it, as if the lid had secretly been lifted off the 'flat' sky during the night to reveal this other space way high above it. A space which was distinctly domed. Just exactly like the blue-ceilinged cupola of a church, painted with stars — and across it, and at that hour, a handful of seagulls gliding silently and languorously back and forth, back and forth, way way high up through it. Pure and white and silent; their slow flight almost a roll across the deep-blue parabola glittering with stars, and seemingly almost choreographed. Divine. Like doves, sent out on some secret heavenly mission. Or a sign — a silent, wondrous scene — for my eyes only."

Then imagine about a thousand pages like that, all filled with wonder and awe and brain-splitting appreciation for the trees and the crashing surf and a general amazement about things like breathing.

I know, I'm just an American hick with a waning appreciation for finely-strung sentences, delicately crafted, lace-like phrasing and centuries-old British syntax. Or, yes, I'm just a jealous, unpublished, oft-frustrated writer that can't handle watching others succeed where I've failed. Guess I could just make it up. Literary integrity is a grey area these days anyway, right?

No, I'll be honest: compelling homeless plight aside, I just wasn't that into her writing.