Perspective

xkcd no. 505 is perspective.

When I read this comic some months back, most of my conscious thought was swept into nostalgia's wind tunnel, to a day during my junior year of high school when I finished a novel from the library. It was "The Gunslinger," first of the Dark Tower series, and one I'd selected at random from the stacks (ignorant I was and fated to become a Tower junkie soon enough).

I used to do this a lot when I was back in Englewood--ride my bike down to the biblioteca pública, find a quiet corner, and stroll the lines and lines of fiction, metropolises of stories encased in paper, on foundations of aluminum, silently bustling under the keen eye of Mrs. Jones (why is always a woman?).

Arthur Clarke, Heinlein, Brooks, Bova, Adams, and dozens and dozens more I can't recall; I picked out "The Gunslinger." I think its cover hooked me (well done public relations!). It took a few months to read it; I wasn't as enthralled as I am now (finishing up no. 4 today, junkie to the core and back again). So captivating (and skin-crawling), full of heart warming (and freezing), and riddled with blood-pumping (and spurting), frighteningly wonderful, and a 'drug' worthy of addicted servitude.

Long way about from the start of this post, there's a scene of perspective at the end of this Stephen King masterpiece (the first installment of his magnum opus, sans contest) where a universe is contained in a burned blade of grass and time flows without rhyme, reason, or boundary. I'll write no more on the details, for the spoiler alarms'a buzzing.

I get exquisite pleasure out of losing my mind in these glimpses of infinity. Tip o' da cap to Mr. Munroe and his stick-figuring webcomic...another in the blissfully long line of creators to dazzle my senses (with a spice of humor to boot!).