This may be entirely the wrong first impression to create with my first post on a message board I have not yet gotten to know.

I work third shift. Yesterday, Monday, morning when I finished my shift, I decided to stay awake during the daytime for a bit and specifically to go pick up my pulls and Previews orders at the comic store.

When I got there one of the books I had waiting for me was the copy of Flaming Carrot Omnibus that I had pre-ordered.

I went to check out an Indian buffet that was new to me for lunch and started reading FC. I got through the text introduction by Kevin Eastman and as far as the panel of Foggy Face in the first issue, and felt the need to put it aside for a moment to read something a little less heady.

Then I went to the mall and looked around at Barnes & Noble for a bit. Eventually I decided to pick up a copy of Italo Calvino's book, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. I'd been looking for this book for maybe a couple of years, but hadn't had luck at the used bookstores and thrift stores that are my first resort for prose fiction. I'm a fan of a podcast called A Thousand Maybe Worlds: it's a ratings/review/discussion podcast dedicated to the old time radio science fiction show X Minus One. On the episode dedicated to "Jaywalker", which they regarded as a stinker of an episode of X Minus One; one of the hosts, Richard, decided to do a tangential lecture on second-person narration and mentioned If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which started me on that quest.

On the bus ride home, I started reading If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. It's a book about books and the experience of reading. It's heady and surreal. My sleepless addled brain wanted to connect my purchase of these two works in a deeper and more profound way than is probably merited. They both seem to be kind of surreal and in some ways a meta-commentary on the medium in which they exist. Maybe there's something there. Maybe I was just sleep deprived by then.