Coming soon to a bookstore near you. Or not.

I am really really really sick of writing about college.
So I'm not going to.
Unfortunately, with my default subject matter gone, I'm kind of left with...my original default subject matter: books!
Let's talk Steinbeck.
I read Travels With Charley while I was hanging around airports when I went down to Virginia. It's not some fictional story set up in Salinas with lots of artificially placed metaphor and symbolism and mice and dead chicks floating in the ocean. I do love those books because I love Steinbeck. This one, though, was different.
Here's the story: Steinbeck realizes that he's been writing about America, a very changed America, without having really seen it in a few decades. To fix this, he gets a truck made into a tricked out camper, grabs his dog, piles books into the vehicle, and takes off across the country from New York. And he writes a book about what he saw.
So not only do you get a fantastic, pinpointed, captured in time, unique perspective of this sprawling glorious mess we call a country, you get to hear about what it was like to be writing about it.
And, for some reason, all the books I've read had finally built up to a point this summer where I realized that I want to write one. I'm not talking a little fluffy novel here, I'm talking about a Book. A good one. It doesn't have to be long, but it has to stand on its own as something worth existing independently. Ask me about the subject when I come up with one. At this rate, this whole thing might happen from the inside of a locked room painted white, but maybe the sedatives will add an interesting flare to my narration.
I'm nowhere near ready yet. This'll take me a couple decades, I know that. Things have a way of building up for me before they actually happen, so I'll just keep on going until one day it all comes crashing out. Until then, maybe I can write some short little pieces of absolute crap to get warmed up; it's not like I won't have people around to help me out. I hear Harvard is good for finding random awesome people who wouldn't mind working on making my writing less shitty.
I was hoping I could avoid the college subject for at least one post, but apparently I just blew it. Whatever. In the next four years, maybe I can work on shifting the balance from stercus to aureum. I don't have high hopes, but it's worth a shot. (See "Carpe diem coleos" on SAe.)

L