Buy PETER LEROY!!!!

Maybe as you get older, you see how different things tie together. For instance, the other day I wrote about the book Outliers, whose main premise is that along with pure talent and inborn ability, outside things such as geography, current events and even date of birth play a big part in one's success. In my "review" I looked back and realized how much that very thesis had been a part of my own life. Then last night I wistfully picked up my copy of Peter Leroy, which I have raved about HERE, and I opened to my favorite story, Take the Long Way Home. Flipped through a few pages, stopped at one and the first sentence I saw?

So much depends on chance. The coincidence of our having last names that begin with the same letter of the alphabet, or at least with letters that were close in the alphabet, meant that certain of us would remain in each other's company throughout most of every day for the next couple of years.

Whoa, I thought...just like what I just read in Outliers! Also, as I remembered, the luck I dreamed of as a kid to be sitting next to the only empty seat in class on the day a new girl came to school that was hot. Sigh.

Then yesterday I spent a lot of my evening bitching and moaning to myself re: the time I've wasted over the years doing absolutely nothing - drinking or, even worse, staring at the tv (at least with drinking, something might get broken.) I could've been doing ANYTHING productive in that time. So then this morning I get on the train and open up The Great Gatsby, as I'm giving it a second chance since the first time I read it I had just read The Grapes of Wrath, which isn't fair for any book to follow. So I pop open the preface, and dude is yammering bout some letter Fitzgerald wrote him in which he writes

...if I had spent this time [the last two years] reading or traveling or doing anything - even staying healthy - it'd be different, but I spent is uselessly, neither in study or contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally.

What the fuck??? Is the cosmos chasing me?

Anyway. I was mildly amused at all of this, and then guess what email I just fucking got?

Dear Reader,

Today, the Babbington Press has re-issued Take the Long Way Home in a handy pocket-size paperback edition.

Peter Leroy returns in memory to the fifth grade, where he finds himself gazing at Veronica McCall across the Gulf of Puberty.

Remembering Veronica, the hottest little number in Babbington's elementary grades at that time, inevitably leads him to reflect on the many varieties of love and lust to which the human animal is subject; to consider the roots of the animosity between Babbington's clamdiggers and chicken-farmers; to recall the occasion of his first meeting Porky White, who was to become the brains behind the Kap'n Klam chain of bivalve-based fast-food restaurants; and forces him to recreate his attempt to skate on ice.

Hmm.