I learned a new word the other day. It sort of means love and sort of doesn’t. I’ve been rolling it up, down, and all around the bag of sawdust between my ears ever since I heard it.

Don’t know about you but I’ve always assumed that everyone else is basically unknowable. You can watch and listen and think about the object of your affection/hate/obsession/whatever till the cows come home but the thing in your mind and heart is not them. It’s a projection. In the best-case scenario, their image of you and yours of them does a dance somewhere in between.

The word I learned was coined by a psychologist in 1979 in order to study love in a scientific way. Admittedly, I’ve only read the Wikipedia entry, but it just sounds like love to me. Or, whatever it is that I’ve always felt toward women I’ve been drawn to. To differentiate, she observes the fact that her participants really saw the object of their affection’s personal flaws, but simply overlooked them or found them attractive.

I’ve never heard of a romantic attachment without this. It has to be a kind of dream that two (or more) people believe in for it to work.

And yet, the article goes on to say that this thing can be difficult to understand for those who have never experienced it, and it is thus often derided and dismissed as undesirable, some kind of pathology, ridiculous fantasy or a construct of romantic fiction.

Anyways, whatever it’s called, something like that seems to be happening to me.

Answered a couple questions. Talked to Rick Kogan about the whale book, which Biblioklept wrote a nice note about.

Nathan Knapp wrote a very generous review of my old cabbie book.