AND THEN IT ALL MADE SENSE: You ever get these things, where you're driving or you're on a treadmill or walking the dog and you think you've figured something out, figured out life or a small piece of it, maybe?

I had one tonight, listening to the Flaming Lips. I was coming back from the grocery store, and I was thinking about my son, about how so much of what he's doing right now as he's learning and evolving is really all about contextualizing. He's learning shades of meaning and movement, little variations on a theme; but the theme he's starting from, that's Truth, the mixed-upness of everything when it's just one big Everything, minus all the context. It's like he had It, Everything, and now he's gradually losing IT.

Contextualizing isn't about adding meaning, it's about subtracting it, and then when we get older we keep recontextualizing and adding on and going subtly more and more crazy...until we stumble across Alan Watts or meditative Catholicism or what-have-you and then we slow down a bit and actually start decontextualizing our way toward what we might call spiritual peace or big-G Grace or the like.

So I didn't want to lose that, up there, those thoughts. We'll see how I like 'em in the morning, though.