Two days ago it rained from dawn till dusk. Because of--and not in spite of--the rain, I had to run errands. My little black and white friend has made her intentions clear: I belong to her. I also came to terms with the fact that if I don't get her fixed, nobody will, and it has to get done, because she's an outdoor cat. She also needs shots. The useless vagrants who brought her into this world (or at least this neighborhood) and then left her here sure as hell didn't do right by her.

So, with the rain, she refused to go out. I have no litter box. She'd already been in for something like 16 hours. Problem.

Once she's spayed, she'll also have to remain strictly indoors for at least a week. Problem.

Solution? Must go buy a litter box.

Did.

Brought it home. Hilarity ensued.

She ultimately didn't go outside until just a couple of hours ago.

Anyway, that's not actually what I intended to note.

When I was buying a litter box at Petco in frustrating Glendale, I made a hasty decision to buy myself a little present at the adjacent Barnes & Noble. What with all that Cervantes, Faulkner, and Borges on my mind, I decided I needed to read...something I hadn't already read.

So I, in a strange act of forgetting worthy of the author whom I'm reading, bought the latest novel by Milan Kundera--Ignorance, recently issued in paperback. I began reading it later that night, only to realize that of the first twenty pages of text, I'd read those exact words in that exact order before, only I cannot remember where and when I read them. Prior to that day, I did not own a copy of that book, nor can I recall any of my friends having a hardback copy that I might have read while visiting. Unless...perhaps...I--in a rare counter-habitual act--bought a copy in hardback in an airport, and read this slim novel on a plane, and then accidentally left it wherever I was visiting.

(friends back east will you check please?)

The question is, how is it possible to know you have read a text which you have no memory of reading?

If this seems like a terribly slight subject to write this much about...well...maybe it is, but it's as unsettling as those odd dreams that crop up every now and then; the kind that tint the entire day, leaving you with a fine, tight knot deep inside your chest.

Fitting that I fell asleep on the couch, then roused myself after 3, got into bed, and promptly failed to sleep well the rest of that night.

Fitting all the more so that the other book I bought was one that's been on my list for the last several years, and that's the large volume of the complete fictions of Borges. I'd never felt like spending the money on it before; I think largely because the slimmer volume I have offered up so much infinite depth and pleasure. I've read Labyrinths over and over, in any order. That's part of the joy of Borges: you can pick him up any time, anywhere, and get utterly lost in these magnificent jewels of short fiction; jewels that swim gleefully in the intersections of memory and experience, forgetting, dreams, waking life, and the confusion of the two.

He is one of the relatively few authors in the world that elicits in me a physical reaction; a sense of vertigo.

And with vertigo, we return to Kundera, both as a theme of his earlier novels, and because I cannot think of a more apt description for the uncanny sense of the familiar, confused with something I am not familiar with: the reading of his latest novel. I simply do not know anymore what actually has happened.