Yesterday, to prep for my interview for Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission, oblique-like, I napped for two hours by the pool intermittently balancing David Foster Wallace “The Pale King” open-faced on my lap, a super-sized LARGE TYPE varietal, that I plucked from Palo Alto Main intuitively, and moving my eyes and probably my lips over parts of it, a tiny fraction, including 33 and 35 because I picked up somewhere that those were the good parts — not just for all the talk about lips and hard to reach places — but because they had appeared previously — maybe even to me, in another dreamlike state — in The New Yorker and Harpers.

The book was not half as boring as I thought it would be. Nor impregnable, and I am not just saying that because of all the young mothers and mothers-to-be circling with their carriages.

Meanwhile, back at the interview, I had a thesaurus moment when I said the PATC was “pungent.” Did I mean it “stunk”? No, according to Webster’s Third New International, another hernia-inducer, it means “pointy” or I meant pointy. Or: fecund, pregnant, loaded, heavy, ripe, ready. It is the most important and powerful committee, which is what I did not want to say or admit. “Pungent” shares a page with “Punk”, duly noted.

David Foster Wallace was said to love words, and not just deeply but he got around.