i can't explain it.

"I can't explain it though I have to try."

It's a simple line from a lovely little Jenny Owen Youngs song, and somehow I find it sums up my general state of mind quite simply. I'm working right now on a story about a boy who was born with a peculiar sort of body. Every muscle and tendon is made up of a string or a songline, every organ is fleshed out by musical tones. He tunes out the world unwittingly because his entire brain becomes an internal orchestra when he least expects it.

Probably it will end up being a stupid story, but there are bits of it I'm quite fond of already. In the beginning, the boy is standing next to his mother looking out the Rockefeller Center windows at his mother, who starts to ask him a question about what he wants for lunch. He doesn't reply because all he can hear is the crashing symphony that accompanies the skaters. It is silenced when he realizes the noise was all in his head.

There's something here in the notion of private language that I can't help but fall for every time; even though my favorite philosopher makes the argument that at the end of the day there is no such thing as a private language, it's still wildly compelling to think about. For all of our idiosyncratic feelings and emotions, at the end of the day the only things that matter are the ones that are communicable.

I think about this kind of stuff a lot, and as we launch this summer, it's foremost on my mind because right now it feels time for new projects and new distractions, and we here who crave cake and love life are feeling it most. Yesterday, we ate some of the greatest carrot cake I've ever tasted at a goodbye party for a friend, and the vibrancy of its flavor clashed with the dull irritation of farewells and we kind of wondered exactly what it all meant in terms of where we'd net out.

There's a great deal to be said for the unknown, but it's remarkably funny to think that we can't say it until we've experienced it and beaten it down into something communicable.