Last night I was reading Jack Kerouac's novel "On The Road." Mostly because I know Fish really likes Kerouac and the rest of the beat generation writers and if someone I think highly of thinks highly of a book than there's a good chance that I'll eventually read it. And this is all possible because of the Kuzzy's since while I was staying with Jim & Beth last weekend I was completely enamored by their many bookshelves and Beth let me take a couple books home with me.

So anyway, I'm reading Kerouac and I come across this passage:

"...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...

This is one (of a long list) of my favorite quotes and I was delighted to stumble across it while reading. I suppose I should have known, but I hardly expected to find a famous quotation firmly embedded in text. There's something about meeting a quote in its proper home that suddenly makes that quote more understandable and meaningful. It allows you to take ownership of the quote because, hey, you found it on your own & didn't need anybody else to point it out to you.

This morning while I was still lying in bed I realized how the quote experience paralleled my life right now. All these names that I'm familiar with from FIS skiing -- Justyna Kowalczyk, Virpi Kuitunen, Katerina Neumannova, Marit Bjoergen -- are actually REAL PEOPLE, not just names, and I am going to be RACING them. Wow.