"I could the degrees as I think."

[adelaidesean]

Hmm. What the hell does that mean?

I found this sentence in the first draft of "Cenotaxis", a novella that will slip between the first books of the Astropolis series (due out in standalone form late next year from MonkeyBrain).

What it's supposed to say is a complete mystery to me. Context doesn't help at all. It's like something reached into my head, scrambled up my neurons just long enough for me to write these words--words that look perfectly correct on their own but together, in that order, make no sense at all--then retreated so subtly I never noticed what happened.

I deleted the sentence rather than try to work out what it meant, then I reconsidered and kept it out of curiosity. Now it's here. Perhaps someone can tell me what I was trying to say.

Personally, I'm hoping it's a coded message from the collective unconscious designed to join with other such coded "errors" in order to reveal some deeply profound truth about the universe (cf. the "garbage" text in modern-day spam). That's much more interesting than the assumption that I'm just wearing out.

Comments

[mireille21.livejournal.com]

Um, I immediately thought that perhaps there is some connection with degrees in a circle, related to cogs turning in your brain "I could hear the degrees turn as I think". Or if it's temperature related (rising due to stress, or atmosphere?) "I could feel the degrees rise as I think."
I don't know. I think it's just proof as we've long suspected that one person cannot really turn out the number of written works you do in a year, and therefore you have a secret stash of monkeys and typewriters somewhere don't you! And this time one of the monkeys got distracted.

[ladnews.livejournal.com]

Those damned monkeys. I knew they'd be trouble one day. I barely caught their attempt at titling the Astropolis books in time: "More Bananas" was never going to work, and neither was "Bigger Cages" for "Earth Ascendant". Sheesh. Don't they know anything?

[gloripebbles.livejournal.com]

Never trust monkeys to do a pony's work is my Monday thought of the day.

Actually Sean, I misread your interesting sentence and saw 'count' rather than 'could' - pesky reading phenomena. Then as I read your post, I re-read with the 'right' word in it (and your post began to make sense *lol*).

I saw degrees as temperature or an accumulating pile of bits of paper procured from higher institutions. The other word I'd play with is the 'the'...what's missing off that one........perhaps.