The other day as I was driving down the freeway, thinking about my perception of all the cars around me and the noise of their engines, I was struck by the similarity of light and sound in that they are both waves. Or rather, I was struck by their dissimilarity, because light and sound seem thoroughly disassociated from one another in our perception of them. And yet, atomically, or subatomically, they are these shivering waves coming at our senses. Bumping our neurons and sending the dendrites shuddering toward the brain.

It seemed like such a phenomenal revelation, this wave business. It took my mind in a hundred different directions all at once, and I found myself rattling off these wonders of nature and perception that were all somehow tangentially related to the fact of the sensory wave, from modern art to the temptation in the Garden of Eden.

It occurred to me that I was just as thrilled by these different ideas and their connections as I was by the fact of thinking of them at all. I had earlier, for a number of semi-legitimate reasons which I won't bother recounting, been thinking about things that thrill people, especially in relation to vampires. In the sense that vampires seem to require (at least in most traditional lore) rather extreme and inappropriate sources of pleasure, namely the whole blood-and-fang business. And in the sense that the vampire narrative represents the corruption of human desires. I imagined myself, at the vast edge of my wonder, standing next to meta-vampire as he laid claim to the epitome of human experience. I imagined myself looking askance at meta-vampire and saying quietly but superiorly, "I know something more. I know epiphany."