The Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Priory School was published in the February 1904 issue of the Strand magazine. I have the complete volume of the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes Strand stories in one volume and sometimes I will start with one story and stop with another. I am rereading this particular story because it features a bicycle as a central component in the story. I have read all the Holmes stories more than once and forget them over the years so I read them again for the first time. It started when my father read the novel A Study in Scarlet to me when I was small and dumb. So, many years later, as a large and dumb creature, I seek comfort in precision and the routine of these stories. They are dependable. At some point in the last weeks, I thought about how many a story functions on a perfunctory level requiring no insight, no reflection. The cigar is the cigar. The bicycle is the bicycle. So the Holmes stories do not give up much upon easy musing. They stand the test of time because they precisely unfold with a common forensic pattern. Yet do not all narratives reveal other things to the those who may be intrepid? Do not all stories by their very existence divulge a uniquely human vulnerability of self-reflection? I tell this story to boast. I tell that story to offer penance. I leave it up to you draw conclusions. 

I am standing on my second hour of concert attendance on a concrete floor. My mind wanders. I know that I should be engrossed with the performer. I am an admirer. Yet I am limited in sustaining interest in most things past a certain point when standing on a concrete floor for over an hour is required. He is telling a story about attending a college house party at a time of his life on the brink of adulthood where everything is a close call and you feel all things with searing intensity and judgement. In the story, he makes eye contact with someone, thinks there may be a connection and builds out the story from here. This is not perfunctory. I check back in. In my boredom, I lost the thread of the concert, of storyteller. Then I am back again, emersed in a narrative of transitive knowing. This is the thing that bridges the perfunctory with the sublime, the ephemeral with the knotted root: I know this thing. I know this easy and ordinary thing. It is my life. My party. My friend telling me that the bicycle is not the thing. And while we eventually get around to the reveal where the kidnapper is given a name and a context, the journey was the point and purpose. The story of adulthood begins with a glance across a kitchen or a map of the moor. 

I locate my stories somewhere around the topic of bicycles. It could just as easily be about a crowded kitchen at a party. This is bone to build the skeleton, the crutch to support the idea.