1/16/2024 0 Comments Inherent vice pancakes![]() ![]() Don’t say the guy can’t write a great bummer of an ending.“This seemed to be happening more and more lately out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he'd seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everyone else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. For the fog to burn off, and for something else this time, somehow , to be there instead.” For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket. Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait. In that ending, Pynchon wrote, “ Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he'd have to just keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody. Doc’s been here before, and he’s wondering if there’s any more to be found on what Clancy Charlock once called “the boulevards of regret.” A whole LOT of talking.Īt the end of the Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice, Doc finds himself alone in his car, no Shasta Fay to be found, driving along PCH and lost in a fog of the kind of density that only comes with lungs full of THC and a heart full of sorrow. “…this don’t mean that we’re back together.”Īnd just like that, here we are, at the end. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.” Listen Now » “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” as Bigfoot Bjornsen says…but what if…what if even that was one of the certainties that the Golden Fang could take from us? Who could you turn to? Who else could Doc take this to, besides our old flat-topped pal?Īs Chandler wrote in The Long Goodbye, “I never saw any of them again - except the cops. That’s a line from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and it’s one that Doc is surely on a handshake basis with, or would at least nod kinda knowingly to before returning to his cloud of Asian indica. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. “.sometimes, it’s just about doing the right thing.” ![]() ![]() ![]() “You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.” If ever there was an author we suspect our ol pal Doc Sportello would enjoy (other than a certain reclusive fellow hiding on the other side of Gravity’s Rainbow), it’d be that acid-fried humanist Kesey, who also wrote something more than just a little pertinent to Inherent Vice in general and today’s scene in specific: He knows there’s a painful side…but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.” Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh across the water…laughing at all of it. In his classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey wrote “McMurphy laughs. ![]()
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