Living on Pynchon Time

So the children are back in school, and I'm not sure whether I'll be back in school or not come January, only that, having looked into this matter more closely, the only thing weighing on my otherwise stellar application to the fine Jesuit nursing school that is as hard to get into as medical school once was is an unfortunate period (this, I should add, is a matter of conjecture, not to mention debate, among many people I know, who, due to having escaped it relatively unscathed, would prefer to remain anonymous) in the late seventies and early eighties where, it would appear, the applicant fiddled around a bit too much in the world of booze, drugs, and women. And stopped going to mass on Sunday. And probably started eating meat on his pizza on Fridays during Lent.

While this was some time ago, and while the current thinking is, officially, among those making decisions on our lives—a group getting younger each year month and day, who, keep in mind, might not have had their seventies time, and may have some bitterness about it when they're looking at your application—that what happened in the seventies stays in the seventies, I'm beginning to think that someone has seen fit to make me pay for my sins. At least nominally.

It's the Catholic way, and while the Jesuits tend to be more philosophical about such matters, more on Augustine's plane than, say, the Pope's—Lord, let me be chaste, just not yet—I have a sneaking suspicion that someone in that deciding outfit is thinking, on my application in particular: "Fuck him. I hardly drink, except when I'm depressed, or when my husband is cheating on me, or when I'm alone, or with somebody ... and I've never done any drugs, especially the fun ones that I keep hearing about from all these fuckers like, I suspect, the applicant, who, by the Grace of God, surely (and that would be just like God, wouldn't it—wouldn't it??!!), quit just in time that he actually looks pretty good for someone fifty fucking one years old, and isn't just muttering to himself in a padded cell in that way people like me, who have only fucked one person in their whole life, and that person, it just so happens, now, is fucking everything he can get his hands on, all figured people like him would end up one day ...

"Well fuck him! He is going to, at the very least, do some penance."

And, to that end, I'm out on my deck this morning, with nothing better to do than read Thomas Pynchon, his latest, Inherent Vice, which I wouldn't recommend to people who didn't have a seventies, or something like it, at some point in their life, though if they're having it now, Pynchon may be a little hard to follow.

I'm still not exactly sure of the plot, which involves a murder in a surfing community in California in the very early seventies. A private eye somewhat like Elliot Gould in Altman's film The Long Goodbye, except our man, Doc Sportello, is a doper, in a milieu of dopers, trying to crack the case.

Thus come some telling lines. Take for instance this one, on page 129: "A private eye [our man Doc] didn't drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops, and truth was, since crossing the doorsill of this place, Doc couldn't help noticing what you'd call an atmosphere."

Indeed. An atmosphere.

Anyway, it's time I got back to my reading, and get a bowl of cereal, a haircut, before the kids get home and the atmosphere, as it were, goes poof!

Enjoy the day.