I’m on page 208. So far this second section has shifted from spastic examinations of an ever-growing menagerie of characters and their feelings and the world around them to concentrating only on the guy who I guess is the main character. Chris says that this section is more about plot, and I’m not sure what to think of that. Looking back, I really enjoyed the first section for what it was. I was able to get lost in the meandering tangents and sudden changes of perspective, and it was a hell of a ride through a bunch of confusing words. I liked it. I’m not sure yet what to make of this introduction of a story a quarter of the way in. I’ve realized that at this point that I really don’t care about Slothrop. I’m interested in what happens to him, but if he dies or fails or fades away, so it goes. I’m more interested in the motives and actions of the Pavlovian experimenter, and maybe that’ll come back to the surface. Recalling V. again, I felt the same lack of care for Profane, the schlemiel who hardly cared about himself, and Slothrop has some similar traits. I suppose that Pointsman could make a comeback much in the way that Stencil, whose eccentricities and interests eventually became the main thrust of V., did, but one of the things that kept that earlier novel interesting to me was how each chapter seemed to promise a new setting and new set of characters: maybe this one’s about a siege in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, or a poet writing about the war in Malta, or revolution in Florence—the story was composed of so many bizarre flashbacks that it was hard to keep up, and I liked that about it. This single plotline seems so mundane in comparison. The next set of boxes is about twenty pages off, so I’m going to call it quits for the night. I hope something changes soon.
And now I’m going to try writing about things that have nothing to do with Gravity’s Rainbow. I got free banananas today. I guess my food buying habits might seem a little weird. I don’t give one single damn whether the farmers I buy from sprayed their crops with DDT or Thalidomide or whatever. Whatever works, man; just so long as it tastes good when you’re done. I do, however, buy some items from the Publix semi-hippie label, Greenwise. The last meat I bought came from chickens that weren’t fed antibiotics or cow waste and went to good schools, and the milk, though not organic, comes from cows not treated with growth hormones. The label says right there that the FDA thinks I’m an idiot and the milk is exactly the same, but I know that the growth hormone creates a problem with udder infections, and that sounds super gross. Mainly I’m concerned about antibiotic abuse. That shit is bad news and we are all going to die of some invincible staph infection one of these days. I think I bought Greenwise tomato juice the last time I needed some, but there weren’t antibiotics involved in that decision; I think the organic stuff was just redder.
Anyhow, the news tells me that organic eating is old and busted, and the new hotness is local eating. I don’t shop at that little stand on Sandy Springs Circle out an effort to eat locally but more out of an effort to buy locally. Support local business and fight the man and all that. I like to know that the dude or lady I am giving my money to represents a small business that is able to keep its customers in sight rather than some huge corporation that is able to abstract customers into graphs and numbers. The health of small businesses seems to me to be in the best interest of the consumer, and I try to support that idea when possible. And sometimes I get free bananas. I don’t know where they came from: Florida or Costa Rica or somewhere. Who cares? Rick’s Farmers Market has a bunch of ripe bananas that need to move fast, and maybe all the sweating I do in a day really is causing a potassium deficiency.
Steve, of Steve, Don’t Eat It! fame, recently made a post about that honey thing that shows up on every box of honey-flavored breakfast cereal. I can understand its purpose—not all honey comes in a plastic bottle shaped liked a bear (my current batch, a sourwood honey from somewhere in the Blue Ridge mountains, came in a glass jar), and drizzling honey out of a jar requires some extra utensils—but I can fill that purpose with a spoon. I want to file this tool away in my mind with the melon ballers and cherry mashers of the world, but nothing so succinctly represents the presence of honey as that honey thing. It’s apparently called a honey dripper or honey dipper or something like that. I kind of want one. I wonder if there’s a Michael Graves version.
Sheldon Brown says I’ve been locking my bike all wrong. The best way is to put the lock around only the rear wheel, inside that rear diamond in the frame. The idea looks at how bicycles are stolen: bike locks are usually either chains or U-locks, so a thief is going to be carrying around either a pair of bolt cutters or a jack. Keeping the lock away from the frame will prevent frame damage during failed theft attempts, and it’s unlikely that a thief will try or succeed in cutting through the wheel. It doesn’t usually make much sense to carry a hacksaw around, and the tension on the rim makes it difficult to cut through. This new locking method makes sense, but it’s going to take a while to get used to. My rear wheel has a lot less clearance than the one pictured, and I’d have to rest the lock against the rear fender which has an annoying tendency to push the fender against the wheel. It still seems worth a shot.
I appear to be getting sunburned. I’ve been putting on SPF a billion sunscreen in the mornings, but I tend to forget to reapply in the afternoons. The EPA says that tomorrow’s UV index is 8, which is probably a lot. I don’t remember all of the details of those genealogy projects I did in school—I think my ancestors were mostly Micks and Dagos—but whatever set of DNA brought me here, I seem to burn pretty easily. I should probably do something about that.
I’m not sure how much longer these bananas are going to make it. Maybe I’ll try making bread out of them.
