It Goes On

Take-out Asian food tonight, of the Korean variety. There's this dish that's cooked in a stone bowl with steamed vegetables and a fried egg on top. Douse it with Asian hot sauce and mix the whole shit up. Amazingly good. Only you don't get the stone bowl in a take-out order, but what the hell. Mood music for my dinner: Impossible Germany by Wilco. Made me lonely in a happy tolerable kind of way. Check it out and you'll see what I mean. Okay. So now we'll move into the religious material. Mack and the boys are on their way in a borrowed truck to catch frogs in order to sell them to Doc in order to get money to throw a party for Doc. The truck breaks down. Gay, the best mechanic of the bunch, says that it needs a needle valve for the carburetor. He takes off hitchhiking to go fetch a new one after saying that he'll be right back: 

"He thumbed three cars before one stopped for him. The boys watched him climb in and start down the hill. They didn't see him again for one hundred and eighty days. 

Oh, the infinity of possibility! How could it happen that the car that picked up Gay broke down before it got into Monterey? If Gay had not been a mechanic, he would not have fixed the car. If he had not fixed it the owner wouldn't have taken him to Jimmy Brucia's for a drink. And why was it Jimmy's birthday? Out of all the possibilities in the world-the millions of them-only events occurred that lead to the Salinas jail. Sparky Enea and Tiny Colletti had made up a quarrel and were helping Jimmy celebrate his birthday. The blonde came in. The musical argument in front of the juke box. Gay's new friend who knew a judo hold and tried to show it to Sparky and got his wrist broken when he hold went wrong. The policeman with a bad stomach-all unrelated, irrelevant details and yet all running in one direction. Fate just didn't intend Gay to go on that frog hunt and Fate took a hell of a lot of trouble and people and accidents to keep him from it. When the final climax came with the front of Holman's bootery broken out and the party trying on the shoes in the display window only Gay didn't hear the fire whistle. Only Gay didn't go to the fire and when the police came they found him sitting all alone in Holman's window wearing one brown oxford and one patent leather dress shoe with a gray cloth top."  (from Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck) 

Next I'll write about the great frog hunt or maybe skip right to the party. We'll see.