Episode #10

“…along comes little Amethyst...”

with guest lindsey romain

“Some ex-old lady had hit town, and they’d run away together. The emergency room had mixed them up with somebody else, the way maternity wards switched babies around, and they were still on some intensive care ward under another name. It was a particular kind of disconnected denial, and Doc figured he’d seen enough by now to recognize it.”

In the novel Inherent Vice, that’s how Thomas Pynchon described the post-1960s generation coming of age in the year 1970, bleary-eyed and hungover from the last decade and the damage done, and afflicted with the cruelest kind of misery—absolutely devastated by the grief of loss, yet operating in complete denial of the existence that grief, telling themselves stories, as Joan Didion would say, in order to live, stories that explain away the deaths of loved ones as strange and grand mysteries, rather than cruel and banal fates.

Further, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation, Sortilege intones that the post-Manson era in which Doc and company found themselves in was perilous, “astrologically speaking, for dopers...especially those of high school age. Who'd been born, most of them, under a 90-degree aspect...the unluckiest angle possible...between Neptune, the doper's planet...and Uranus, the planet of rude surprises. Doc had known it to happen...that those left behind would refuse to believe that people they loved...or even took the same classes with, were really dead. They came up with all kinds of alternate stories so it wouldn't have to be true.”

The Harlingens are a family in need of such a story, one that will allow them to live in the Mansonoid post-60s drop-out drag of the Age of Nixon. If only someone could tell them that story, could put together the pieces so we could all see it a little more clearly…