Let Me Down Softly: Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge"

 

I had this thing pre-ordered. I was excited for a new Pynchon. And then I got a few pages in and gave up for whatever reason. That was a decade ago now.

 

I did pick it back up and went back at it. There’s not a lot of payoff.

 

It’s weird. If you like Pynchon, it has all the things you like.

 

There’s plenty of paranoia.

 

You got your bad puns.

 

You got your songs (someone needs to make an album of his songs if no one has done it yet).

 

There’s people with weird names.

 

 

But I didn’t care about any of the characters, except maybe the protagonist and then only a little.

 

I spent the book waiting on some plot action, knowing that this was his “9/11” book.

 

And 9/11 happens, on page 316 of a 477-page book and for the most part it could have not happened. The characters are in New York, and they are affected by the event, but it stays in the background.

 

Maybe that is the whole point, that 9/11 stays in the background? It was kind of disappointing.

 

Oh, and the last thing is that a lot of the characters and plot revolves around the dot com bubble and bust from a New York vantage. It rang false. It kept reminding me of Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons” which is not the comparisons you want your text to fish out from the reader.

Five Years Sober

 Some time today or yesterday or tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the last time I had a drink.

It was Memorial Day weekend. Anita was out of town. I’d gone to a concert and a baseball game that weekend, but I was relaxing at home, and I went to the fridge at about quarter after midnight for just one more before I went to bed for the night because I had to work the next day.

And then the next weekend I didn’t buy any more beer and then the next weekend and the weekend after next to a point where if I did buy some it would have made Anita sad, so I decided against it. Of course, it was more than that. I had a long history of bad, self-destructive decisions I made while drinking and it isn’t good for your health even if you say to yourself, you can moderate it. And I couldn’t really moderate it. Five years ago, I had been drinking more to sooth work stress and political stress and it was just time to stop.

I liked being drunk though and sometimes I still miss it in a way I don’t miss smoking (even though there is still the occasional craving for a cigarette fifteen years out). The difference is that I kept smoking because not smoking made me feel bad, but I liked drinking, so I drank to feel good – it helped level out the anxiety. Thankfully, I wasn’t at the point of physical dependence on alcohol.

I don’t miss the hangovers though – the dehydration and feelings of dread as your brain chemistry reset or the piecing together of the night before to make sure you didn’t do or say anything the night before.

Quitting drinking was surprisingly easy for me in terms of physical cravings. I wasn’t expecting that based on how hard it was for me to quit smoking. The hard part was making the decision to quit and keeping that decision every day. It was easy because it was something I wanted to do, and I had people around me that supported me.

You have those people too. Even if you have those cravings that are so bad you can feel it in your teeth, you are surrounded by people who care about you and want to see you make the healthy choices for your best self.