An old aerostat hand by now, Pugnax had also learned, like the rest of the crew, to respond to "calls of nature" by proceeding to the downwind side of the gondola, resulting in surprises among the surface populations below, but not often enough, or even notably enough, for anyone to begin to try to record, much less coördinate reports of, these lavatorial assaults from the sky.
* * * * * * * * * *
I'm stuck on the phrase "not . . . even notably enough" when describing how people reacted to human and dog-sized shits falling upon them from out of the sky. How is that not notable?! I get hit one time by a human-sized piece of shit from out of the sky and I never stop fucking talking about it! I spend my life seeking solace via hardline retribution against the bastard who shit on me and I tell everybody I ever meet about it! Sure, Pynchon says it's not notable enough to try to keep a record on these events. But it's not like they're mysterious. How fast is the airship moving and how fast does human excrement fall? I get hit in the head by a large piece of shit, I'm looking up and noting everywhere it could have come from. And that airship puttering away to the North is a pretty likely candidate!
I suppose I'm thinking about it in too modern a way. In 1893, everybody's lives were more localized. And probably more religious and mysterious too. And also probably filled with a lot more encounters with shit. Maybe in 1893, getting hit by a large turd from out of the blue was just another tedious moment in a long day of tedious moments at which a person could only shrug and think, "God's ineffable, baby!" So poo falling from the sky might become a local talking point down at the bar—"Hey, ya hear about Zeke getting blindsided by some cosmic turd? Hilarious, ayuh?"—but the story might never actually travel to the next town where it could cute meet with another story from that area about old Randy gettin' splattered from above. In 1893, maybe dots were too hard to connect over even relatively small distances. And probably the least of everybody's problems. "So ya got shit on from the sky? Big whoop! I just lost my baby in a runaway thresher accident!"
Is that a thing? A runaway thresher? I lived in Nebraska for one year and all I learned was that every farmer I ever met had at least half a digit missing and that the summer humidity was so awful that I couldn't live there another year.
Was the big news story at the time Pynchon was writing this that thing about blue ice? It was a plot point in the 2003 finale of Six Feet Under so maybe?
Perhaps this one sentence is foreshadowing how the enemies of the Inconvenience will eventually learn to track their movements! Just follow the scat impact craters!
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