Chapter 1: Section 1: Page 8: Line 77

 And Chick Counterfly, for better or worse, had remained. . . .

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Did you know I'm also discussing Gravity's Rainbow and Vonnegut's Player Piano over on my sister blog, Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea? That's also where I discuss comic books when I'm in the mood. But lately I haven't been in the mood because I've been reading more serious things where most of the characters don't wear form fitting outfits that show everything and nothing all at the same time. I mean, Booster Gold has some incredible abs and pecs and the other muscles but you can't see one wrinkle of his cock. You can't even see he has a cock! Or balls! He's just a Ken doll. That's the most unrealistic thing about comic books. Even in that scene in Good Omens when Jon Hamm as Gabriel is jogging in sweat pants, you can see his massive cock! I'm assuming it's massive when it's erect because he's just so damned confident! You don't attain that kind of confidence as a male without having a penis that shouts, "I could do porn if I wasn't so good looking!"

I just realized this would have been a good entry for another sonnet! The best entries for sonnets are the self-explanatory short ones with just the right amount of subtext to infuse the stanzas with a point and an eventual turn or summation. I could probably have made quite a bit of subtext out of that "for better or worse" part, especially with my theory that the Chums of Chance are undead monsters forced to roam the skies for eternity, like those Ghost Riders that country folk sometimes sing about. That's the "for worse" part! The "for better" part is that they might be angels or just ghosts trying to make the world a better place to redeem them for their past crimes after which they can move on to Heaven. But if that were the case, wouldn't the airship be called Purgatory instead of Inconvenience? Although Purgatory was created to be a kind of inconvenience.

Now that I've guessed Pynchon's airship is Purgatory, is he going to change tactics and instead make it some old rich guy's institute running paranormal experiments on reality instead?!

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 In time, however, the ominously cloaked rustics, perhaps in superstitious fear of that very machinery, had dispersed to their homes and haunts.

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What Pynchon is saying here is that racist bigots are superstitious hicks who might not just live in houses but also haunts. The definition for a haunt is "a place frequented by a specified person or group of people" such as a Country Club or a Whites Only Restroom. Notice that Pynchon doesn't remark on their economic fears or their nice and engaging qualities which they only show to other people who look, act, and think like them. Also, the use of "superstitious fear" in regards to a strange piece of scientific equipment can also be extrapolated to how they view other things they aren't familiar with, like people of other races or, probably, cats & spiders.

Take that, racists trying to read Pynchon! Do you think that's a thing or do you think racists only read Nietzsche and then only those curated by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche? Also I'm curious about the things they would brag about reading and not the things that would automatically out them as bigots and racists. 

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 It had been a night of sleepless precaution lest sparks from the torches of the mob drift anywhere near the hydrogen-generating apparatus and devastation result.

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If I knew a guy and I was all, "I sure could use a torch later," and he whipped me up a torch, I would totally suspect he was a racist jerk. Also why would I need a torch later? Is it the end times and part of Judgment Day that wasn't encoded in Revelations was that batteries would stop working and also I was too lazy to use my hand crank flashlight? But that's kind of the point! If a guy knows how to make a torch that isn't just trying to light the end of a dry branch with a Zippo, he's got some fucking secrets that maybe I don't want to know about.

Although at this point in history, I'm fairly confident that nearly all Republicans know how to make torches. No wait! I take that back. Nearly nobody knows how to make torches anymore which is why all those racists trying to save statues of Confederate officers went to Lowe's and bought out all the tiki torches.

Can you imagine somebody trying to save statues of Confederate officers using the excuse that destroying them is destroying history without knowing the actual history of why those statues were erected and when? The nerve of some racist asshole telling everybody that these statues tell some kind of historical story that isn't just "a bunch of scared white assholes decided to erect these statues in the face of civil rights movements as a means to intimidate Black Americans." Confederate officer statues are the sculpture equivalent of a dog pissing on a tree. History? More like pisstory!

Yes. You really nailed the landing on this entry, Me!

No wait! I forgot to discuss the line! Um, well, you see, all the Chums were nervous not just because the KKK, a bunch of villainous violent thugs, were surrounding their encampment but also because they had torches and the most famous thing about hydrogen is that it likes to react with oxygen especially around fire because it's an, um, oxidizer or something. So this line is meant to make the readers think of the Hindenburg and then to think "Oh the humanity" which leads them to thinking about humanity and how the Chums of Chance probably aren't human at all but angels or ghosts or aliens and also a dog.

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 "There is nothing further to discuss—this fellow is to be granted asylum and, if he wishes, provisional membership in our Unit. There certainly remains to him no future down here."

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Randolph St. Cosmo comes to Chick's rescue because Randolph St. Cosmo is the name of an angel. Which suggests, especially since there's now no future for Chick "down here," that the Chums of Chance have more in common with Moore's Dead Dead Gang than I first thought. Is it possible the Chums of Chance are not supposed to interfere because they're ghosts and/or angels? I know us modern idiots have all been convinced by popular entertainment that all angels and ghosts do is intervene in our mortal affairs! But in 1893, I'm pretty sure all angels and ghosts were concerned with was making sure nobody sees anything sexually enticing.

In other words, Chick has just been lynched by the KKK so now he must carry on in the sky with the other poor wandering souls. But he doesn't know it yet! That's why he's a provisional member. He won't actually be a real Chum of Chance until he faces and accepts his terrestrial death.

Later we'll see that the Chums of Chance do age but I think that's just something ghosts and angels can do. They can appear to be any age they choose and the Chums of Chance probably choose to age albeit slower than living humans. That's probably why their adventures can span such a great space of time and they're still seen as lads. Randolph probably stopped aging at 18 and the others are slowly aging toward that, the aging process growing ever slower so that they never actually reach and then pass the age of the captain.

This sentence says none of that. But—and this is major Coast to Coast AM logic—if it caused me to think it, maybe it actually is there? At least I didn't write another sonnet!

Although what would a project like that look like? If I were to write one sonnet for every line in this book?! Man, don't tempt me, me!