Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 17: Line 94 (199)

 Finally, to Darby's surprise, "I sure do miss my Pop," Chick confided abruptly.

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Chick is still at the age when he needs his father. It won't be long before he realizes "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin isn't a sad song at all about a son becoming like his absent father; it's a song about a son realizing his dad never really cared and so he doesn't care about his dad anymore. The son doesn't grow up to be just like the dad; the son just chooses, now that he has the option, to not associate with his father any more. The son is off spending time with his kids who have the flu instead of ignoring them with work. The song tries to make it seem like the son grew up to be obsessed with work and care little for family life but we never actually get a picture of the son's family life. We just know the son grew up to not want to spend time with his father for reasons the listener completely understands by the end. For those of us who grew up with a mostly absent father, the song isn't a sad ballad; it's a fucking anthem for sticking it to your dad.

What I'm saying is I hope that one day, Chick can grow up to stiff his father just like his father stiffed him and to not give a rat's ass about him.

"I sure do miss my Pop"
"Pop" can be a regionalism for "soda" but it probably isn't in this case because it's capitalized and Chick's father abandoned him. So it's probably what you thought it was when you initially read it. No Pepsi subtext here!

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 17: Line 93 (198)

 They sat by the fire for a while, silent as a pair of drovers camping out on the western prairie.

* * * * * * * * * *

Chick and Darby are bonding, King of the Hill style. Lindsay probably thought they'd bicker and insult each other all night. But they're going to form a fucking union and Lindsay's head is going to explode.

"fire"
A signifier of warmth, probably used to show the two are growing closer together.

"pair of drovers"
They're people who drive! But they drive cattle and not cars. And not in the way you drive cars. You can't get inside a cow. Comparing them together to another career shows that they're not so dissimilar, and they share a need to work together.

"western prairie"
Probably like Kansas or Nebraska. One of those states that seem flat if you travel east/west but is more like a rumpled carpet if you travel north/south.

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 17: Line 92 (197)

 "Thanks, wouldn't mind a cup at all."

* * * * * * * * * *

In polite discourse, "I would love a cup. Thank you very much!" is preferable to "Thanks, wouldn't mind a cup at all."

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 17: Line 91 (196)

 Something in his tone suggested that this was only the sort of friendly teasing a fellow Darby's age had to expect to put up with.

* * * * * * * * * *

Chick Counterfly wants to make a friend but he can't completely drop his insulting demeanor! But Darby gets it. You've got to haze the younger guy a bit. Not too much! Don't be a complete dick about it! But let him know he's one of the boys by throwing an insult his way every now and then. Especially if it's about how young he is because the unspoken part of that insult is that it's actually a compliment, jealously given!

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 17: Line 89-90 (194-195)

 "Care for some?" Chick offered. "Or don't they let you drink this stuff yet?"

* * * * * * * * * *

In 1893, I guess kids weren't allowed to drink coffee. Probably because there wasn't enough cocaine in it. Unless maybe kids in 1893 were drinking tons of coffee but kids in 2006 weren't yet back to drinking 1893 levels of coffee, so Pynchon was all, "The youngest kid aboard the airship probably isn't allowed to drink this adult beverage."

I used to go on caravan weekends with my grandparents, their siblings, and their siblings grandkids. This was in the 70s. All of the adults would get up early and sit around on lawn chairs drinking coffee. It smelled pretty good and it looked like a good time so I, of course, whined my head off until I was given a cup and told not to waste it. I had one sip and thought, "How do I waste this without anybody knowing?" My first attempt to drink it was to add so much milk that the coffee turned as beige as a brand new Vega being given away on The Price is Right. It still didn't work. Eventually I whined my head off until I was allowed to dump it in the sink.

Now I like coffee. All kinds of coffee from the black stuff brewed at the back of the church on nights when church isn't in session to the sugary nonsense stuff from Starbucks that shouldn't legally be allowed to be called coffee.

Chick likes coffee and he wants a buddy to drink coffee with him so he can't be all that bad. I mean bad in a bad way. He's definitely bad in the way that I would thoroughly enjoy if I were into bad boys which I am not. I was into Leather Tuscadero and not The Fonz.

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 17: Line 88 (193)

 He had just completed his repairs when, looking up, he noticed Chick Counterfly by the fire, brewing a pot of coffee.

* * * * * * * * * *

Chick is slothful! Look how he only turns up after the work is done! Although, I suppose, somebody's got to brew the coffee. And if Chick's brewing it simply because Chick wants coffee, that's at least an indication that the coffee will be decent.

And now that I've convinced myself one of these two characters is actually a girl, I'm super excited about the potential make-out session! Especially if they both turn out to be girls!

Look, I can't help it if I'm male and I have a gaze!

Chapter 1: Section 2: Pages 16-17: Line 87 (192)

 That unpleasant memory, like the damage beneath Darby's nimble fingers, would soon be quite unmade . . . as if it were something the stripling had only read about, in some boys' book of adventures . . . as if that page of their chronicles lay turned and done, and the order "About-face" had been uttered by some potent though invisible Commandant of Earthly Days, toward whom Darby, in amiable obedience, had turned again. . . .

* * * * * * * * * *

The narrator narrating this sentence knows that Darby is a character in a boys' book of adventures, currently The Chums of Chance Nearly Meet Their End But Miles Blundell Stumbles and Barely Avoids the Gaze of H. H. Holmes. That title is the entire story so it's not their best adventure.

Anyway, this is more the kind of thing I feel Pynchon wants to be writing but he's got to write all of this "boys' book of adventures" crap to make Against the Day feel more accessible to the average reader! You can pick up this book and dive right in without any confusion at all. Compare that to Gravity's Rainbow which immediately throws you into some kind of dream realm or hallucination involving the evacuation of London after a rocket strike. Maybe if Pynchon would have begun with the guy sticking the banana out of the fly of his pajamas, more people would attempt to finish that book!

But this line gets me raring to go again! A character in a book who is also a character in fictional boys' books of adventure feeling like he's a character in a book is just the kind of dizzying self-referential nonsense that fuels me! Plus Pynchon basically gets to call himself a "Commandant of Earthly Days." That's probably pretty satisfying. I always called myself a "Grandmaster Comic Book Reader" but nobody ever used that title when introducing me. That's probably why I hate all of my friends and family.

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 16: Line 86 (191)

 Darby, left solitary in the glow of the watch-fire, applied himself, with his customary vivacity, to the repair of the main hydrogen valve whose mechanical disruption earlier had nearly spelt their doom.

* * * * * * * * * *

Why is the word "vivacious" annotated in the dictionary as "typically used of a woman"? Do men just not look attractive when they're lively and animated? Is that emasculating?! Or is this use some unquestioned holdover from a literary tradition of white males (probably majority heterosexual or, at least, passing?) being the creators of the Western Literary Canon? Why would they ever describe a male character as "vivacious"? The term was probably the indicator of a manic pixie dream girl so it would never be used to describe a guy in the old straight white man's canon. And being that it was used in this way by males who dominated and gate-keeped the field of Western Literature (for the most part), somebody looking at the history of the word might note, "Oh, it only really gets used to describe women. That must be part of the intrinsic qualities of the word." Which of course it isn't. It's just sexism.

But Pynchon decides to subvert the use of the word by using it on Darby! Unless it's also acceptable to use it on a young boy because a lot of those old white men were gross sex pests. I can't be sued from the grave for disparaging them all, can I? It's not like I named any names like Alexander Pope or T.S. Eliot! Those were just examples of names I could have named and not of old white writers whom I thought were sex pests! Please don't sue me, the Estates of Alexander Pope and T.S. Eliot!

Or it could be I was wrong in thinking Chick Counterfly was the girl masquerading as a boy! Maybe it's Darby and that's why Darby is full of vivacity!

Interestingly, if Pugnax had been vivacious, he would have been named Vivax.

I thought Miles Blundell was the handyman. Shouldn't he be fixing the valve for that reason and also for the other reason that he broke it? No, instead he's rewarded with a trip to the Fair! Which is so not fair at all!

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 16: Line 85 (190)

 He turned and strode away to join Miles, while Pugnax, whose tail had regained its customary animation, was left to scout the bounds of the encampment, searching for evidence of other dogs and their humans who might seek unauthorized entry.

* * * * * * * * * *

Does anybody else get the feeling that Thomas Pynchon isn't thrilled with writing standard linear plots even if they involve reading dogs and adventurous kids who constantly insult each other? I sort of get that feeling but not in any way that I can explain. It's kind of a paranormal feeling, as if a ghost were whispering in my ear, "Pynchon sounds bored, right?"

All of these extended linear scenes which need extra sentences to link the action from one moment to the next all sound too clinical and, well, normal! I guess Pynchon continues to point out how Lindsay has a huge stick up his ass merely by saying he "strode away." And I guess Pugnax's tail knows enough that it can feel "at ease" once Lindsay and Randolph have departed the camp.

At first I thought Pugnax would simply be excited to get some earthly smells and maybe engage with other dogs but it looks like he's excited at the possibility of a fight. That shouldn't be too surprising being that his name pretty much means "inclined to fight" or "combative" in Latin.

Is that what Pynchon thinks of his readership? That they're combative? That's probably true in the sense that nerds love to debate literature and Star Trek.

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 16: Line 83-84 (188-189)

 "You know the penalties for falling asleep—be sure that you impress them upon your watchmate Counterfly, who inclines, I suspect, toward sloth. Perimeter check once every hour, as well as a reading of the tension of the gas within the envelope, corrected, I need scarcely add, for the lower temperatures of the nighttime."

* * * * * * * * * *

Of course Lindsay couldn't leave it at "You have the watch, Suckling." He needed an extra breath to be able to get out all of the insults and threats and "scarcely needed" things to add but added anyway because that's simply another way to insult Darby's intelligence.

It's unfair to categorize Counterfly as "slothful" just because he's averse to doing duties on an airship he didn't exactly petition to be a part of. He's only there because the other choice was to be tarred and feathered by a bunch of racist white southerners. I'm sure if you discover what color Counterfly's parachute is, he'll be the epitome of whatever the opposite of sloth is! I think it's "tamarin monkey."

Coincidentally, the color of my parachute is "sloth."

Chapter 1: Section 2: Page 16: Line 82 (187)

 "You have the watch, Suckling," Lindsay advised before departing.

* * * * * * * * * *

You would think that this statement meant Lindsay departed after saying it. But he still has more to say! I know that because as a human animal with the means to perceive things using my perception ability (even if it's not as great as it once was and I often find myself confused if there's too much sensory stimulus, like in that Pointsman poem about Pavlov from Gravity's Rainbow), I noticed another set of quotation marks beginning the next sentence. Also it's Lindsay. When has he ever kept things brief? That rule loving jerko has intimate relationships with the sound of his own voice.

I wonder what the Chums of Chance are worried about that they need a watch? Spies, I bet! And probably Communist ones! Communist ones who want better working conditions in American factories and less hours with greater pay! I bet they'd love to blow up a hydrogen-generating machine to get their point across!