Episode #17

In his classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey wrote “McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh across the water…laughing at all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there’s a painful side…but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.”

If ever there was an author we suspect our ol pal Doc Sportello would enjoy (other than a certain reclusive fellow hiding on the other side of Gravity’s Rainbow), it’d be that acid-fried humanist Kesey, who also wrote something more than just a little pertinent to Inherent Vice in general and today’s scene in specific:

“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.”

Goddamn, Ken…