VL--IV, p. 60 All You Need is Love

[Michael Bailey]

 Mark Kohut wrote:
> I think there may be more than just a pun involved with the 'sex' 'ex' play on a letter. Most sex fantasies, I think it is fair to say, involve people with whom we have not (yet, maybe) had sex and involve "outfits, accessories and scenarios" as P writes. Beyond that "can't do it enough" time of lust/love in most relationships, with an ex of some time (in this case) it shows an obsessive "love", not just a maybe-unrealizable fantasy.
> Zoyd, a 'make love not war' 60s hippie turned Humbert Humbert-like obsesive? P on love power getting stuck there? Or just that "love is strange"?--Ian & Sylvania
>

this is a seminal scene (-;
speaking just for me,

a) if he and Sasha waved goodbye at the airport, then in order for Z
to turn up at The Dark Ocean Hotel, one of them (and not Sasha) must
have entertained fantasies of a Hollywood ending (like Wedding Singer
(1998)) where somebody hops a plane and saves the day.

b) "Me, I get through OK, just worryin' about you, Frenesi"
surely some of us have rushed into situations like this?  With similar
practicing of lines? Nobody else?  Perhaps it's not as poignant, then.

c) The act of taking that impulse out of reality (where it has moved
his body thru space in real time to a given set of co-ordinates) and
moving it into fantasy where it won't materially affect Frenesi, is
making it an "ex" fantasy, or the fantasy marks the beginning of her
being realized (against his wishes) as an "ex" - or, in vernacular
terms, she leaves him holding his dick.

d)  and of course, this "astral travel" is but the first of many such,
so that while here he is just imagining her body in the shower, by the
time he confesses it to Prairie, maybe 12 or 14 years later, he is
imagining whole neighborhoods, and control mechanisms for getting
there.
("I see the Moon, the Moon sees me,
the Moon sees somebody I'd like to see.
God bless the Moon, and God bless me,
and God bless the one I love.")

e) If Z's longing isn't felt, and sympathized with, no wonder how come
so many people don't like Vineland.

f) but wtf else is he supposed to do? "Not too tough to cry"