V-2 - Chapter Nine - Fasching/False Time

[Robin Landseadel]

	Broken lines, broken strings
	Broken threads, broken springs
	Broken idols, broken heads
	People sleeping in broken beds
	Ain’t no use jiving
	Ain’t no use joking
	Everything is broken

My Nana came from Sicily and dirt farms, she was constantly aware of  
the class difference between north and south. My Grandma came from  
England and money, she was constantly aware of the class difference  
between north and south. Grandma played the Beethoven Violin Concerto  
at Carnegie Hall around 1915, Nana took her Rambler station wagon out  
of Tennessee around 1963, moved into a ranch-styled 3 and 2 in Azusa,  
ran a root-beer stand, smoked Camels and drank Jack Daniels.

And who is the Whore of Babylon anyway? Ruberta Chirpindon Groin?

Kurt Mondaugen is nothing more or less than a reflection of the young  
author's worst fears of what could happen if things just kept  
continued drifting in the same direction. Hooking up with a job that  
grew out of his math & physics background, making enough money to keep  
in groceries, learning of all of the myriad potential modes of Death  
 From Directly Above, being assigned some job he doesn't exactly  
remember signing up for. How did young Thomas escape from his Tower by  
the Space Needle? Did he adopt a defenestrative or a transfenestrative  
pose in Seattle? Mexico? New York City?

	Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed
	Dignity never been photographed
	I went into the red, went into the black
	Into the valley of dry bone dreams

	So many roads, so much at stake
	So many dead ends, I’m at the edge of the lake
	Sometimes I wonder what it’s gonna take
	To find dignity


Kurt is being told to fold up his Sferic tent and join the Fasching in  
progress over at Foppl's place. Things are already pretty much broken  
anyway. Simply by having to head South, away from the light of the  
North into the Blackness of the Veldt. Simply by finding himself in  
this situation, Kurt can justify just about anything he does by virtue  
of all the chaos that swirls around him, so far away from the clock- 
time of Leipzig and the futurity of Munich. Somewhere far south,  
sometime near Beltane back home, Mondaugen finds himself rudderless in  
the mirror-time of the South-West Protectorate.

Fasching is Carnaval, one of those old Pagan, Earth-based holidays  
that the Catholics, in their greed for assimilation, folded into the  
calendar. If Kurt was back in Munich, Fasching would start up on the  
eleventh day of the eleventh month and last till the cows come home or  
Ash Wednesday, whichever comes first.

http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa020501a.htm

But this is Southern Mirror time, these Europeans -- we'll be back  
with this foolish group on the toilet-ship Anubis in a couple of books  
down the line -- are making their own adjustments to the local  
variations in Earth's Magnetic Field. In Leipzig and Munich it's time  
for Beltane. We'll have Geli Tripping remind us of Walpurgisnacht in  
Gravity's Rainbow [and how!]. But here, so close to the deathly  
stretches of the Kalahari, local mirror-clock time sez it's time for  
Fasching, the season of the Feast of Fools.


	The time will come when religion will outlive its
	usefulness. Marx, Groucho Marx, once said that
	religion is the opiate of the people. I say that
	when religion outlives its usefulness, then opium...

	will be the opiate...

	Ahh that's not a bad idea...

	All right...