CoL49 ch5 / IA in gay bar / Zippo / The Stack

[Michael Bailey]

Why would a member of the IA be getting drunk in a gay bar?

Maybe he had just concluded a session of sitting with a fellow IA member.

After suggesting she write the founder:
“Think of it,” he went on, also drunk. “A whole underworld of suicides who
failed. All keeping in touch through that secret delivery system. What do
they tell each other?” He shook his head, smiling…

He knows but he isn’t talking.
What is love anyway (defining that’s beyond my remit, I think) & what do
you do with your time when you’ve renounced it?
Probably go looking for happiness, until somebody founds a
happiness-seekers anonymous?
Have a lot of hobbies?


Noticed something I hadn’t before about the founder:
“He was about to make the farewell flick of the wheel on his faithful
Zippo, which had seen him through the Normany hedgerows, the Ardennes,
Germany, and postwar America,”

- so he was a WWII veteran
- subject to the more real traumas that Oedipa had thoughtlessly,
facetiously, wished on Wendell

Curiously absent from the initial curriculum was basic or any other martial
training:

“Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed
nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but
sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and
to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for
specialized reasons he had to have explained to him….”


Also had to look this up:
“…he was jolted out of a boozy, black-and-white dream of jumping off The
Stack into rush-hour traffic….”

What is the Stack?

The first 4-level expressway interchange - in Los Angeles - Google Maps
said it’s permanently closed but I haven’t found any articles about its
closing.

https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/l-a-s-famous-four-level-freeway-interchange-the-stack-turns-58