No Moving Parts

So Roland’s dad was some sort of genius like I said.  Roland—my junior high locker mate–said his father was trying to make–and this was 1962–a watch with no moving parts.  I was consternated.  I geodomethought the guy must be nuts.  But now everybody has watches with no moving parts.  So maybe the guy was unto something of an electronic or digital nature.

He also wanted to invent other things.  Following Buckminster Fuller he had built a hyperbolic dome right there on there lot.  They had made it out of WOOD, mind you, and had been hell to build since wood does not bend all that easily.  It was set on a concrete foundation, and rather than buy gravel to pour the concrete the old man had the kids (eventually, as I said, there were ten of them) go out and pick up rocks and pebbles from the dirt on the surrounding hillsides. The house itself was ramshackle, sprawling and in need of paint.  They made no pretense whatsoever to landscaping.

 Roland and three of his brothers lived in this small room with bunk beds on both sides.  The only other stuff in there was a radio on the window sill, a stack of muscle magazines and bar bells.  I would set on the floor or on the edge of a bunk if it was vacant, and we would talk and occasionally one of them would get up and go grab a barbell and huff and puff for a while lifting it and then sit back down.  I didn’t participate in the barbell stuff and they never asked me to.

 The barbell stuff didn’t seem to be macho compettive stuff, though they did have any manner of masturbating contests, involving who could do it fastest, or who could do it most repeatedly, and who could not do it for the longest time.  They were also into experimental masturbation what with fruit and such.  Like making a hole in a water melon and fucking that.  Or putting tuna oil on their cocks and getting a cat to lick it.  Stuff like that. They were way beyond me masturbation wise.  I did tell them about a book I read that talked about some Russian that fucked trees.  They thought about it for a while and agreed that, while it might be somewhat painful, depending on the bark, a tree could be fucked.

One day we are talking and I ask Roland where he had been born.  I knew they had lived back East and wondered what state, but he mistook my question and said he had been born in the house.  House?  Yes, he said.  After the first three his father had decided to screw the hospital bills and so he had delivered all the other kids himself.  This disturbed me a little bit but then I remembered that people used to do that all the time.  Though usually there had been a nurse of some sort present. And I wondered did they have birth certificates, and Roland said he didn’t know but would ask some time because we agreed it was important to be fully documented.

Then Roland said all of the babies had not lived or maybe had been born dead; he didn’t know.  How did they know this?  He laughed and said, well, his mother would get pregnant which was highly visible and then about nine months later there would be all this screaming and yelling when she delivered and then that would stop, and if the baby was dead, his father would come out with it wrapped up in something and then burn it in the incinerator out back.

I could see that incinerator from the window.  It was made out of concrete block about waist high with a little metal door in the front and a metal chimney coming out the back that was painted red for some reason.  I found this all a little strange as if I had strayed off into the forest and gotten a bit lost.  I asked Roland did he think that was legal.  Who knows? He said.

Hog

One day when I am living in the hole under the house, we get a call from a relative.  I believe she was the daughter of one of the brothers of my grandfather, William Berner Tingle, Sr.  She wasn’t calling from Georgia where she lived; she was already here and on a terrible mission.

easyriderIt turned out her son had been in the Navy and had served a year or so over in the area of Vietnam or the water thereabouts, and while he had been over there everything had been fine.  When he got back he still had time to serve and maybe too much time on his hands because he got into drugs as they say and also joined a motorcycle gang.  

I never did get clear on the detail, like what happened exactly, did he hit a wet spot or whatever, but he was rounding a corner and the bike slid out from under him and he hit his head on the curb.  That was about it.  He was in a coma in the VA hospital near Balboa Park and it did not look good at all. 

 But she, his mother, had come out to sit by this bed.  The father didn’t come.  I don’t know why, but I think the whole thing might have been a financial strain because my parents talked me into going to pick her up several times at this cheap motel where she was staying and drive her to the VA hospital.  It was the family thing to do.  

So I would park out in the back lot behind this big old, depressing, 10 story building that was the VA hospital while she went in.  I never went in.  She didn’t invite me and I didn’t invite myself.  I never knew how long she would be.  Maybe an hour usually, sometimes more.  Then she would come out and I would drive her back.  What could I say?  I don’t remember having spoken with her, but I must have because one day she said she was upset because the members of her son’s bike gang had come and hung their colors all over her son’s room.

I would sit there smoking one cigarette after another staring at that big depressing building.  I would try to read something.  I remember, maybe it was just the circumstances, but one day I read some of Nietzsche’s Will to Power.  I remember trying to figure out why he said Buddhism was nihilistic.  Because, I guess it was so other or unworldly, maybe.  Because I associated religions with morality I hadn’t thought of them as being nihilistic exactly….but of course Nietzsche was arguing that some so-called moralities, especially the Christian slave morality, is nihilistic.

So there I sat smoking one cigarette after another, waiting for my relative’s son to pass on, as he did after a couple of weeks, in my beat up 59 Plymouth station wagon, with springs that came up right through the front seats and would stick into your butt if you didn’t watch out and thinking about nihilism.  It was all pretty fucked.

The son’s mother gave me the bike because they never wanted to see it again.  It was a Harley, a hog in fact, with those long old extended forks up front and a tiny, dinky little handle bars.  I sat on it once, started it, and the damn thing scared me to death.  So I sold it to a friend who, at that time was driving a trash truck, and he fixed it up quite nicely.

Gunner

When you’re a gunner and shot the ball 75% of the time when you get your hands on it sometimes you have a hard time getting the ball.  This is especially the case if you have other gunners on your 3 on 3 pickup team.  But sometimes if I didn’t have gunners on my team or we were down and ballneeded to get ahead, I would get the ball.  Since however I did not make plays for myself I was dependent on the other guys on the team and had to train them in the course of a game, if we had not previously played together.

To get my hands on the ball, I would run the baseline, cutting constantly behind the guy who was guarding me, and then I would stand there with my hands out, jumping up and down to indicate I was open.  After I did this a while, somebody would throw it to me, sometimes close to the basket.  Then I would use my back-to-the basket game and do a turn around on them.  Or I would just run out along the base line till where it nearly ended and stand there.  And when they passed it, the guy guarding me would either not be anywhere around or he would dare me to shot it which, being a gunner, I would.

That was part A of my two part game; the other part, part B, was to go to the top of the key and shot from there.  Sometimes I would shot a turnaround from there; and if I had trained my guys properly one of them would set a pick and I would get off the shot.  As you may have noted I had no drive to the basket game at all.  

The game of the varsity team was built around the play of our guards as I have said.  With our full court press and constant fast breaking are game was mostly controlled mayhem.  But when we got stuck and had to go up against a set defense, our offense was incredibly stodgy.  We ran patterns.  One involved me cutting to the basket and trying to brush off my guy on the center who had posted low; then I would cut directly for the free-throw line and put out my hands to get the ball which I almost never did since actually I was just a decoy and I would then go set a pick for one of our guards.

I did on one rare occasion get to display parts of my game during what is called “garbage time.”  In this particular game, garbage time started somewhere in the second quarter.  The final score for this game was 120 for us and 77 for the other guys; that’s a hundred and 97 points scored in a 36 minute high school game.  I don’t know what the fuck we were doing.

 But in the third quarter, the coach put me in at one guard and my old catcher from little league at the other.  He was a pretty good ball handler and I would run down and he would pass me the ball and I made five shots in a row—the other guys were completely discombobulated.  That was my all time high scoring game.  22 points in about ten minutes.  I could hit ok when there was no chance we were going to lose and I could play my game which was to shot it 75% of the time that I got my hands on the ball.

25 bucks

Traditionally, when a guy gets a letter for a varsity sport, he puts it on something.  A jacket, usually known as a letterman’s jacket.  So I got my letter for a varsity sport, basketball, in the spring of myletterman junior year, and along with the letter they give me a little pamphlet with a form to order a letterman’s jacket or sweater.  I guess I must have showed this to my mother, but anyhow, I remember her indicating that she thought the letterman’s jacket was awful expensive though maybe they could afford a letterman’s sweater.

I didn’t want any damn sweater.  That’s what guys who lettered on the JV (junior varsity) team got if they were stupid enough to wear their JV letter on anything.  And fuck the jacket was like 25 dollars, a good bit of money back in 1963.  I knew that much, so later when the old lady asked me if I really, really wanted a letterman’s jacket, I said no because no was the answer she wanted and if I said yes there would be no end of shit about the jacket.  Just getting her to sew the letter on the jacket would be a fucking agony.

And maybe in some way I was relieved because I had this feeling that, if I did get a letterman’s jacket, I wasn’t sure I would wear it anyway.  Maybe I didn’t want to stand out or something or maybe I didn’t want to be identified with the jocks.  Hell, I didn’t know a single guy on the football team.  Or maybe people would think I thought I was special if I wore a letterman’s jacket and get the idea that I thought they were all a pack of shit eating idiots.

 So I didn’t get a letterman’s jacket and fuck me, if I cared.  But years later, I got to thinking that things might have been different.  What if I had a father (or even a mother) who said something like:  “Damn, you got a varsity letter!  Now isn’t that great.  Where do we get the jacket?  Oh, you have a form here.  You’re right….that is a bit of money.  But what the hell? We can scrape it together.  What do you mean you aren’t sure you will wear it?  Sure you will wear it.  OK! OK!  I see the problem.  But it’s a warm jacket right.  You can wear it in cold weather.  That’s a good reason.  Right.  When people get cold they wear a jacket.  This one will just happen to have a fucking varsity letter on it.  Your letter!”

So what, things could have always been different.  They could always have been better or even worse for that matter.  Maybe I didn’t want a letterman’s jacket.  Maybe I wanted a different father.  Hell, he simply couldn’t talk like that to me, since he hated me and wanted to kill me, I guess.  Who’s going to spend 25 bucks on a letterman’s jacket for a kid you would just as soon kill.

Anyway, by now—if I had got the jacket—it would be long gone, in tatters, I guess, with moths flying out of it or whatever.  Just another piece of crap—in what does Yeats call it—the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  I wonder what’s worse.  A nearly empty rag and bone shop?  Or a nearly full one?  Goddamn, with that echo in here I can’t hear myself think.

Rebound!

In three on three pick up games, I was a gunner.  If I got the ball in my hands, there was about a 75% chance I would shot it.  That’s because when I shot I made a lot.  Remember, I am talking 3 on 3 pickup games here; not the real varsity games where I tensed up.  And anyway my job on the varsity team was to garner rebounds, as best I could at my skinny six feet, cover my area on the press, and make outlet passes to our guards.

The varsity game was made around the game of our two guards.  One of these was regularly all league and the other was 2nd team all league, and they could run the hell out of the court with our fast break.  I’d grab the rebond and fling the ball down court towards one of our guards who would cherry-pick at the drop of a hat.  Once the coach came in at halftime and said Tingle had got 13 rebounds.  That’s quite a few rebounds for a 16 minute high school half.  I had no idea that I had got 13 rebounds and knowing me I probably didn’t get a single one in the second half.

I got a rather comical picture of myself getting a rebound in the Daily Nixon, as I continue to call the rag that passes for a newspaper in San Diego:

reboundone

That’s me getting a rebound by sticking my leg up in the air. Sometimes, I don’t know why, getting a rebound one of my legs would go up a lot higher than the other.  And kicking out like that was a pretty effective way of keeping people at a distance.  For some reason, as you will note, while the other team, Helix High, had cool uniforms that look like uniforms, our coach for some reason ordered uniforms with short sleeves.  I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking about.

Maybe somebody at the Daily Nixon had it in for me because they put another picture of me in the paper doing something comical again:

rebound2

This time I am apparently attempting to take the rebound away from my own center, though honestly, I think he is the one acting stupidly by jumping on my back like that.

Under Pain of Perjury

I am paranoid to a fault.  Paranoia has and continues so much to permeate my subjectivity that really I am unable to see it or to see around it sufficient to characterize it.  I can say what it is not.  I don’t believe that aliens control my brain or things come out of the TV tube and infiltrate my brain.  I don’t even believe in conspiracy theories out of principle; conspiracy theories are just ways marchingof protecting one’s self from what I am paranoid about: the general malignance of both the human and the natural universe.

To think that a cabal did this or that malignant thing is to protect one’s self from the awareness that no cabal did it.  Rather if it appears that a cabal did it, one should understand this appearance as suggesting the operation of either social or natural laws that cause certain persons or entities to act so much like synchronized swimmers that they appear a cabal.  Human beings might protect themselves at least partly against these synchronized swimmers by making basic changes to the social structures and the fact that we do not or are incapable of doing so is that malignancy to which I previously referred as the source of my paranoia.

Once for example, I bought a car from my brother.  It was a Volkswagen and he had managed to put a significant dent in three of the four fenders.  We joked about ramming the untouched fender into a tree so that I might have a complete set of dinted fenders.  I paid about 500 dollars for it as I recollect as it had just received a new engine and I was getting my gear together for departure from Casa de Oro.  As I was going into register the car, somebody mentioned that I would have to pay 10% of the purchase amount to register the car.

That comes out to 50 bucks.  I couldn’t believe it and was fucking outraged.  I suppose I had the 50 bucks but I surely couldn’t spare it.  So I got my brother to sign a bill of sale that said I had paid a buck for the car meaning I would have to pay a dime at worst to register the car.  I stood there casually with my fake bill of sale and walked out with my car registered, and this horrible feeling in the back of my head that some people at the statewide level were going to seek me out, take me to trail, and send me to jail to make a point about such casual grifting of the government.  I imagined the trial and my poor brother trapped between having to perjure himself or say, yes, yes, in fact he paid me 500 dollars, the bill of sale was a scam.

 I do not exaggerate when I say this feeling severly trouble me at odd moments out of nowhere.  I was not ready like Raskolnikov to go to the authorities and confess my crime so that I might relieve myself of my guilt.  But I thought about such things.  In this fog, I tried to reason with myself and eventually came to a thought:  Now, why the fuck would they come after me for 50 dollars when it would cost them far more than 50 dollars to come after me.  This supplied me some relief of a rational order though it did not dispell the deeper fear since governments daily do completely irrational things like paying 200 dollars for a hammer or attempting to gain peace by waging all out war.

But to pit the value of my 50 dollars against the value of their efforts was a step in the right direction.  It allowed me to see I was chump change, gum on the bottom of a shoe, shit on the stick and so on.  In short I was worth nothing, a zero in short, invisible and non-existent.  Thus the paranoid seeks to get out of his paranoia by feeling people can see right through him…And thus are very well positioned to gain control over him by whatever manipulative means.

Yes, it’s true.  People are out to get me.

Phrenology

Sometime I will try to consider why I have a soft spot for philosophy and why had I been a precocious child, when asked that question—what do you want to be when you grow up—I would have said, why a philosopher of course as if that were a worthy and respected occupation like being a fireman or baseball player or financial tycoon or any of the other things that little boys want to be. As it were though, I don’t recall ever having been asked what it was I wanted to be by anyone least phrenologyof all by my parents.  Perhaps that is what made me philosophical.

But I have read quite a bit of it.  I have even read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit whole and in parts on several occasions.  This book is so incomprehensible that other books have been written about it that are nothing but line by line or paragraph by paragraph exegesis, or retranslations of it into other words.  Unfortunately these books are more incomprehensible than the original.  And while I would never say I understood anything of what this book says, by which I mean I would never dare to claim to say the book says this or that, I did by dint of immersal come to sense the general drift of the argument.  In fact I do believe that this may be one of the most repetitious, in a profound sense, works ever written, the only problem being one is not at all sure of what is being repeated.

In any case, one day while reading Hegel, I began slowly to chuckle and then to laugh deep down into my belly.  I do believe I am one of the few persons alive who has ever laughed at Hegel.  Not that I believe Hegel was capable of telling a joke or if he was capable,  that one would no doubt have walked out from sheer fatigue, midway through it.  No, and I mean no disrespect, but I found myself laughing at his bringing to bear, with all manner of pulleys, hoists, gyros, tubes, levers and cranks, his massive Teutonic apparatus upon the topic of Phrenology and its claim to be a science.

 Nobody today—or at least I hope not—believes that phrenology that claimed one could know the character of a person by reading the lumps, bumps, pits and curves of the skull is a science.  But during Hegel’s day, phrenology had become quite scientific looking what with all manner of charts and graphs.  That’s why I laughed I think to see Hegel all strenuously and seriously bring to bear his gigantic Teutonic apparatus on something as transparently stupid—one now feels—as phrenology.  It was, I strain for an analogy, rather like watching the entire American nuclear force depositing itself on a hapless flea.

 Perhaps as is frequently the case with a laugh, one has to be there, and while the following can in no way supply the full sensation of the movement of his Teutonic apparatus, it may supply at least a glimmering:

 The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor even a `speaking’ movement. We neither commit theft, murder, etc. with the skull-bone, nor does it in the least betray such deeds by a change of countenance, so that the skull-bone would become a speaking gesture. Nor has this immediate being the diminish the organ, whether it would make it coarser and thicker or finer. From the fact that it remains undetermined how the cause is constituted, it is equally left undetermined how the effect is produced in the skull, whether it is an enlarging or a narrowing and falling-in of the latter. When this influence is defined, as it were, more imposingly as a ‘stimulation’, it is still undetermined whether this takes place by swelling, like the effect of a cantharides plaster, or by shrivelling, like the effect of vinegar. All views of this kind can be supported by plausible grounds, for the organic relation which just as much plays a part accommodates one view as readily as another, and is indifferent to all this cleverness.

Now if this is not good for a laugh, I don’t know what is.  I mean,  The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor even a `speaking’ movement!  What a hoot!

Mary and Me

Mary and I, as I have said, were both auburn hair (though hers was nicer than mine) and, as I haven’t previously said, we both wore granny glasses and smoked.  And though I didn’t know it lemon grovewhen I first met her she had grown up not more than a mile or so from the Tingle house in Casa De Oro too.  So she knew about things like the Hire’s Barrel, but she had gone to Catholic school.

But she wasn’t Catholic anymore having gone, as she said, a bit sex crazy when she got out of there and went to college.  Then she had married and had two kids and then got a divorce.  One night she asked me, did I think it was right for a husband to wake his wife at two and the morning and scream at her because there was some tomato paste on the kitchen wall and make her go and clean it up at two in the morning.  I said, no, because that didn’t sound right to me.  And she said it had gotten to the point where she just couldn’t stand it and felt like she was suffocating and didn’t exist anymore.  So she had left him.

She didn’t live far away over in Lemon Grove most famous to my mind for having a huge old yellow chicken wire and plaster of Paris Lemon stuck right next to the railroad tracks so when you drove by it you knew you were in Lemon Grove.  I would come over pretty late usually and we would drink beer and wine and hang out a bit.  I got along ok with the kids because I usually do get along ok with kids and dogs and animals generally.  They were still young and went to bed pretty early and then Mary and me we would retire to the bedroom.

 Coming from a Catholic family, she had plenty of brothers and sisters, and her favorite Sister had married a Mexican American who worked at the place for the Sons and Daughters of Migrant Workers.  That’s how Mary had got the job there, and he was a good guy and looked out for everybody he was related to.  So Mary had her own family and then this large Mexican American family.  And what with birthdays and barbeques something was always going on that involved eating and drinking. 

These were a really friendly people or let’s say they hugged a lot.  Maybe it was a cultural thing, but I had never hugged people so much in my whole life.  I sort of liked it, and my theory is that the Mexican people introduced the white people to hugging and that’s where all the one hug a day thing came from.

 I don’t know if Mary thought our relationship had legs or not. We didn’t really talk about that.  There are lots of things I will never know because I didn’t ask.  And I do regret that.  But since I am generally honest, I had made sure she was clear about what I was up to up front.  I was going off somewhere to graduate school.  So not to make too fine a point, but  the relationship had a sort of time-line attached to it, at least to my mind.  In fact, even in spite of my overwhelming desire to get laid and be normal again, I don’t believe any of that would have happened had I not known there was a time line.

Because if she had her fears of being suffocated, I had mine of being swallowed up. 

(I wrote a song about one incident we had.) 

Thunderbird

One day while driving around in the Great Northwest, we drove down a country road, found a memorable looking mailbox, stashed our weed in the culvert by it, and drove into Canada.  That was Vancouver, and I don’t remember anything about it except that the money was different and it was real clean.  I have noticed that cities where there is lot of rain or snow tend to look clean.  Nature does the dirty work.

Unlike Tijuana.  I went there once, or I went through it once later when I was living in the hole under my parent’s house.  My mother’s Aunt by this time had made a lot of money selling real estate and she had married into a large Catholic, Italian family though she was neither Catholic nor Italian.  So she bought this “house” I guess you would call it on the beach in Ensenada.  I say “house” in quotes because it was more like a beach side bunker.  Block walls, concrete floors, a bathroom, a kitchen, and some empty rooms. 

You could call it a summer home I guess.  They locked it all up with padlocks when they weren’t there in the hopes nobody would break in and vandalize when they weren’t there, though there wasn’t a whole lot to vandalize, and there were other places all around my Aunt’s place that looked ltbirdike they might be better to vandalize than her place.

So once me and my good buddy were invited to tag along with the rest of my Aunt’s clan to one of their weekend outings.  I have to say I was impressed by the cheapness of the wine.  We found a winery right there and could get decent stuff for 2 dollars a bottle, keeping in mind that my idea of decent stuff was Thunderbird, Ripple, and Red Mountain, by the gallon.  But this stuff was real wine with like a cork in it and not a screw off cap. Also the clan bought plenty of beer, though they all had to call it cerveza because they were in Mexico I guess.

 This was, to my mind, a pretty strange family weekend.  No doubt I was in a bad mood as usual.  But the weekend seemed to consist primarily of lying around in the sun and maybe running out into the water for a bit and sleeping either in the concrete house or in the sand and then getting up and starting to drink again.  So the recreational goal, if I may call it that, seemed to be to get as blotto as possible for a 48 hour period.  If so this was the ideal place for it, since the booze was cheap, and what with no TV there was nothing else to do.  Maybe some of my aunt’s stepsons went into TJ to fuck some whores, but that was about it.

So I have been in Canada, Mexico, and the USA.  That’s it.  I guess I am a pretty provincial, parochial, and totally unsophisticated guy.  I am USA all the way.  I have thought about going to Europe, but according to my Aunt’s husband who visited there during WWII Europe is a pretty fucked up place.

Eventually, my aunt and her clan stopped going down there because the concrete house was built on sand and eventually the ocean came closer and the house fell into it.

Puget Sound

I don’t know how I met Mike.  He was a fraternity guy, but I did and somehow BJ and I ended up driving around with Mike and his wife, Pam, through the great Northwest.  I had never been there passengerpigeonbefore and Mike lived up there in Oregon, and BJ was going to go to college up there in Portland. So that seemed the logical place to go.

We drove around for three weeks maybe.  Going from one camp ground to another and to Mike’s parent’s house and to a place by the Puget Sound.  I don’t know where I got the money to do such a thing but we ate mostly hot dogs and chips and the campgrounds weren’t that expensive back then.  One night we camped near Mount Rainier.  This is one impressive mother-fucking mountain, sticking up out of the middle of nowhere.  And it rained that night on us—which you might expect camping next to a mountain with the word Rain in it—and we woke up all sodden in our sleeping bags because we had been sleeping in the open.

I woke up in a puddle and being a hypochondriac was sure I was going to catch my death of a cold.  But near by, were these sort of houses.  Well they were four poles sticking up about eight feet each, with a roof like a house on top, so you could get out of the rain, but no walls.  And at the back of each of these strange abodes was a huge fire place.  We collected wood from all over the place and lit a rip roaring fire and just sat there all day long in front of it getting stoned and watching the flames and the coals as they cooled and crumbled.  Basking in the heat of those flames on one side of your body, while cool air blew through the house with no walls, and the rain poured down—well, it was sort of a mystic experience.

I thought the Northwest was pretty Great.  But this was back in 1968; I got no idea what it’s like now.  I expect there are a lot more people.  We stayed at a house of some friends of Mike’s wife, like a summer home I suppose you would call it, and it was on a flat bit of land and two steps out of the house, your feet were in the sand and you were looking across the Puget Sound towards an island way the fuck off over there somewhere like in Canada with wind and fog and rain and shit blowing through.

The people who owned the house had grown corn and tomatoes and they would go out  along the beach and come back with clams and oysters.  And one day, we trek up into the backwoods, and down a canyon and came to this crystal clear stream and caught trout and saw deer.  And I got to thinking that maybe this is what the first settlers in America had seen: a fucking land of milk and honey.  You could live off the damn land or near to it.  Bison used to roam the woods and deer. 

Of course, all this good stuff to eat seems to have over stimulated us because back in the days when passenger pigeons darkened the sky for days on end, we Americans would load up cannons with buck shot, point them towards the sky to produce a veritable deluge of dead and dying pigeons.  They couldn’t eat all those, any more than that mother fucker Davy Crockett could when—he bragged to his biographer—he shot six buck in one afternoon.

Too much of a good thing seems like too much of nothing.  We started out as a nation of goddamn wastrels and we continue in that tradition with a fucking vengeance.