I’m several days now into my pharmaceutical regime, my wee white pills which accompany breakfast each morning. This is a novelty for me – I’m usually reticent about touching anything. Back when I had migraines I got used to carrying around pseudoephedrine and ibuprophen but since I stopped drinking coffee and strong tea I haven’t had any migraines. The notion of needing a daily dose of something, even something of the resonantly named family of calcium antagonists, is not one that I find hugely congenial – not that that counts for much of course.
I have mused occasionally on the use of The Calcium Antagonists as the name of a band, perhaps a prog-rock band or perhaps a band in the hinterland between prog and metal. The title of this very post is one which I had briefly considered as being an extended prog-rock epic featuring incontinent swathes of mellotron and lyrics which are highly meaningful/totally meaningless depending on one’s tastes and prejudices. Far Out.
Talking of far out, says he in an attempt at a wittily post-modernist link, I have have just finished reading the latest from Thomas Pynchon, the entertaining Inherent Vice. Ostensibly a whacky detective novel featuring a hippy PI, Doc Sportello, and a cast of counterculture denizens and potentially crooked cops, it is very readable and, by Pynchon’s standards, a straight ahead plot. Lurking beneath the surface is a brooding questioning of a culture on the cusp of turning from a hippy idealism to something more nasty. The Manson murders are constantly referenced and lurking in the playfully sketched in potheads and pillheads is the threat of incoming heroin and its corrupting poison.
It is also, like most Pynchon funny.
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