Chamblee54

In 1996, PG was in a phase of his life. The details are not important. As usual, he needed escapism. Then he found Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, by Tom Robbins. One night, on page 183, he saw a sentence: “Mister when you redecorated your brain room, you hung the pictures upside down.”
Three characters of HAFP are involved in that sentence. The voice was inside the head of Gwendolyn Mati. GM is the central figure here. She is a stock broker, on the easter weekend after the stock market crashes. Mister is Larry Diamond, who bears a gruesome resemblance to Tom Robbins. LD, whose middle name might start with S, is a former stockbroker. He talks too much. As fiction fans know, eventually GM and LD are going to fuck, but not before 269 foreplay pages.
The person redecorating the LD brain room is Q-Lo Huffington. (Yes, Q-Lo sounds a lot like the Spanish word for butt. Wait until you meet Motofusa Yamaguchi.) Q-Lo reads tarot cards, and does other things. Q-Lo is a pal of GM, and had a professional arrangement with LD. Q-Lo is also missing on page 183. GM suspects LD of doing something terrible to Q-Lo.
PG is currently on page 230 of HAFP. The story has 156 pages to go, making this a proper time to post part one. Q-Jo is still missing on page 230. Yes, you read that correctly. When PG looked at the page number of the last page, he glanced up, and saw the name Q-Jo Huffington. Calling her Q-Lo was a mistake. Her appearance on the last page implies that she will be found alive. This is one of several loose ends that need to be tied up at the 230 mark.
Getting back to 1996, PG was in a bad way. He read the line about hanging pictures upside down, and began to think. PG had a poster of Grace Jones by the front door. Her hairdo was flat, and tough. If you were to turn her upside down, the hairdo could support her. PG turned the poster upside down, and immediately felt the quality of his life improve.
HAFP was originally published in 1994, and written before that. It takes place over Easter weekend. A post 1987 stock market performance is rocking the world. At one point, GM and LD are in a bar. Someone turns the tv away from a baseball game. “I guess the President is going to make an important speech or something.” You scowl at her for confusing you with one of those Cheeto heads who short their potential and downside their IQs watching televised sports.” Could the author, as insightful as he is, known that twenty five years later it would be the fans of the president that might be called Cheeto heads?
In any Tom Robbins book, the plot is just an excuse for the author to exhume existential eggshells, out of the compost pile of life. An example might be on page 126. “For years now, most automobiles have been designed to roughly resemble eggs. Manufacturers claim the ovoid shape maximizes aerodynamic efficiency, but if that is true, how come a bird has to break out of the egg before it can fly.” Maybe the bird is R. Kelly, and if you believe you can fly, then you can. The truth is, anybody can fly. The problem is landing.
“…if we aren’t learning something from a new experience, it’s usually because we aren’t paying attention. Or we’re following the wrong libretto.” The author says libretto a lot in HAFP. It reminds PG of something else he read. Arthur Marx wrote a book, My Life With Groucho/Growing Up With the Marx Brothers. Groucho’s idea of a good time was to pass out librettos, and listen to Gilbert and Sullivan records. Groucho later performed in The Mikado on television. Pictures for this saturday morning cartoon are from The Library of Congress.