Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

“There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others.”

Ensign Purcell complained about this daily, pointing out that only a pervert or a geek would enjoy sweet gummy raisins mucking about in his mouthful of egg, though he said this none too loudly, for all around him the cream of American manhood was chomping away with gusto.

Man's peculiarly ambivalent psyche permits him to operate simultaneously according to two opposing codes. There is the code which he professes to live by, and there is the code to whose standards he actually does adhere. The deceit is so ingrained and subtle that most men truly are unaware of it, although to psychologists, philosophers and the like, it is no news at all.

“Everything happens faster these days. Sometime I will explain to you why that is. In the meantime, how do we know that man's actions, and their seemingly dire results, aren't rhythmic; aren't just another ordained manifestation of the universal ebb and flow?”

There are surface implications of something sinister afoot hereabouts and I could be sticking my already rope-burned neck into a noose.

To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats. The majority of our actions occur regularly, lack dynamism and are unaccentuated. But occasional actions, such as Plucky Purcell's venture into the Wildcat Creek Monastery, are accentuated due to their intensified stress. When an accentuated beat is struck in relation to one or more unaccentuated beats, there arises a rhythmic unit. Rhythm is everything pertaining to the duration of energy. The quality of a man's life depends upon the rhythmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy.

It didn't take all night to read the letters, of course, but he had to stop after each epistle to reassemble his nervous system and scrape his mind off the stars.

“Blake once wrote, 'I must invent my own systems or else be enslaved by other men's'.”

On the way downstairs, my brain chug-a-lugged a quart of Tabasco and wiped its lips with a saw.