Not the best day

Demi and/or her friend got in trouble for shoplifting. She was upset when she called so I didn't get a coherent story.

Richard's work foreman, the one he painted the car mural for, had three heart attacks yesterday. He and his wife are incredibly nice people; I feel terrible for them.

I'm not sure I can keep reading Gravity's Rainbow, for the reasons I posted yesterday and because it's getting very gross, and racist, and even more nonsensical (if that's possible). A man dives into a toilet both to retrieve his harmonica (why not just buy a new one!?!?) and to avoid the black men in the nightclub he's in, because he knows that black men will try to gang-rape him (and they do). He doesn't find his harmonica, but he gives minute descriptions of all the varieties of sh** he finds in the sewer. Then he ends up outside a barn.

In my own defense, I have to point out that Pynchon told his friend Jules Siegel: "I was so f****d up while I was writing it . . . that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can't figure out what I could have meant."
Forgive me if I sound like a snob, but I just cannot picture Nabokov or Dostoyevsky saying, "Yeah, I was really f****d up when I wrote that one, let me tell ya..." Even William Burroughs made more sense than Gravity's Rainbow.