Some Like It Hot. Some Like It Cold. Some Like It In The Pot 92 Days Old

I really liked Hal’s story with “The Darkness’” (Orth) head stuck to the window. During the whole 20 November section in first person the story keeps switching between Hal and Orth and Gately and Joelle, which suggests parallels in their stories.

The first one I noticed was the idea of being trapped against your will for the purpose of ultimate betterment of oneself. Gately talks about being kept for 92 days in the holding cell to keep him from returning to “The Bird”. It reminded me of the part in The Shawshank Redemption, imagining being trapped in a hot room where each moment you’re in agony from going cold turkey. Ultimately, though Gately acknowledges that it was worth it. In Orth’s case he puts his head against the cold window to cool off because he was too worried about the upcoming games and celebrations and hoopla. So in a sort of similar way he’s trapped there with nothing to do but count the seconds. I’m not sure yet if this will benefit him anyhow, but it’s interesting how they’re tortured by doing nothing pretty much. Orth hallucinates (or DOES he?) and thinks that he sees a ghost. There’s a lot of paranormal stuff in this reading. Hal’s answering machine message, the conversation about Himself and Mario’s paranormal experiences, lots of the word choices suggest things about ghosts, and Gately’s dream about death being Joelle Van Dyne. Speaking of which, isn’t it weird how Death is this seductive woman who has to become your mother in the next life in order to make up for killing you?
That seems like it would be plausible for Avril. She’s obviously got something incestuous going on and Joelle says how she thinks it’s weird that Avril seems nice but that it’s never sincere enough. Maybe she’s only being nice to make up for being death? Or maybe I’m not looking at it deep enough.

Now for something completely different:

I’d also like to point out how Joelle says that she thinks it’s odd how newly sober people always look up to people who have been sober longer because that’s what they aspire to be, to be in control of their lives. But Joelle doesn’t believe that she is. She’s always talking about “recovery” related topics to her thumb and can’t get away from this idea of having to fix herself (by being sober). These addicts spend all their lives trying to fix themselves that once they achieve what they want, they have nothing left to do. Their freedom is, in a weird way, trapping them. They become addicted to getting better.

Things to think about:
-Why Winston Churchill?
-Why doesn’t Hal want to play a game for the first time he can remember?
-Why the paranormal stuff?
-Why the Incest?-That’s about it.