The Gideonse Bible   With the beard? Yeah, you!

I tagged myself with the au courant book meme, which I’ve seen on Vagabond Scholar, The Wisdom of Whores, and Todd’s Hammer. None of them tagged me. Not that they would. Anyway, I’ve tagged myself, as suggest by the Vagabond Scholar, whose blog I’m digging right now.

And these are the meme rules:

1. Look up page 123 in the nearest book.
2. Look for the fifth sentence.
3. Post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.

I was originally going to do this meme while sitting on my desk, and you would’ve probably ended up with some sentences from Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare by Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs. And they’d probably would be rather depressing. (Note to self: Read that book this weekend.) But I’m actually sitting on the couch in the living room, drinking a martini and watching last night’s new “Law & Order” on Tivo. By the way, it’s really good this year. And so, the closest book is whatever I can reach from the bookshelf behind me. Without looking, I felt around and ended up with–and I’m not kidding–one of my favorite books ever, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.

And here are the three sentences following the fifth sentence. Okay, kids, here’s a question: Why not just tell us to post the sixth, seventh, or eighth sentences? Why do that wacky fifth sentence thing? Whatevs. Here they are:

“…The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad.” “I love you, ma,” he said.

Yeah, that is clear as mud. I haven’t read the book is ages, so without reading it again, I can’t say what the hell it means. If it means anything. It’s Pynchon after all, so it either means nothing, everything, or not what you think. But I kinda love it, so I’m changing my tagline to “The dolphins will be mad.” Ha!

What a weird meme.

Okay, tag yourself.