"I'll tell you what I know, then," he decided. "The pin I'm wearing
means I'm a member of the IA. That's Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is
somebody in love. That's the worst addiction of all."
"Somebody is about to fall in love," Oedipa said, "you go sit with
them, or something?"
"Right. The whole idea is to get where you don't need it. I was
lucky. I kicked it young. But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or
not, and women even older, who might wake up in the night screaming."
"You hold meetings, then, like the AA?"
"No, of course not. You get a phone number, an answering service
you can call. Nobody knows anybody else's name; just the number in case
it gets so bad you can't handle it alone. We're isolates, Arnold. Meetings
would destroy the whole point of it."
-- Thomas Pynchon, "The Crying of Lot 49"
If I could read your mind, love,
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel,
The kind the drugstore sells,
When you reach the part where the heartaches come,
The hero would be me,
Heroes often fail,
You won't read that book again, because
the ending is just too hard to take....
