Theresa Duncan's tiresome prose: Slogging through The Wit of the Stoner

Good old-fashioned reporting isn't sexy--it's tedious and time consuming. And these days, it's rarely done by MSM reporters. But as a dedicated Duncanologist, I'm not afraid of a little hard work. So here's what I've dug up for you today.

Based on numerous reference to the herb in her posts, the Wit appears to have been a stoner (which would make JB a stoner too, of course). Hey whatever you do in the privacy of your own home is fine with me, but it would certainly explain the couple's chronic paranoia and the dreamy, convoluted, self-important prose. Suddenly everything begins to make sense.

Here is an example

Fresh from LAX, I instead hid in my Lunar Library office and listened to early Kinks albums, smoked a couple bowls of California chronic, cataloged a crate of first edition Walter Cranes in fine gilt bindings, caught up on my copious handwritten correspondence (stationery Mrs. John L. Strong) and polished off half a bottle of XO cognac. Or so. [emphasis mine]

And here another

We tighten the suede laces on the Wit teepee flaps and brace ourselves for the months of everglow sunshine ahead. We wonder at all that June, July, August, water under the bridge, put on the nineteen fifties child's feathered headress we bought at the yard sale on Horizon and spark up a doob. [emphasis mine]

And here another.

While summer 2006 begins on this Solstice day elsewhere, we know that summer never ends at The Wit Of The Staircase. Doped to the gills as the Staircase is on the chronic creations of the solar orb nearest our 90291 neighborhood (and some stars even farther out), Wit is now so sun drunk that she is often forced to wonder where summer ends and she begins.

California is a psychoactive agent capable of providing a synaesthesia of not just the senses, you see, but a synaesthesia of whole states of the Union and individual existences. The first thing Wit did on relocating its offices from the East Coast was buy an Alfa Romeo convertible. The second thing she did is put the top down. And the third was to acquire a big square bottle of one-of-a kind Oyédo by Diptyque that takes up the car's entire tiny glove box.

[Sharp inhale...then "holding-pot-in-lungs" patois] Late fall's desert winds from Santa Ana are already poised to drag in their hippie-kiln heat and a choking red dust that seems wafted in from Mars. Things standing for over a century are going to burn, and even Christmas looks like the original one, with sand and sun and a star already rising in the East.

[Slow North Wind with puffed-cheeks on an antique map exhale] Princess Summerfall--stupid, gorgeous, arrogant--trips over her gossamer green train and her eldritch evil sister Novemberwill takes up her cracked sceptre.

Are you bored yet? Here is another.

And then I learned the same rule again at the detective academy last year, which surprised me, because I had worked so hard to forget the first lesson through pot smoking, catalog shopping and sunbathing while slicked with a measly millimeter of level 2 SPF only. Daredevil, some say.