I almost called this chapter “Fourth Time Around” but I’ve never liked when an album has the same title as a song on it. (Yes, I already sort of did this earlier…) “New Age” is fine, but I considered it a placeholder of a scene title until I was agonizing over where to set the break points in these wedding reception shenanigans. By the time I settled on “son arrives, old man departs, Daphne gets the last words” as three distinct chapters “New Age” just sort of stuck. It does take us from paths of pain to jewels of glory AND references a blonde haired character, but I think I was mostly enamored with I know everything you’ve done. Anyway, I hate divorces for foreshadowing purposes.
It’s the beginning of a new tidbits age:
- The opener here is one of my usual song lyric word association free-write exercises designed to get in a groove and break writers block taking on a life of its own and yielding something usable. I dug how it planted some seeds on how Local Boy’s son has it in his blood to become a music critic in a section arguably existing only because his future music critic son paid him a visit. A stretch of a time travel analogy between the two songs didn’t hurt either.
- An image of the tan van coming to a screeching halt on this park road (a callback to the OG TP) was in my loose outline from the start, but I couldn’t work out when to use it. Eventually I decided it should recur multiple times from a few different perspectives even if it wasn’t the exact same scene, setting up a near accident we’ll get to later.
- In the now of this chapter I got quite the adrenaline rush swapping out the time traveling son for the time traveling old man and then deciding I might as well complete the set with the time traveling redhead fishing off the chain.
- This Local Boy lyric is an attempt to invoke Dylan, with maybe a dash of Benji Hughes: Third time is a charm, I won’t sell the farm, or sound the alarm, hope you mean me no harm.
- Rules-wise, the photo can be held by the book since both objects are displaced in time. The fact they aren’t necessarily from the same time doesn’t matter as calamity TP physics go.
- “no more than a circle or a line” could be from Brad or Feist.
- Confession: I went to print with a typo on the 5318008 digits, rendering the old dumb juvenile joke even dumber.
- I had no idea what the redhead would do with the book until she handed it back. Confiscating it was too obvious. Annotating it was nerdily wild and in line with the character.
- Daphne’s handwriting font in the paperback is based on my wife’s actual writing, originally serving as L’s penmanship in L Extreme. Fonts fly forever! (Made with Calligraphr)
- “None of this happened, but all of it is true” is a quote I’ve loved since the first time I read it in the liner notes of a Carter USM album in 1997 and have probably thought of and/or re-quoted at least once a month since then. There’s a surprisingly few number of Google results for it. One is me, none are Carter or Jim Bob. Here’s hoping this sets the record straight on origins.
- A clue: The redhead signs her name as Daphne the 4th (fourth time around?), but this is only the 2nd time we’ve encountered her in the book. It’s like she has a time machine or something…
