The Blood Sister viewing
Hal knows that L-TC wasn’t an inversion or lampoon at all, but derived right from the dark B.S. ’80s period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private entrepreneurism, when a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored, and Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar’s Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada’s Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room.
Context
A verbatim "anhedonic" hit, applied to the father: the patent windfall left JOI with nothing left to chase — attainment-despair in the essay's own clinical vocabulary, the Wild-Turkey year as the goal-attained crash Poutrincourt generalizes at p. 680. The son diagnosing it sits in a crowded room "only in a very technical sense," working on his own flat year.