"Abandon All Hope": Hal's self-pitying trope for abstinence

texture · ~12-17 Nov YDAU

• When: ~12-17 Nov YDAU (the trope "started as a wry dark mental joke and now within a week has become" his frame for abstinence)
• What: Hal's Pemulis-inspired trope for putting down the secret daily Bob Hope: "Abandon All Hope." What began as a wry dark mental joke becomes, within a week, the way Hal characterizes abstinence to himself — "which any Boston AA would tell him isn't a very promising way to think about it at all, in terms of self-pity." Names the self-pitying frame Hal brings to his withdrawal (and the Dantean overtone of the whole November slide). [Given its own dated position here rather than absorbed into the standing-facts block.]