The Margarita at the End of the Universe

I got a kick out of the couple who came yesterday morning to hook up the icemaker and water dispenser on our new fridge. For starters, it's unusual to see a husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend team doing this sort of thing. They were both sort of scruffy, with the raspy voices of heavy smokers, and though they weren't tanned or conspicuously "beachy" they somehow had the air of long-time coastal partiers who had seen their share of margarita-soaked sunsets. This led me to joke that I had been told that they could hook up the "water" dispenser so it would actually produce perfect frozen margaritas right out of the fridge. He said, "If you figure that one out, let us know, and we'll be right over." After they were done their work, before they left, we came back to the dream of the fridge-based dispenser of perfect margaritas. I said I would work on the invention and let them beta-test the result when I had something. All in all, it was a slightly offbeat and funny way to start the morning and I found this couple lingering in my imagination for the rest of the day, taking up habitation in the bare, partial structure of a kind of never-to-be-actually written short story that I mentally sketched in odd moments. I wonder how many people walk around every day "working on," or playing with, little fragments like this.

Oh, and concerning the title of this blog, here are two consecutive entries from the Online Etymological Dictionary.

lacuna
1663, "blank or missing portion in a manuscript," from L. lacuna "hole, pit," dim. of lacus "pond, lake" (see lake (1)).
lagoon
1612, from Fr. lagune, from It. laguna "pond, lake," from L. lacuna "pond, hole," from lacus "pond" (see lake). Originally in ref. to the region of Venice; applied 1769 to the lake-like stretch of water enclosed in a South Seas atoll.

I started out with the idea of a "lacuna" as a gap or missing piece (and of course the term was made popular by pomo French theory) because of my sense that this blog could be a kind of hole down which certain things might fall, things that would heretofore have disappeared without a trace. I added "laguna" for the sound play and because I like the water, and living near it, but I was unaware that both words have the same root, going back to "lacus" for lake or pond. So the lacuna was already watery right from the start, and the laguna was already just a kind of hole.

For more on lacunae and memories gone missing, see Michel Gondry's intriguing film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and this humanitarian venture, Lacuna, Inc. As for the title of this entry, I blame Douglas Adams's trilogy Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and specifically the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The location mentioned in the title seems like it would be a very good place to drink a perfect frozen margarita.