Fiction. Film Studies. A somewhat deranged cultural studies professor, having been informed by a reliable source (his "girlfriend of the time") that he reminds her of the legendary silent film star Buster Keaton, inexplicably dumps her and strikes out on his own to seek out the nature of this resemblance. A truly slapstick adventure ensues in which our good professor travels from the Boston area back home to Tennessee, flees the police to parts unknown, encounters psychopathic roommates, heroin punks, the sadomasochistic underground, hermaphrodite butlers, curmudgeonly cave dwellers, tarot card casino dealers, vaudeville cults, guru junkies, and more, all of whom, in the spirit of Keaton's films, he falls in love with one by one. When our hero steals a hot air balloon in order to make it to California, will he finally discover the secret of Keaton's apocryphal machine, the "love catapult"?