Now More Than Never

Jesus, I am in need some distraction.  I am facing an existential hell which, as you know, is always our own creation.  Right now, I don't wish to make the important decisions and am really not capable of it.  Forty-eight hours, I say.

And then I open the N.Y. Times and read this:

Poetry and beer. Maira Kalman and Gypsy rhythms. There’s nothing the Miser likes better than mixing it up.

The Brooklyn Historical Society is going to present  "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Girl."  What is Wallace Stevens doing in his grave?  (O.K.--nothing, of course).

Next I read the review of David Foster Wallace's "new" posthumous book which makes me wish to buy it.  If I can find it in a bookstore here in my own hometown, I will be lucky.  I searched unsuccessfully for months to find "Infinite Jest."  I confess that I still haven't read it.

His posthumous unfinished novel, “The Pale King” — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom. . . . Perhaps, he writes, “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” namely the existential knowledge “that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back.”

I'm changing my mind a bit, at least for the weekend.  All hells are not of our own making.  Other people can make them for us.  I am eschewing the burdens of responsibility for a few days.  I hope.  If I can find some distraction.

My friend Q lives in Manhattan.  I think of all the distractions there.  Manhattan presents the other problem, I guess, of too much distraction.  I need that for awhile.

Maybe I need to quit reading the Times.  Since their internet site will soon no longer be free, I may.  But perhaps it will be the better thing.  They lead me into traps I sometimes cannot escape.  "Skins."  After reading their provocative review of the show, I watched it.  All of it.  I got hooked like a ten year old watching the Disney Chanel.  I am despicable and ashamed.  It was fun.   

The kids don't read much on that show.  There are no references to Wallace (either one).  But there are plenty of distractions.  Still, none of them are happy.  Hmm.

I need a concluding sentence, something witty, some metaphor that ties this disjointed entry together in some organic/artificial way.  I am not clever enough for that this morning, it seems.  I didn't really write this.  It has been pieced together from notes by a third party editor who has read my other writings.  Consider it notes for something.  Incomplete.

Although “The Pale King” was pieced together by Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch from pages and notes that the author left behind when he committed suicide in 2008, it feels less like an incomplete manuscript than a rough-edged digest of the themes, preoccupations and narrative techniques that have distinguished his work from the beginning. After all, Wallace always disdained closure, and this volume showcases his embrace of discontinuity. . . .