atlantic city

Stoned, the wad of money not lost to the casino digging into the side of my thigh, falling asleep on a ledge next to the 21st story window after watching the lemming waves do their thing, thinking about how the transvestite hookers could've possibly known that I'm half-Irish and not a rounded whole, I woke up at 10am to the sun and Dan's whispering and then, at Trump Marina, where the cocktail waitresses were a little older but brought us more than one drink an hour, Pete won $760 at blackjack and roulette. Jenny and I followed his lead for a little while and everything was coming up Milhouse until we all stopped playing...

we've always been at war with eastasia

n/t

all my heroes are suicides

David Foster Wallace hung himself.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-wallace14-2008sep14,0,246155.story

Here's part of his commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College:

"As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration."

The death of an author is a strange one. I never met the guy (Liz did, read her blog, it's great), and I've only read a few of his essays ("Consider the Lobster", "Big Red Son", "Up, Simba"), but I feel closer to the man than I did to, say, Elliott Smith. Wallace's writing was funny, empathetic (read "The View from Mrs. Thompson's", his account of watching 9/11 unfold from the living room of an elderly woman in the Midwest), and projected a truth that seemingly fell from either the stars or directly out of his ass. Truth nonetheless.

metadata

Occasionally, the metadata sent by book publishers won't include a description of the book. If it's not available on Amazon or the publisher's website, I get to write my own. I'm especially proud of this one:

"The true crime tale of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, who murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters and blamed it on hippies."