Today is the big day. 8 years later

from good old neon 1/2

The truth is just that late at night one night in August after Dr. G.’s return, when I couldn’t sleep (which happened a lot ever since the cocaine period) and was sitting up drinking a glass of milk or something and watching television, flipping the remote almost at random between different cable stations the way you do when it’s late, I happened on part of an old Cheers episode from late in the series’ run where the analyst character, Frasier (who went on to have his own show), and Lilith, his fiancée and also an analyst, are just entering the stage set of the underground tavern, and Frasier is asking her how her workday at her office went, and Lilith says, ‘If I have one more yuppie come in and start whining to me about how he can’t love, I’m going to throw up.’ This line got a huge laugh from the show’s studio audience, which indicated that they — and so by demographic extension the whole national audience at home as well — recognized what a cliché and melodramatic type of complaint the inability-to-love concept was. And, sitting there, when I suddenly realized that once again I’d managed to con myself, this time into thinking that this was a truer or more promising way to conceive of the problem of fraudulence — and, by extension, that I’d also somehow deluded myself into almost believing that poor old Dr. Gustafson had anything in his mental arsenal that could actually help me, [cont]

2/2

and that the real truth was probably more that I was continuing to see him partly out of pity and partly so that I could pretend to myself that I was taking steps to becoming more authentic when in fact all I was doing was jerking a gravely ill shell of a guy around and feeling superior to him because I was able to analyze his own psychological makeup so much more accurately than he could analyze mine — the flash of realizing all this at the very same time that the huge audience-laugh showed that nearly everybody in the United States had probably already seen through the complaint’s inauthenticity as long ago as whenever the episode had originally run — all this flashed through my head in the tiny interval it took to realize what I was watching and to remember who the characters of Frasier and Lilith even were, meaning maybe half a second at most, and it more or less destroyed me, that’s the only way I can describe it, as if whatever hope of any way out of the trap I’d made for myself had been blasted out of midair or laughed off the stage, as if I were one of those stock comic characters who is always both the butt of the joke and the only person not to get the joke — and in sum I went to bed feeling as fraudulent, befogged, hopeless and full of self-contempt as I’d ever felt, and it was the next morning after that that I woke up having decided I was going to kill myself and end the whole farce.

whoah a simple thought dressed up in cheap language, really makes u think, especially the part where he says engineer twice

my favorite photo of him

...

>DFW will never not give a speech on Animorphs again

where was you when david fosters wallruses died?

i was sat on my sexy Couch reading infinet jets

'davids is kill'

'no'

wtf I just read that part as well. also the vegetable sister story from the AA meeting had me in tears.

I'm at the same spot you guys are. The AA meeting was kinda fucked you
>dead baby
>vegetable sister

but the map is not the territory so it doesn't matter what happens to the map

what's a beeper?

chillin on MSN after school

last seen around 5:30 discovered at 9:30

fuck you, ungrateful bastard.

1) use the search box
2) speak about the topic in the existing thread, instead of creating a new one

Nope.

...

what is he trying to say? (this, or I could read it 3 times)

I'm a the spot where a guy is killing stray cats for closure.

>ECT treatments x12
electro-convulsive therapy aka electroshocks aka medical electrocution
known as a barbaric treatment

...

guess I'll repost my obituary here,

12 september - Anniversary of David Foster Wallace's death.

Tribute thread.

David Wallace aka David Foster Wallace

Born February 21, 1962
Ithaca, New York, United States
Died September 12, 2008 (aged 46)
Claremont, California, United States

Best-selling postmodernist fiction writer.
Author of the famous speech "This is Water" about the need for empathy in our lives of crushing routine and anger [YouTube] This Is Water - Full version-David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech (embed)

Tennis champion in his teens, he later earned a double Masters in Philosophy (maths, linguistics) and Literature. Wrote two essays for his two Masters (?), the one in philosophy about fatalism and the freedom of the will, the other would be his first novel The Broom of the System.

Author of Infinite Jest, novel about the Incandenza family, esp. Hal Incandenza, young champion in a tennis academy, pot smoker, with a demeaning father refered to as "Himself" and who (the father) takes his life, a scene described not without irony over about 20 pages, all the family later trying to analyze his deed. The novel is also about support groups, rehab, Boston, and the evolutions of politics and entertainment in a near future North America.

He was also teaching creative writing at Pomona college.

At his death his unfinished new book, the Pale King, was published. But some say he had lost his inspiration and couldn't write anymore, which would have pushed him to become clean of the antidepressants he was taking. When he started taking them again, he felt the drug had lost its efficiency. He then went through electro-convulsive therapy (electro-shocks).

His sister remembers him as a happy big brother, who would tease her one summer when she worked as a cashier at the grocery store, remarking that the same summer he could get up late and make 5 times more money than her by teaching tennis only two hours.

Later in life he was haunted by the paradoxes of humility, empathy, authenticity, waging a war against irony.

RIP.

>professor started talking about DFW the other day

The description of his body sounds vaguely like his writing style.

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Smiley faced man with the hook.
Mario lying in front of the radio.
Gay black dying in LBJ's bed.

Good times.

waking up after a hookup, happy girl wants to prepare breakfast, doesn't understand you're waking from a night of nightmares. (IJ)

What is this from?

How would someone end up doing this face while in a conversation, if not by intention?

One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his fifties. He was a civil engineer whose hobby was model trains — like from Lionel Trains Inc., etc. — for which he erected incredibly intricate systems of switching and track that filled his basement recreation room. His wife brought photographs of the trains and networks of trellis and track into the locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering from psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had had no reason to disbelieve him. He was stocky and swart with thinning hair and hands that he held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago he had slipped on a patch of 3-In-1 brand oil from his model-train tracks and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement rec room in Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond all human endurance, and stayed that way. He’d never once tried suicide, though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was very devoted and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day. She was very devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily Mass when he was not institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try. They’d tried Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake-Inhibitors [S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors.], the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They’d scanned his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are beyond human aid. The man’s case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and to Mass and building miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond her ability to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew that this man and his wife must be possessed of a courage way off any sort of known courage-chart. But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at the idea of the squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence total except for the sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid into place, the man’s head full of poison and worms and every cell in his body screaming for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel.

The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurgery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the brain which causes all sentiment and feeling. The man’s fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man’s life enough meaning for him to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.

The couple had gotten Kate Gompert’s mother’s address and had sent Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in their prayers and wishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert didn’t know whether Ernest Feaster’s limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not.

>The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not.

>She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not.

did you even watch the interview pseud?

all those faces you see screencapped were by intention

I want to read that post about bloom firing himself out of the westward cannon after assassinating DFW