We were not asleep before we woke up

Copping Jay McInerney. Making myself universal, out here in what seems to be less than two-dimensional space:

NAUSEA, BY JEAN PAUL SARTRE:

Last week you fucked up a hard-boiled egg, and even at the time this seemed catastrophic in ways beyond the culinary. You failed at an empirically simple task, and that makes the egg itself a symptom of what you may now call a disease: the things happening in your mind suddenly have real life, tangible repercussions and they are serious, involving life and death matters, sustenance. You're not just "possibly emotionally starving," you're dying, physically, literally, mentally -- you no longer have the faculty to provide for yourself in any meaningful way. Proof.

In a small, irrational gesture of protest, you make several plans to go out to brunch this week, where you'll expect to spend money you don't have. In the strain of domino theory most recognizable in those 'Give a Mouse a Cookie,' books, it soon becomes clear that the lifestyle of a person who makes plans to go to brunch simply won't accommodate a tedious desk job, or homework or rehearsals. You prune events from your planner with the same discrimination as your average born-again ascetic might rid themselves of earthly possessions: all you want is time. Time at home. Time to kill. Time to simmer in your poverty, your divine decadence. Time to become this alternative -- a fabulous care-free brunch cadet, unfettered by the possibility of cooking solo, subsequently happy, subsequently not sick. You giggle a little at this terrific loophole, the active imagination. But when you run out of money two meals later and find yourself surrounded only by the loose promises you broke already and the smuggled hours you fought so hard for, it's pretty clear you don't HAVE anything to do.

This draws attention to the fact that you don't WANT to do anything.

Luckily, the Internet has various portals for watching movies not-yet-released on DVD, and you and your roommates have thrown so many parties this month that the house can always be scoured and the repetition of this task won't seem insane. Luckily, sleep is always a good option -- It's like a friendly shadow, a suggestion, a wink. Luckily, most other people around you, aside from those few who know you very well, are happy to talk in a Cockney that makes your sick pedestrian: "Yeah, this semester has been rough. I've been feeling blue, too. What's up this weekend for you?" Luckily, Sushi delivery comes straight to the door. Luckily, no place in the neighborhood seems interested in upholding America's liquor laws. Most luckily, the real embracing of cynicism -- and I mean snuggling up to the concept, becoming BOSOM BUDDIES -- enables a candor you've been wary of before; a self-referential, 'dangerous', chiefly obnoxious, self-pitying kind of gobbledegook that creeps into your writing like a thief, your voice like a bandit, your art in general like inkblots on a page. You're only a little surprised that the glibness slips into you so easy now, when previously you've always felt yourself modest and comparatively well-adjusted, at times hypersensitive to rudeness and hesitant-to-offend to the point of fault. Whatever, is what you say now, Luckily there is some instant macaroni and cheese in the cabinet. You make this, following all the instructions a to a tee, and it doesn't taste right. It just doesn't taste right.

The night stretches out like a yawn still, full moon tongue. It asks nothing of you. You have no response. Is this funny? you wonder. Perhaps this is the Infinite Jest. You can't ever muse this with any credibility though, because you haven't finished the book.