Kid Science

Guys I have twenty-two pages left of Infinite Jest and I can't do it, won't do it, because when I get to the end it will be over for real. And what then? Because that's all he wrote.

Guys I have twenty-two pages left of this Terra-turning book and I can't do it, won't do it, because after the fall where will all my smug subway not-quite-conversation-starters go? How will I tell the world at large that I talk the talk and walk the walk? Because it's about being lonely, and surely the people who've read this gospel understand all the weird facial machinations I'm making at all times, trying to divert attention quietly in a crowded room. Maybe.

Listlessly listening to a Laura Nyro record that the LP Man on Astor Place said I'd “really dig.” He was right. Plus it's raining in sporadic sheets in this here city of long islands, and the murk of it all lends itself to what is sic transit gloria here and now, that first a phrase I really just grasped the meaning of. The locomotive behind today's clacking language is I think I might want to be a writer, for real, for keeps. I also think that my life is presently like the elves going West in Lord of the Rings in that another lush summer (of long-form experiments in lifestyle) is coming to the end of its heyday. I am always talking and fretting and fuming about getting older and accepting subsequent personal responsibilities, but, like Liz Taylor liked to say, I think now might be the time for guts and guile. One of the times. Just something to draw attention to and name, like the autumn leaves in Central Park.

Like, I need to meet deadlines. Sure. Given. Like, the time has come the walrus said to know certain things for sure like, what kind of person you want to be around, like, how does your ideal morning feel, like, do you really like this thing you do, like, how MUCH? Like, what are you willing to work for? And do you know in your soul what work IS as opposed to ISN'T? And then I keep clutching at this: “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it,” (Hal Incandenza).

I think, and so do many other characters in Infinite Jest and presumably the author, that the “something pathetic about it,” is a de facto cop out. Cuz the thing is it does feel awfully pathetic to the boxed-up intellectual who fears small-talk to give it away in a mundane sense, I know for I have seen. It's the end of solipsism, really, it's a total admission that you are not self-sufficient in the universe nor interesting or central enough to affect change by Just Being You, You outside the Chess Club or college or organized sports-related fun. I have always understood you, lackluster non-joiner kids and tattooed hooligans who work in “freelance.” Yet we've all still got to DO something, regardless of how anathema we feel to the Grain. Which is to say, we all have to compromise. And some kinds of DOING and COMPROMISING and BEING IN THE WORLD seem more practically worthwhile than other kinds because certain cults seem to have bigger fanbases: e.g the nuclear family, the democracy, the church, THEATRE! Doing things means you believe in things. Believing in things means you're alive. When other people are following you or leaning on you it gets bigger, this world, it blows right up.

But the beast of burden for the brainiac is that this arrangement is fraught with visible insincerity and suspicious motive, because doesn't this math defy altruism, isn't it after all like what Tennessee Williams says (to debunk ALL your romantic notions): “using people is what we think of as love,” mustn't it be like that if we're only ever doing things to comfort ourselves, at the end of the day? (Exhale) Does this not make everything semi-vapid, semi-fake, and if so why live under such a tacit banner of mediocrity? Or at all? Is this what it is to look for happiness and if so why is this at all okay, much less the Holy Grail in America? Everything becomes but a prop under the cool light of realizing we move around because we find and fear deficiency. And suddenly everyone is an actor, and all the world's a stage, and your armchair philosophy with dubious quotations throughout is the mast on a ship heading anywhere but Pleasure Town because also hell is other people, according to Sartre.

But again, 4pm, here at the end of the day. At the end of the book. I will come back and confirm in twenty-five minutes, but I'm pretty sure that there are some rules, and these are not simply concessions or ways to Get (fleetingly) Happy with abandon and no insight. Maybe 'social contract' is a good term but actually not quite I think the rules are things you owe your brief time on the planet, the rules are actually how to get out of your own map and into the scary mystery of another person's. The rules, I'm finding, SEEM selfish and frighten the armchair philosopher and tattooed hooligan and Hal Incandenza but they aren't a cop-out, are in fact the opposite of a cop-out, are a cop-in, because you know while you're following them that they're pathetic, and to admit to having a flaw and wanting to change it is the bravest thing a person can do, right? Boston AA is corny, but it works. This is a better way to think, I think.

So some rules are: you have to pay the electric bill. You have to go out on blind dates sometimes, and sometimes you have to go to graduate school, and sometimes – the early twenties have become about discerning when, exactly – you have to let people kiss you on early AM corners and not start psychoanalyzing the gesture even before its over. And sometimes you have to stay at the party way too late or leave way too early (you have to go, either way) and sometimes you have to pick a fight, and sometimes you need to flee the state or get a tattoo or let someone hurt you. Sometimes you have to end phone calls and say no! with conviction and sometimes you have to tell lies to best friends and often you have to apologize, other times you have to say Yes! And a lot of these Sometimes' will stick and direct traffic in your autobiography, and how frightening to release into the knowledge that an idiot kid made a lot of the choices whose fruit will be bearing down on your shoulders at fifty and sixty years old, but following the rules is the only way. And not everyone can abide, and I constantly hope for the grace to neither begrudge or judge or occasionally envy these people. This is sink or swim country, and most of us are nowhere near Michael Phelps' but a hilarious universe throws us into the deep end nonetheless and there's nothing for it but to make some kind of attempt and there's no one to blame after a point, just a project, this is breathing, and finishing great books, and being brave. Breathing is pretty brave, you guys, if done with conviction.

Wind is still making music with the trees outside. Laura Nyro's clicked off. Later I'm going to the movies with a good good friend. Yesterday I sat in Union Square with another good good friend and ate dessert and talked about everything, and before that I went to rehearsal, and I talked to my Mom on the phone, and I kissed a person I liked in the very early AM and I worried a little about money and feeling foolish and I danced before that, a lot, to a favorite song, and I laughed until my stomach hurt and I ate an okay sandwich and I saw a great movie and I saw an old friend and--

I don't want a medal, exactly. I'm not sure I even want your full attention. But I do want something else entirely, a TBD kind of to-do, and the fire of this fuels me, always, even while I can't quite seem to hold on to it (It being FIRE and all) and have lost my ability to pronounce its name, while sometimes it has burned deep and other times it has cooled off to near-invisibility, while I've met such a precious, interesting few amount of people who seem to also be burning alive and care about feeding flame rather than putting it out, what I know for certain these days is that it's never going to stop being hungry. It's never going to go out.