When you need to go to the bathroom and there isn't one in sight...no
matter how long you've 'held' it...no matter how many miles you've
traveled under the mounting pressure...when you come within range of the target, the last 20 feet are the most excruciating.
The human ass can detect proximity. In all of history, never has a more accurate homing beacon been devised than the rectum.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
The Flu, Tolkien, College, Suicide, etc.
When I was in 7th grade I stayed home sick from school. My parents didn't have the most extensive reading collection, but one book that was on the shelf, a book my aunt had given me for Christmas some years before was The Hobbit. Being stranded in a suburban home with an itchy brain and an ill body . . . with nothing on pre-cable daytime television but soaps and "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" . . . led me to pull the Tolkien story down. It changed my life. Literally every direction I have moved since can in some way be traced to that serendipitous flu.
A couple years later, I was at church with my folks for a Thanksgiving service and browsing the bookstore when I came across The Fellowship of the Ring. I hadn't heard of any sequel to his first and most famous book-- but recognizing the author's name, I bought it with allowance money and devoured it and the subsequent members of it's trilogy.
Because of Tolkien I chose-- much to my father's disapproval-- to study English Literature in college. Also, being a collegiate football player made this choice . . . somewhat strange. Having landed at Illinois State University, football faded away and even to me a Lit education at a second rate school at the end of the postmodern bubble . . . in its final death belch . . . seemed less than aspirational. However, it did afford me lottery-ticket level exposure to a young writer and professor named David Foster Wallace.
When my wife asks me now why I was, and am, so fascinated by him--particularly because our lives have almost nothing in common and he chose to hang himself in 2008--I tell her being there, at that point in both of our personal histories (1), was like being able to reach out and touch lightning without getting burned.
If David Wallace-- who the day he died would likely not have remembered my name-- could have received a small jar filled up with some cosmic substance capturing all of the anonymous impact he had on my life and all of the personal importance, fulfillment, gratification, and potency that knowledge could have carried with it . . . if there was an ice cream scoop for the brain that could remove that compartment of reverance/gratefulness/respect in me and surgically juxtapose it with whatever his final reality was, he never would have died the way he did. That knowledge would be a cure for anything. Even depression. He didn't know me, and I miss him.
The rest is details. I want to say or do something, someday, both worthy and reflective of his impact.
___________
(1) - It was the school year of 1995/96. He was already a legend in the small universe of the English department, and was on the cusp of publishing the cruise ship article in Harper's which served as a shot-across-the-bow to the world for the super-stardom which would accompany the arrival of Infinite Jest. I was in my final year, and had just enough education and exposure to such things that I understood the rare air I breathed. (I obviously understand the triteness of a footnote here. I'm sorry.)
A couple years later, I was at church with my folks for a Thanksgiving service and browsing the bookstore when I came across The Fellowship of the Ring. I hadn't heard of any sequel to his first and most famous book-- but recognizing the author's name, I bought it with allowance money and devoured it and the subsequent members of it's trilogy.
Because of Tolkien I chose-- much to my father's disapproval-- to study English Literature in college. Also, being a collegiate football player made this choice . . . somewhat strange. Having landed at Illinois State University, football faded away and even to me a Lit education at a second rate school at the end of the postmodern bubble . . . in its final death belch . . . seemed less than aspirational. However, it did afford me lottery-ticket level exposure to a young writer and professor named David Foster Wallace.
When my wife asks me now why I was, and am, so fascinated by him--particularly because our lives have almost nothing in common and he chose to hang himself in 2008--I tell her being there, at that point in both of our personal histories (1), was like being able to reach out and touch lightning without getting burned.
If David Wallace-- who the day he died would likely not have remembered my name-- could have received a small jar filled up with some cosmic substance capturing all of the anonymous impact he had on my life and all of the personal importance, fulfillment, gratification, and potency that knowledge could have carried with it . . . if there was an ice cream scoop for the brain that could remove that compartment of reverance/gratefulness/respect in me and surgically juxtapose it with whatever his final reality was, he never would have died the way he did. That knowledge would be a cure for anything. Even depression. He didn't know me, and I miss him.
The rest is details. I want to say or do something, someday, both worthy and reflective of his impact.
___________
(1) - It was the school year of 1995/96. He was already a legend in the small universe of the English department, and was on the cusp of publishing the cruise ship article in Harper's which served as a shot-across-the-bow to the world for the super-stardom which would accompany the arrival of Infinite Jest. I was in my final year, and had just enough education and exposure to such things that I understood the rare air I breathed. (I obviously understand the triteness of a footnote here. I'm sorry.)
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