Maybe One More Thing

To begin, I think I write here as if there is an audience which I'm pretty sure there isn't. Maybe someone every now and then will wander into the room and listen to me talk to myself but probably not all that often. I think therefore that I will dispense with this voice that sounds like I'm speaking publicly and write more in keeping with the bloggy spirit - i.e. for me.

That being said, I wanted to make sure I recorded here my complete DFW thoughts and explain to myself what's going on.

There's a picture below of DFW that while I know it doesn't completely look like me there are some VERY familiar things about how he's dressed and his hair and glasses. I'm identifying with him superficially. And I think that's why there's the Fr. Judge piece below. This confluence of events for me - the anniversary of 9/11 which is hard (not because I lost anyone but more because we ALL did and I think sometimes the average Joe doesn't take the day seriously enough and then there's the whole republican thing blah blah blah) and then the death of DFW. (I use DFW because that's what I call him when I talk or think about him - which is less familiar than the "Dave Wallace" that he apparently preferred [because I didn't know him] and less formal than "David Foster Wallace" which is his "stage" name).

The connection is this: the most stirring image from 9/11 for me is the "my-age-dressed-like-me-at-work" man falling from the upper floors down, head-first. This image meant for me that it could have been any of us and in that way it WAS all of us. That poor guy just had to do all the hard "work" of that identification and I will therefore forever honor his memory, whoever he was. Then there's DFW - I could never be a writer like him but his writing was joyful to me. I don't know if he took joy in doing it I only know that when I read his words they absolutely delight me. He's funny and brilliant and has such a great heart - at least that's what I see in his writing. Most importantly he makes me want to write. And to write better. To know that he was so tortured by his own BIG BRAIN - that his thoughts plagued him, that he found the racing energy of his own mind a thing so difficult to handle that he had to choke off the air and oxygen to it to make it stop. That scares the crap out of me. He wrote about 9/11. He wrote about the choice of the people who jumped - how frightening it was to him to realize how horrible it was that falling from 90 stories seemed like the better choice.
Anyway, I won't plague you anymore Johnny with the thoughts of your own brain. Let this be a lesson to us all.