Infinite Jest: Ain't that some BS

After almost two years of on and off reading, I finally finished Infinite Jest.  The first 400 pages were what took the most time, with sprawling world and character development that tried its hardest to shake my interest, resulting in multiple other books being read along the way.  But somewhere around that 40% mark, the story took off and really sucked me into the book's alternate reality.  The last week of the book was spent reading my days away with wide eyed intrigue at how this colossus of a story was going to wrap up.  With so many open ended storylines and less than one hundred pages to go, I knew I was in for a whirlwind finale.  And now that I've finally finished those last few pages, I can soundly say that Infinite Jest was possibly the most unsatisfying books I've ever read.  Rarely will I say this about a book, but I almost wish that I had never picked it up.

In summary...

There are thousands of reviews and critiques of this book.  It's been hailed as post modern genius and it's been derided as a liberal arts love note to AA.  In the foreword, David Eggers calls it, "drum tight and relentlessly smart," but others may be more inclined to call it braggadociously verbose and heavy handed.  This book, like all books, is open to subjective discourse, so as a brief nod to DFW, you can, like, think whatever you want.  Personally, I think that this book doesn't goddamn end, so I don't really care how masterfully crafted, intelligently insightful, or imaginatively told it is if it's not a finished product.  If a story can't be wrapped up in 1,100 pages, just keep writing and I'll read it once it's complete.  What's another 200 pages?

Before continuing down that path, I just want to say that I can see what critics and literarians love(d) about this book.  DFW is an amazing writer.  The world development that managed to be both expansive and fine-grained, the floating narration with character dependent affects, the exciting and interesting storylines, the introspection and thoughtfulness, the waits and reveals, the character development both forwards and backwards.  It pulled me in and I loved it.  I was so invested in the lives of these people that I wanted nothing more than to see how their intertwined follies wrapped up in a messy little bow.

But being pulled so deeply into the story and its players made the non-ending all the more aggravating.  Why spend so much time building this world and narrative to just seemingly stop mid story?  Is that the joke?  Is the joke on me for reading for so long?  For the sake of those that can't be dissuaded from making the time investment, I'm going to put my list of dangling thread gripes in a white font, so if you want spoilers, just highlight the space that appears empty below:

• Gately - He's in his hospital bed, as physically incapacitated as he had been at the end of the dilaudid binge that resulted in Fax's death (presumably in a horrific manner), suffering through a clear message of damned if you do/if you don't.  But that message seems to have been pretty clear throughout the whole book.  Why not end on a stronger message or at least with some sort of character closure?


• Hal - He's losing his mind on his way back to the Y.G., with an unsubtle message around drugs not being bad for everyone, and in some cases, a life/mind saver.  Why don't we get to see the climactic shift?  I would've loved to hear in Hal's words, not in my own.


• JVD - Were the lights a reference to an Ennet Houser accidentally finding the Entertainment and then wiping out the whole house?  Same goes for Gentle, Tine, and crew.  Was that final viewing infiltrated?


• Marathe/Steeply - So... not wrapping that up in any way?  No one is going after the casket?


• Mad Stork/Wraith - Why introduce the wraith so late in the book to then never really use him again?


• Darkness - Was he the telepath moving things around?


• E.T.A. - Was there a mass murder at that final hob knob soiree?


• The Entertainment - I like that the Entertainment wasn't explored too deeply, but I would've really loved to see some sort of personality type that was immune.  My assumption was that the clinically depressed would be safe from it, and that would be some sort of reveal.  I guess the Entertainment was just another form of addiction.  Oh well.


• Orin - Should I be surprised that the only character to receive proper closure is Orin?  What could have been more cathartic to DFW than to horrifically murder the symbolic manifestation of every character trait he so deeply loathed in another person (assumption on my part)?  Just try and kick your way out of that one, O.  That turn was about as blunt as renaming North America to O.N.A.N.


• Misc. - There were more open threads, like Pemulis' future, the Mario/C.T. reveal that went unexplored, John Wayne, Stice's forehead/face skin in relation to telekinesis, and more, but I think I hit the big ones.  

Maybe the joke wasn't on me.  Maybe the joke was on an entire industry and I just happened to be a casual bystander turned collateral damage.  Maybe DFW tricked the entire publishing and literature industry, spending a decade laughing as they paraded down the street naked in the finery, bragging about their understanding of the unfinished garment.  I don't know.  Maybe I just don't get it and should keep re-reading it until I get it.  I'm not going to do that.  If you get it, don't explain it to me.  I'm done with this book.

Generation CD

As my move date approaches, I'm steadily working my way through all of the things I don't want to waste gas money on by letting it drag down my gas mileage crossing the country.  The current stop on this disposal voyage is one that most people my age will eventually slam their memory cruise liner into, my CD collection.  Music CDs, computer CDs, burned CDs, you name it CDs that've been accrued since the mid 90's.  We're talking a milk crate, multiple binders, and a couple spindles, some of which have been moving with me, others have been stored in my mom's basement along with boxes of books that are next on the list.  And if I weren't moving at the end of the month, you'd better believe none of them would've ever been tossed.

Aside from the move in general, the main impetus for this mass CD disposal, really, was the desire to not be hypocritical.  I'm currently in the process of helping my mother shed a large quantity of what I would consider garbage from her house.  My childhood home has an unnatural density which has resulted in old clothing, unsorted boxes, and other unwanted odds and ends being unable to escape it's overwhelming gravity.  Once I'm out of Philly, anything I've left at that house will more or less join the abandoned ranks of my childhood tighty whities and broken tennis racquets.  If I were to depart without getting rid of those CDs, I would only be helping to increase the total mass of that black hole, which would make me a total poser jerk.

It took a little over a week to sort and rip/toss the CDs.  It was a simple, mindless task, and I should have done it years ago, rather than drag that crate and those books of CDs from apartment to apartment for the past decade and a half.  So why hadn't I?  Prior to starting, I couldn't tell you, but after getting only a few dusty CDs in, I can without a doubt say it was for the exact same reason there were unmarked cardboard boxes lining the wall of my mom's garage.

As a child, I first listened to cassettes.  Those cassettes still live under a bed.  As an adult, I listen to digital music.  Those files litter my phone.  But in my formative years spanning those years between, the ones where music leaves indelible marks of meaning throughout ones memory, compact discs were king.  The reign of the CD as the dominant form of media distribution overlaps perfectly with the years in which I was a pop culture vacuum, so it seems reasonable to assume that the medium became just as important as the message in my brain's heart.  Really, why else would I have a pristine copy of Spacehog's Resident Alien?  Spacehog just happened to come along at a time when personal meaning was being assigned indiscriminately at an overwhelming rate in an attempt to form some sort of personal identity and sense of self.  Related, I just found out that Spacehog's lead singer/bass player (Royston Langdon) was formerly married to Liv Tyler, and I cared far more about that fact than I imagined possible, which is to say, at all.

This was a thing (Photo Taken from Zimbio)

Years later, I now have these boxes and books full of CDs, but they're not CDs, they're little scratched up memories that mean more symbolically than physically.  They're my damn boxes, and they need to go.  Regardless of the space they take in the basement, they take up way too much emotional memory if I'm not able to just throw them out without thinking about it.  I am not the physical manifestations of memories!  Better than Ezra should have been gone out with the Buzz Bin, not somehow taken up permanent residence.  Ugh, I can't imagine the amount of weight these CDs would have carried by the time I reached my 50's.  We have the tendency to polish memory turds, and I never want to be a septuagenarian that looks backed embarrassedly on the years when I went through that late-1990's in the early-2030's phase.  I do not need fuel for the midlife crisis that will later fuel my late-life crisis.

Ok, I can't let go of this Spacehog thing.  I just found a superb video of their performance on Letterman in 2006, so click on that link, watch it, then come back to this paragraph.  Let's walk through this for a moment.  First off, Letterman's staff must throw out more CDs in a week than I could throw out in a lifetime, 2) that look on the guitarist's face during the intro, 3) those pants, 4) still those pants, 5) those smug face ooooohs, 6) vocal vibrato, so much vocal vibrato, 7) work must have gone into the studio version because his voice is sounding strained (still infinitely better than Dexter Holland live), 8) just realized the other guitarist is wearing a sheer, collared shirt, 9) that drummer is going ape shit, good for him.  Who'd have thought they'd be one hit wonders?  Here, cleanse your Network TV-based aural palette with Sabotage on Letterman in 1994.  Or Rage on SNL.

Anyway, this purge already has me feeling lighter as the possessions that once weighed me down are now weighing down future generations while they resist biodegradation at the bottom of a Philadelphia landfill.  In the meantime, there's going to be a bunch of free CDs on my porch for the next few weeks, so feel free to stop by and grab a couple discs.

Leaving the Desert to go to the Desert

After two and a half weeks in the Black Rock Desert, it was time to get back on the road.  The airport was all but gone and so were most of the people that had worked there.  In a few days, nothing would remain except for tire tracks and post holes that would be swept away by the wind or filled in by the dust.  That and the giant fenced in perimeter surrounding the entire event.  The DPW folks would be cleaning up for a few more weeks, and that fence wasn't coming down until all loose debris had been secured.  I'm not sure how a corporation like Burning Man is able to convince people to stay and work (more or less) for free in the blazing sun for weeks after the event ends.  It's kind of a cult like that.

My cultish obligations were over for the year, though, so I was free to do as I pleased.  What I pleased to do was return to Utah as quickly as possible for a few more days in the canyons before taking the truck and trailer back to Mississippi.  I still had over 1,300 cycling miles between Jackson and Philadelphia, so while I wasn't in any position to dawdle.  Buuuuut... when you're in that part of the country with an air conditioned truck, you should really take advantage of the situation.  I knew I was going to have to be efficient with my time, so the first thing I did was head west.

Just west of Reno, in the opposite direction of Moab and Mississippi, is one of my favorite vistas in the entire country.  I'd say world, except I've seen more of a percentage of the US than of the world so country carries a bit more weight relatively.  The first time I'd seen it, I was on my bicycle sick as a dog, with gravelly lymph nodes, and a brain swimming in DayQuil.  The second time I'd seen it, I was in the passenger seat of a dusty minivan with the check engine light shining bright on the dash.  This time I was going to see it with a properly functioning body in a properly functioning vehicle, the most ironic way to view the home of one of the most dysfunctional stories of the frontier days.  I'm talking about the Donner Memorial State Park, named for the om nom Donner Party.

A gorgeous spot for a picnic.

The Donner Pass summit sits around 7,000', overlooking Donner Lake and the sometimes green, sometimes brown, always steep walls of the Sierra Nevadas.  There's a little parking lot just beneath the top, and to be able to sit there for a while just looking off into the eastern distance is easily worth the fifty or so miles it adds in each direction.  My good idea for the day was to leave the trailer I'd been hauling back at my hotel parking lot outside of Reno.  Ok, Donner Summit was complete.  No more distractions.

Buuuuut... Nevada is pretty nice when the sun is setting.  To just drive through without stopping to take it all in really seems like at the least a bad idea and at the worst completely sacrilege in a Mother Gaia kind of way.  Did I really need to get back to the concrete of Philadelphia that quickly?

I couldn't not stop, you know?

No.  No, I didn't.  Also, the human bladder can only hold so much fluid, so I had to stop any way, and I may as well stretch the old legs out and take some pictures, right?  Yeah, that's right.  The above photo is what a lot of Nevada looks like.  If you've ever wondered what the bottom of the ocean would look like if it was all dried out and the dead fish all removed, there you go.  Nevada.

It was getting late (nothing to do with the detours), so I pulled off on a big, roadside turnout for the night.  There is no shortage of places to pull a car off the road for a nap in Nevada.  It is not a heavily populated state, and most of the pop density is focused in and around the gambling towns, of which I was nowhere near any.  I was mostly near scorpions and camel spiders, and they took up very little space.  At least after a nice long nap I'd be refreshed and ready to drive the rest of the way to Moab without any distractions.

Well, almost all of the way.  You see, the last time I was in Utah, there was a site I really wanted to visit, but it had been raining on the day I was nearby the aforementioned, unnamed site, and it's not really the place to visit in the rain.  Aside from the roads becoming impassable and walking paths unwalkable, the main fun of this place is that it's full of climbable hoodoos that were carved out of the ocean floor millennia ago, if you believe the Earth is that old.  And said hoodoos are impossible to scale the moment they get even slightly damp, the fine dirt that's ever present turning into a viscous, earthy shortening.  Terrible for walking, terrible for cooking.  But it was nice now, sooo... probably should stop for a while.

This is a place.

Well, that was nice.  Crystal clear day and only one other car parked in the lot.  And I only almost got myself into inescapable danger once.  Good for you, sir.  And now that the final (I swear) detour had be taken, I would be in Moab by the evening, meaning time to grab some beers at City Market before settling in for a night of jigsaw puzzling.  All I had to do was just make sure I didn't get distracted and stop somewhere along the way...

Tibor Dreams or Remote Viewing: You Tell Me

It's been almost seven months since Tibor, my city bike, was stolen during a brief visit to Northern Liberties.  Since then, I've moved through the seven phases of grief pretty quickly, lingering on anger for the longest (and most creatively, as I had caught and forced penance upon the thief many times over and in many different ways in the perfect justice system of my mind), but given enough time and a dirt cheap replacement bike, I've gotten over it.  The theft didn't really hit me in the pocket, just in my bike heart.  Tibor was a bit of a Frankenbike, having been fixed up and decorated over the years, not a financial investment.  If anything, it was an emotional theft, as I'd been riding him for over a decade.  The hardest part for me to get over was the fact that he is likely sitting in a scrap yard currently, as even a pawn shop would have trouble moving him (he has a crank arm that falls off every ten miles that I was eventually going to fix but it was fine for my needs and I usually just carried a 10mm hex wrench to fix it on the go).

What kind of Kenzo junkie monster would steal that bike?

Months had gone by, life had settled back into place, and Tibor thoughts had faded into the background.  I had finally settled into the Seventh Phase.  Good for me.  And then last week I had a freakin' dream that I found Tibor just leaning unlocked against a bike rack in the city.  Actually, I think it was down on Kelly Drive, just west of the Falls Bridge, except in the dream the Falls Bridge was in the city.  I grabbed Tibor and rode off reunited into a sunny day, but then I woke up and Tibor was gone again.  It was an unexpected dream, but I shrugged it off.  Dreamland is where the subconscious deals with the deals that are still undealt with, so I clearly had some unresolved feelings buried beneath the topsoil of my mind even if I couldn't see them under the vegetation.  If anything, that was probably the dream that would clear my mind of the remaining Tibor cobwebs that still hung in the corners.  Cool.  Not the best dream, but not the worst.  When I was little I had a dream that a large fish kept leaping up from the ground and trying to swallow my arm whole.  I'd shake it off and it would keep leaping back up, its mouth sliding all the way up to my shoulder.  That dream is still the worst.  Close second is the one where the big orange monster from Looney Toons was chasing me around my house.

Figuring my Tibor trauma had finally been resolved, I was surprised to then have another Tibor dream only a few days later (a few days ago).  What was going on?  I hadn't given a single conscious thought to Tibor (other than the ones prompted by the previous dream) for months.  Why was I having another dream about him?  I was flummoxed and looking up pro bono therapists when I stumbled upon a possible answer.  

There's a podcast I listen to now and again called Astonishing Legends.  I love supernatural tales, especially when told in a non-fiction format, as this allows me to properly suspend my disbelief.  A suspension which has provided plenty of terror over the years.  Thanks, Fire in the Sky.  Don't let children watch that movie.  And don't let them listen to Whitley Strieber's Majestic on cassette in the middle of the night at Boy Scout Camp.  I still don't know how I've never been abducted by aliens.

Anyway, Astonishing Legends did an episode back in April about Remote Viewing, and I finally got around to listening to it just the other day.  I listen to a lot of podcasts and it had slipped down the priority list, so the delay wasn't a reflection of interest level.  Remote Viewing is a fairly hip paranormal phenomenon that has found its way into pop culture whether you know it or not.  There are books about it, movies based on books, and it's how Eleven spies on Russians (and finds terrifying creatures) in Stranger Things.  Those pop references are mostly based on the Stargate Project, a declassified CIA study in the use of the phenomenon for spying purposes.  Briefly, Remote Viewing is exactly what it sounds like, a way to look places where you're physically incapable of looking, usually over far distances.  This is done while in a meditative or hypnotic state with the help of guiding questions.  While the exact mechanism isn't really understood, it could have something to do with the Jungian Collective Consciousness or just that all matter/energy in the universe is interconnected by way of its humble beginning as an ultra dense mass that exploded outwards making all of us.  Or maybe it's just the result of people wanting to believe in something so much that mind overtook matter.  Or maybe it's all a hoax.

In this episode, the AL guys talk to Lori Williams, a renowned Remote Viewer that teaches classes on Viewing and has done private work for companies all around the world.  While talking about the basics of RV and how it's used to find missing people or understand unexplained events (the episode focused on its use in determining what happened to Flight 19), it occurred to me that maybe my dreams about Tibor weren't actually dreams, but remote views into his current whereabouts.  Hear me out on this...  the gist of RV is that it creates a bridge between your conscious and subconscious, and while bridged your conscious mind can tap into this universal information that the subconscious can always access.  Normally the Collective Consciousness would blow your mind to pieces, so the subconscious acts as a buffer, but in the hypnotic state, the buffer leaks a bit and your conscious mind can sneak some peeks.  Going from there, when else do the conscious and subconscious minds intermingle like that?  Oh, I don't know... maybe when we're asleep?  I don't think it takes too much of a leap of faith to say with complete confidence in science that this clearly points to my dreams being direct visions into the location of my missing bike and has nothing to do with unresolved feelings regarding its theft and the sense of personal invasion and vulnerability that all theft leaves us feeling.

That said, if everyone can just keep their eye out for my bike and when they see it be sure to maybe put up some sort of subconscious red flag for me so I can find it at night while I'm sleeping, that would be just great.  Include as many landmarks as possible in the surrounding area and try to not cloud the memory with symbolic representations of childhood traumas as I will not be able to find that tree from back home in Tennessee where you and your brother hid while your parents fought after pappy drank too much because the factory laid him off (for his drinking) when I'm looking around in Kensington.  Real trees only, no symbolic trees.  Thanks!

Bruise Update, Snake Update

The weekend has passed and it's time for a bruise update.  For those following along, big news from the underside of my left thigh.  Now it has purple striations and I have no idea what that means.  Here's both with and without the Sunset filter:

Sin

Con

Are they bad?  Are they good?  Are they just a way for my leg to express itself?  Why won't my leg just talk to me and tell me what it's feeling?  It's been years since we had a good conversation and it hurts when I think about how distant we've become.  Sure, we're both busy, but it doesn't mean we can't make time for each other.  Were we just friends by proximity?  Friends because there were no other friend options around?  Wow.  My leg's really giving me a lot to think about.  Maybe this just isn't a friendship worth reviving or pursuing.

In other news, holy shit are there huge snakes in New Jersey!  Damian and I hit Gloucester County today for a little late morning MTB, and while normally only concerned with poison ivy and ticks, I now know to watch out for giant Black Racers.  While zipping down Swoopy Trail, I thought I saw an exposed hose across the trail, or some similar drainage/erosion control device.  I didn't think twice, and rolled over it.  While over top, I looked down and realized the thick hose was actually a thick snake, so I slammed on the brakes about ten feet later.  Damian bunny hopped the monster and then parked too.

Upon further inspection, it was a 4-5' Black Racer and it was about as thick as my wrist.  Being a muscly constrictor, the snake didn't even flinch when I ran it over, and didn't really move until after we got close to it and it started to feel either threatened or shy.  I don't have any photos to prove this, but I do have a grainy video from Damian that I will gladly show someone at a bar even if they politely ask me not to.  In any case, I now have one more thing to watch out for on that trail system.  Next time, I'm taking my phone.

Photo from AnimalSpot.net