"Because it's hard. "

(Video: El-P "Patriotism", Quote: David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech)

David Foster Wallace hung himself the other day. He was not the most unlikely artist to commit suicide, I will admit. And I do not pretend to judge his decision as an individual. I have never believed that suicide is the "cowards way out". He was neither a coward nor a fool, a weakling nor a solipsist. We cannot sit and declaim what he did as a terrible wrong without the impossible empathy of being inside his head. But, goddamnit Mr. Wallace, you cheated ME. You were 46 and one of a handful of writers I actually looked up to and envied for your prowess. For fuck's sake, even your work that I didn't like changed the way I thought about writing. Call me selfish, but Infinite Jest was not enough. You gypped me. I don't know that I can forgive that.


I'm losing the heart for engineering. I was never the most enthusiastic participant in this trade, but I would mostly grin and bear it. I'm in Suburban LA all this week. Drinking whiskey in a generic room, flipping through channels so fast it's just fuzz and scrolling news about Sarah Palin and advertisements for Cialis. Looking out my window and pretending I smoke cigarettes, pondering the mysteries inside the Tustin blimp hangars 100 feet or miles from my plastic rental car. They must house monsters or documents or the control room for the coming nuclear holocaust. During the day I yell to co-workers that I've found access points to coil, moldy cabling and have a foundling's understanding of how these traffic lights work. They all come into work hilariously post-9am and stay paralyzingly late into the eveing: there is no way to get any LAist into or out of work in a reasonable amount of time. Moreover, what I cannot say is how little I care. You cannot be truly compensated for hours or days or nights in your laboratory; there is no equation to rightly convert time to money. I wake up sweating in strange sheets to the sound of the icemaker and fret paranoid over the neurons that have been reassigned during the day; poetry congealed into the arrangement of data, my creative eye poisoned for the sake of seeing plan-sets clearly. The woman riding shotgun rants on the ugliness of corporatization during our mid-afternoon Starbucks break. Santa Ana does not understand irony. This time next year, I will be in grad school, or teaching English to children in India, or working an oil derrick on the frozen sea. One of these.


I called three different people tonight to ease the loneliness of being in a place so strangely populated. My mother did not answer, a kid in Detroit did not answer, a girl I obviously do not understand didn't answer. The simple thing to think is that I could not drum up interest. That people saw my name on the LCD and hit ignore, or caught it a moment later and decided against returning. Or perhaps I'm literally stuck here, the Inland Empire its very own planet with a high-smog atmosphere and godawful exchange rate for cash identical to ours. And then the realization that this is how I feel about every place, simply amplified. I'm a contrarian and understand things based on what about them I hate or am alienated by. And so no place feels like home because it never matches the image in my head (something like this, but with free internet and a weed farm in the backyard) and I'm never satisfied in my relationships because I see right through them to the end. But this anxiety mandates some resolution, at least some comfort in the desire to throw things and kill brain cells. And I've hit upon it, so brutally simple I could have surmised it as a child: there is nothing permanent, and you do not want it to be.