just words

“The Citadel Military College of South Carolina (simply known as The Citadel) is a public senior military college in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Established in 1842, it is the third oldest of the six senior military colleges in the United States.”
—Wikipedia

A few months ago, I was really into Columbo, and one night, while watching the show on Pluto TV, I was hit over the head by some seriously dreadful deja vu.

A cannon had backfired at a military academy ceremony, killing its headmaster, foul play was suspected, so up drives Columbo in his busted-up 1959 Peugeot convertible, shaking and backfiring and billowing smoke like crazy. He parks, gets out, bumbles through an open portcullis into the courtyard of a massive three-story barracks, floor a checkerboard pattern of red and white, walls smooth and white and taller than the eye can see. It’s all very orderly and intimidating and familiar somehow. And I’m sitting on my couch, overcome by this dreadful sense of profound deja vu, as if I had stood there before, right in the middle of that checkerboard courtyard, but I couldn’t place the when, where, or even the why. So up Columbo walks in his wrinkly old trench coat with that signature drunken-penguin gait of his, and there are dozens of young military cadets performing drills in the courtyard, and their drill instructor, a Colonel Lyle C. Rumford, played by Patrick McGoohan, who plays a villain in like every other episode of Columbo for some reason, instructs his cadets to continue their drills before turning to talk to the aloof hobo detective, at which point Columbo asks a few seemingly innocuous questions before going wait wait just one more thing, then asking a few more questions, and then wait wait just one more thing, and yet more questions before the Colonel reveals, in an overly calm and conspicuous way, that the now-deceased headmaster was planning to allow girls to join the academy, which of course makes Columbo instantly suspect the Colonel as the murderer, and so now Columbo is determined to figure out how the Colonel did it, how the Colonel murdered the headmaster while making it look like an accident done by one of the young cadets. And throughout this scene, shots of the barracks from every angle are shown, the three stories of white-cement archways, the rounded castle-like stairwells at each corner of the rectangular courtyard, the countless dark blue doors lining each identical floor, and of course the cadets with buzz cuts and fatigues all looking both stoic and miserable at the same time somehow. And all this is just making my deja vu more dreadful and profound. So I’m sitting there thinking to myself, I have been here before, I know I have, but where, where is this place, and it’s bothering me a little bit, so I whip out my phone and search up the episode, and that’s when it all comes flooding back.

This is the place my dad sent me for summer camp when I was like twelve. This is the Military College of South Carolina. The Citadel. How could I have forgotten?

“The Citadel was initially established as two schools to educate young men from around the state, while simultaneously protecting the South Carolina State Arsenals in both Columbia and Charleston.”
—Wikipedia

Back then, I played a lot of video games and shopped at Hot Topic and listened to 80s music on repeat. My youth was typified by a yin-yang dichotomy of apathy toward anything that didn’t interest me and hyperfocus toward things that did interest me, those things being Zelda, The Cure, Dragon Ball Z, and Gundam Wing, but never school. I was the type of kid who would literally use dog-ate-my-paper type excuses when teachers asked why I didn’t complete my homework. So my grades were terrible and I was put in special-ed classes. I always had the feeling that people thought I was dumb and detached, but looking back, I now realize this is only half true, although for people looking at me from the outside, this was not obvious, understandably so.

My parents divorced when I was like ten, so I would live with my mom one month and my dad the next, as outlined in their court-ordered custody agreement. My dad was a hardass, while my mom basically let me do whatever I wanted. This parental yin-yang colored my entire childhood. My mom’s favorite phrase was “yes, honey.” She indulged my every whim, either because she loved me and wanted to make me happy regardless of the consequences, or because she didn’t want to deal with my tantrums, or maybe a mixture of both. My dad was the opposite. He was all about hard work and personal responsibility, and he didn’t take no shit, and he was the only person who would tell me no. He was also very stubborn, so he could wait out my tantrums no matter how long it took. My dad had an old-school conservative upbringing typified by rulers and staring at walls, and he incorporated a watered-down version of this into his parenting technique. He was never abusive, but I grew to be afraid of my father, and this fear brought about a certain level of obedience. But after my parents got divorced, it was like I lived in two different galaxies, one with a warm bright star and another with a cold dark star. When I was living with my mom, I did whatever I wanted. I would come home from school, tell her I didn’t have any homework, drink soda and play video games all day, spend all night on my Dell PC just chatting away with strangers in the Yahoo! chatrooms while Adult Swim played repeats of Home Movies and Cowboy Bebop in my periphery. There, I lived a life of no responsibility and maximum comfort, courtesy of my new wealthy stepdad. I remember my bedroom only vaguely. It was on the second floor of a mansion, and you had to walk across something like an indoor bridge to get to it, so my mom never bothered to check on me at night as long as I kept quiet. My room was a decent size but felt small because of the king-size bed pushed against the middle wall. My computer desk was on the right side of the bed, with a bookshelf and stereo to the left, and there was a low-standing dresser with my television and Nintendo 64 to the right. A big dresser containing all my band shirts and tripp pants was situated on the left side of the bed, with only a small walking space between the bed and the dresser. I had stuck band stickers all over the dresser itself, which was something my stepdad hated because the dresser was an expensive antique, much like everything else in the lavish house, none of which I appreciated, because back then I never once thought about how privileged I was, because frankly I was a spoiled fucking brat, and my dad knew this better than anyone, because when I came to live with him, I had always gained like ten pounds since the last time he had seen me, and I was tired all the time, and so of course he blamed all my apathy and weight gain and bad grades and inability to focus on my mom.

Living with my dad was like orbiting a whole other star. From the moment I walked through the front door of his square brick house, party time was over. It was all about chores and schoolwork and playing on local church sports teams of which he was the coach. To this day, my old room is decorated with photos of the teams I played on, everyone looking bright and happy except me, wearing a huge scowl in every picture. At my dad’s, there was little time for doing the things I actually wanted to do. The Nintendo 64 was in the basement, and the basement was locked until I completed all my chores and schoolwork or whatever. When I came home from school, the first thing he would have me do was sit at the kitchen table and do my homework until it was perfect, often coming in and checking over my shoulder. But I would sit there in silent protest, in that uncomfortable metal chair, just using my pencil to poke little holes in the apples in the decorative bowl at the center of the table, pretending like I was stuck on a math problem or something. I was stubborn in a very dumb way, because I knew that if I completed my homework, then Dad would let me play video games, but I still didn’t complete my homework for some reason, so I never got to play video games. In this way, my dad’s parenting method didn’t really work to improve my grades, but it did work in preventing me from throwing tantrums like I would with my mom, because I was truly afraid of my dad, not because he was abusive or anything like that, but because he was firm and would take my stuff away and do all the other normal stuff normal parents would do when trying to raise their kids to be fine, upstanding citizens.

At some point, however, my dad got sick of it all, and realizing that my apathy was not fading and that I was not improving, he decided to send me to a summer camp for troubled youth, although he didn’t frame it that way at the time, positioning it as just a normal summer camp that normal kids went to, so it wasn’t until I walked through that open portcullis and onto that red and white checkerboard flooring that I realized that this was not a normal summer camp at all, this was actually a fucking military camp. I remember standing there, frozen, staring up at the castle-like compound, watching kids wearing buzz cuts and fatigues march in the courtyard, realizing that I was a long, long way from home, in a place that might as well have been hell, and that’s the first time I ever felt true dread.

“A lawsuit contends that The Citadel knew one of its counselors was abusing summer campers in the mid-1990s but didn’t fire him and did nothing to stop it, yet another in a string of sexual-abuse accusations that have been made against two men who worked at the military college’s summer camp.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

The next thing I remember is my dad was gone, and I was being shouted at by some older man in full uniform. He directed me to get into marching formation with the other kids, but I was frozen in terror. I remember I was wearing my Cure t-shirt and tripp pants, and I was sweating profusely in the harsh summer sun. So when I didn’t immediately comply, the man shouted something like, “C’MON PIGGY, WE DON’T HAVE ALL DAY,” which kicked my ass into gear, and I immediately fell in line. We marched out of the portcullis, through the sports field, and into another huge white castle-like building. I had no idea what was going on. Some of the other kids were in civilian clothing, some were in fatigues. The ones in civilian clothing were separated from the fatigues-wearing ones and ordered to march down a thin hallway, where we stood silently outside a blue door. Kids entered this door one by one. At first, I didn’t know what was happening, but after the first kid entered with shaggy hair and exited with a buzz cut, my eyes grew wide, and I knew. They were cutting my hair. Back then, I was serious about my hair. I liked it long and messy, like Robert Smith from The Cure. So as the line and average length of hair for the regiment grew shorter, the pit in my stomach grew larger. Until eventually, I entered the barber’s room and was pushed into the chair. The clippers went BRRRRRR and just like that my hair was gone. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. This was one of many hammers used by The Citadel to pound individuality and ego out of children.

Later that day, they assigned us our quarters. Mine was on the second floor. There’s a scene in that Columbo episode where the titular detective enters one of these rooms to question the cadet accused of accidentally backfiring the cannon. My room looked just like the one shown in the episode, indicating that The Citadel has not changed in a long long time. The walls of the room were white brick. There was a single barred window. It felt like one of those insane asylum rooms. There was a sink in the corner, a single dresser with two cabinets pushed against the right wall, and a bunk bed against the left wall. The mattresses were thin, and the blankets ratty and torn. I was paired with another kid. I forget his name, but he was strange and kind of horrific. I remember he was tall and lanky and acne-ridden and would make a lot of weird sex jokes. I slept on the bottom bunk in a perpetual state of psychic terror. On the first night, in the middle of the night, instead of going out to the bathroom, my bunkmate took a shit in his underwear, wrapped it up in a ball, and then put it in my cabinet dresser for me to find the next morning, like some sort of weird animalistic dominance thing. I was too afraid to report him, thinking he would hurt me or something, so I just cleaned it up and didn’t say a word about it. I remember, night after night, after they would ring the bell and scream “LIGHTS OUT” at 8 p.m., I would just lie in my bunk, frozen, staring up at the wire mesh above me, fantasizing about ways to escape. Occasionally, a camp counselor would creak open the door and peek their head in, checking on us. One time, at night, I remember a counselor entered my quarters, stopped in the middle of the room, and stared at the bunks for what felt like an hour. I was wide awake but holding my breath and keeping my eyes shut real tight, frozen with fear, thinking the guy was going to get me out of bed and beat the shit out of me or something. Nothing happened, but I learned how to play dead that night.

“The suit was filed in federal court in Charleston earlier this week by a now-25-year-old alleged victim who claimed to have been abused on 21 different occasions by Michael Arpaio. The Citadel ultimately closed its summer camp in 2005 after reaching a $3.8 million settlement with five campers who said the former Marine captain had abused them between 1995 and 2001.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

Every day was the same. I would wake up at five in the morning to the sound of a loud whistle, put on my fatigues, hustle down the stairwell, and line up with the rest of the kids. Then we’d march to the mess hall, where they’d serve us the worst-tasting breakfast you have ever tasted, so bad that I hardly ever ate anything, only drinking some milk most mornings. Then we’d march out to the field, do push-ups and jumping jacks and sit-ups and burpees and laps for a few hours. Then we’d play soccer for some reason. Then we’d march back to the mess hall and eat the worst-tasting lunch ever. Then there’d be a thirty-minute block of free time, where we could socialize or whatever, but being so out of shape and practically starving myself, I was pretty much half-dead by this point, so I would just go back to my quarters and sprawl out on the bottom bunk and pretend I was in another place, pretend I was in the world of Hyrule, and this was a brief respite, my little form of escape.

They wouldn’t let us bring anything personal into the camp with us, but we were allowed paper and pencil for writing letters to family, and I remember one time, during the break period, I wrote a short letter to my grandma, Susu, because her address was the only one I could remember, and the letter went something like this: WHAT DID I FUCKING DO TO DESERVE THIS? I AM GOING TO DIE IN HERE. I WANT TO GO HOME. PLEASE. I’M SORRY FOR WHATEVER I DID. TELL MOM TO GET ME OUT EARLY. PLEASE. I CANNOT DO A WHOLE MONTH IN HERE. SAVE ME. PLEASE. This text is almost verbatim because Susu kept the note and still has it to this day, along with the newspaper clipping she found years later outlining why The Citadel summer camp was closed down permanently.

“Arpaio pleaded guilty to multiple charges in 2003 following a military court-martial and served 15 months at the Charleston Naval Brig. According to the lawsuit, Arpaio was indicted in 2009 on federal charges including conspiracy to commit murder and disposing of a cadaver and is in federal prison.”
—The Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 13, 2013

When it was all over, I had lost about thirty pounds and was mute for an entire week. I remember, when I got home, the first thing I did was fold all my clothes and arrange them neatly in my dresser, then I put all my Gundam models and Nintendo 64 games and Dragon Ball Z VHSs in the closet, hiding all the things I loved, then I straightened out my sports team photos on the dresser, organizing everything real nice, because I thought that if I hadn’t done all this, I’d be sent back there, back to hell. And then I sprawled out on my king-size bed, imagined myself in Hyrule, and passed out.

But it must have been midday or something, because I remember my dad woke me up. He was looking around my room with this astonished look on his face, and he said something like, “Wow, you really cleaned up, I guess your time at The Citadel taught you a thing or two, huh?”

And I remember rolling over in bed, looking up at him with this blank expression on my face, and nodding, then I went back to sleep, dreaming of Hyrule.

Then, the following year, around my thirteenth birthday, when the judge gave me the option to pick which parent I wanted to live with, I picked Mom, and then, just like that, I was back in Hyrule, for real this time.

Back when I was a kid, when I would ask my dad to buy me some new game that was beyond my monthly allowance, he would always say something like, “Son, you'll appreciate this game more if you work for it, if you save up and buy it with your own hard-earned money.” And back then, when I was like 12, I resented him for being cheap or cruel or whatever, and then, when I was a bit older, I figured he was just trying to force his oppressive conservative worldview down my throat, which made me resent him even more, but now, after playing Final Fantasy XI for over two decades, I now know he was simply trying to teach his stubborn young son a very valuable lesson.

A few weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy XI again. I've been playing this game on and off since the early 2000s. On my current character, which I’ve had since 2013 or something, I’ve played the game for something like 103 days, 30 hours, and 15 minutes, according to the in-game playtime tracker, but in actuality, I’ve played the game far longer than that, considering I’ve had many characters. It's one of those formative core games for me. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, meaning people run around in real time battling monsters, crafting furniture, gardening, fishing, and all sorts of other stuff. And while remaining the same core game over these two decades, it has changed a lot over the years, and I wanted to write about these changes because they align well with something I've been thinking about lately, that something being Instant Gratification and how it relates to feelings of accomplishment.

From the game’s debut in 2003 to the release of its fifth expansion, Seekers of Adoulin, in 2013, Final Fantasy XI was an absolutely brutal game, probably the most brutal online game on the market outside of Everquest, the game that actually inspired many of Final Fantasy XI’s mechanics. After creating your character from a list of classes and races, all with their own unexplained strengths and weaknesses, and then selecting your hometown, which provided special unexplained benefits depending on your race selection, the game would just drop you into the world of Vana’diel with no guidance whatsoever. Games were like this back then, they treated players like intelligent adults, able to figure things out on their own, rather than ADHD-diagnosed toddlers who require constant hand holding, but Final Fantasy XI took this design philosophy to an extreme. It didn’t tell you where to go. It didn’t tell you what to do. It didn’t even bother to explain core mechanics like how to navigate menus and control your character, which involved weird hotkeys, a complicated macro system with its own coding language built in pretty much, and an obtuse movement system requiring one hand on the numpad at all times. You only got a few Gil and some starter equipment at the very beginning of the game, and what you did after that was totally up to you. Many players quit within the first few hours, frustrated by all the electronic mystification going on, some demanded refunds, I imagine, and those who stuck with it were rewarded with one of the most time-consuming grinds in video game history.

The grind went something like this, if you started in Bastok, you’d wander out into the Gustaberg region and whack bees with your sword or spells or baghnakhs or whatever, depending on your job class, gaining paltry amounts of experience per kill. I think it required 500 experience points to get from level 1 to level 2, and each bee rewarded about 50 to 100 experience points, and then it required 750 to get to the next level, but with each level the number of experience points rewarded from bees went down, so you’d have to start killing worms until the next level, which required 1,000 experience points, at which point you’d graduate to lizards until the next level, which required 1,250 experience points, at which point you'd graduate to Quadavs, and so on, each level taking progressively longer, until eventually you reached level 13 or so, at which point you could no longer level up by yourself because monsters now did far more damage to you than you did to them. And at that point, many players would switch to a different job class, level that job to 13 or so, then select a new job class and do it all over again. Some would branch off into crafting and fishing, others would just unsubscribe and give up, because what were they supposed to do, just let worms and bees and lizards and Quadavs kill them over and over again? Where’s the fun in that? But the few adventurous masochists who stuck with it would eventually notice someone in town soliciting other players to form a party. They would see something like {Looking for Party} {Red Mage} 13 {Valkurm Dunes}, the brackets being the game’s built-in auto-translate feature. That masochistic player might even join said party, at which point they’d discover that the party required four more players to be efficient, preferably a healer and a debuffer and a couple damage dealers, which required more in-town shouting and private messaging. Eventually, after about an hour of soliciting, a party of six would be formed, at which point this party of six had to trek to where the good experience-yielding monsters were, Valkurm Dunes, which was very far away, and that would take another hour or so, maybe even longer, especially if one of the party members died along the way, which was very easy to do, because there were aggressive monsters all along the path from Bastok to the Dunes, and dying meant you were teleported back to town, meaning you had to start the trek all over again. You could also Level Down upon death, which was a nice added kick in the crotch. But eventually, the party would make it to Valkurm Dunes, at which point a camp had to be established, a little corner of the map where you could pull high-level monsters and defeat them comfortably, but the problem was that multiple parties were already there, at the Dunes, already using all the good camping spots, so you had to compete with other people just to find a good camp, which caused all sorts of drama and would take another hour or so, which is all to say that Final Fantasy XI did not respect your time, like, at all. Then you’d spend the next four to five hours fighting lizards over and over again, gaining paltry amounts of experience with each kill, leveling up slowly over several days, until eventually you unlocked your subjob, itself needing to be leveled sufficiently to match your main job, so you would repeat the whole Bastok-to-Gustaberg-to-Dunes grind once more, maybe several times more, until you reached level 20 with multiple jobs, but by this point you probably had a main job already in mind for your character, so you stuck with that job, say it was Red Mage, and you kept playing Red Mage, partying with other players, gaining experience, to the point where you had invested so much time and energy into Red Mage that you yourself felt like a real-life Red Mage almost, like this job class was now part of your identity, and the players you had partied with would also start thinking of you as a Red Mage, sometimes private messaging you with party invites days later, “Forrest, don’t you play Red Mage, we need a healer, do you want to party in the Dunes?” Meaning you partied in the Dunes as Red Mage a whole bunch, until eventually you reached level 20 or whatever, at which point you could no longer party in the Dunes because the monsters didn’t give good experience to level 20 players and joining a party of lower-level players actually penalized experience point gain for all of those players, so you were forced to move on, leave the Dunes, so you asked around and learned that you now needed to party at Qufim Island, which was also far away and required you to carefully trek across the vast landscape of Vana’diel, avoiding all the dangerous monsters that you yourself could not defeat. And at that point, after the long trek, you joined a party in Qufim, and you partied there for a week or so, until eventually you graduated from Qufim, at which point you needed to go to Yuhtunga Jungle, but this required an airship pass, which required the completion of a quest that involved collecting items with very low drop rates from incredibly dangerous parts of Vana’diel, incredibly dangerous parts of Vana’diel that could not be traveled alone, so you needed a party for this too, so you would solicit and solicit and solicit until eventually you found other players to help, sometimes crossing paths with the very same people you had spent hours partying with in the Dunes before. But you couldn't just level up and expect to get into any old party. At a certain point, you needed good gear, armor, weapons, rings, earrings, capes, et cetera. Gear was very important. Around level 30, if you didn't have the right gear, your battle performance would suffer, so people would scoff and jeer and refuse to let you join their parties. So you had to get the good gear, one, because you had to produce the big damage numbers, and two, because some of the gear was just cool as fuck aesthetically, like Final Fantasy XI has some of the best-looking armor sets in role-playing game history, stuff that looks super dope without being over-designed and tacky like a lot of later Final Fantasy armor designs are, and if you don’t believe me just Google the Magus Attire set and see for yourself. So you had to get the good gear, it was not optional. But the good gear was incredibly grueling to obtain. Some gear required the completion of quests that took you to locations in Vana’diel that were just not hospitable at all, places that no level 50 Red Mage could possibly survive alone, meaning you often had to party up to complete these quests. And some gear required you to defeat rare monsters that only spawned once per day and only dropped the gear like literally 1% of the time, the drop rates in Final Fantasy XI back then being insane and almost hostile to the player, and these rare monsters would be camped by other players who needed the same gear, meaning often you’d have to wait at the rare monster’s spawn location for hours while ten other people also waited at this same spawn location, everyone eagerly watching their screens, just waiting to tag the rare monster when it spawned so that they could get the good gear before anyone else, which caused all sorts of drama, but of course this was all made easier with the help of friends, which, by now, after literal days of playtime, you had made several friends, so you’d hit these friends up, ask them for help obtaining that cool rare sword you needed, Nadrs, which dropped at a 14% rate from Cargo Crab Colin who only spawned once every six real-life hours and was heavily camped by other players. And if that seems like a very specific example, that's because I did that, I farmed that crab, back when I was like sixteen. I remember my mom came into my room one morning, “What’cha doing?” and I told her I was waiting for this damn crab to spawn so I could get my cool sword, and then, like 12 hours later, before she was going to bed, she came up to check on me, and she said, “Are you still waiting for that crab to come out of its hole?” And I said, “Yes mom, I’m still waiting for that crab to come out of its hole.” And eventually I did get Nadrs, but it was only after some other players had stolen the monster from me and after I had messaged my in-game friend to come help me camp the damn thing, which was the point in my Final Fantasy XI career that I figured it out, the whole point of the game, the draw, if you will.

That was the point when I understood what made Final Fantasy XI so special, the true magic of the game, the whole draw of the Final Fantasy XI experience. I figured it out. After camping Cargo Crab Colin, and after literal weeks of partying in the Dunes, and after dying many times on my trek to Qufim, after becoming discouraged, getting frustrated, getting pissed, after all that stuff, I figured it out. I realized that although this game neither held my hand nor respected my time, it was the journey itself, the hardships, the frustrations, and quite literally the friends I made along the way that made Final Fantasy XI a truly magical experience. I realized that by being so difficult and obtuse, Final Fantasy XI basically forced me to work with those around me, forced me to build partnerships, forced me to make connections. The hardships that came along with life in Vana’diel brought us all closer together, fostered a sense of community, made Vana’diel feel like a real, living, breathing place, a second life almost. But this was not all that made Final Fantasy XI so special, there was one other thing. Accomplishment. There was this overwhelming feeling of accomplishment that came with even the simplest of tasks in Final Fantasy XI. Learning how to control your character. Killing your first bee in Gustaberg. Joining your first party. Making it to the Dunes the first time. Obtaining your first cool piece of gear. All of these things, while simple in theory, felt like real accomplishments, and they felt like real accomplishments because there was no instant gratification here. The fact that Final Fantasy XI was an utter timesink, combined with the fact that it was incredibly hostile to the player, made every little thing feel like a grand achievement, because at the end of the day, when I had just finished my long trek to Qufim, or after I had just spent twelve hours getting that cool sword from the rare crab, I could sit back and say, I did it, despite all the bullshit, I did it, and look what I have to show for it.

Now, side note, there is something to be said here about digital achievements that, when viewed from a certain perspective, can make the previous paragraph seem somewhat sad and pathetic, like surely there is some commentary that could be made here about the vacuousness of collecting what essentially amounts to pixels on a screen and how collecting such things might be a poor replacement for real-life accomplishments, and I’m sympathetic to argument, I get it, but that is not the point I’m trying to make here.

The point I’m trying to make here, the thesis if you will, is that feelings of accomplishment seem to be directly related to hardship and suffering, or what my old man would call “hard work.” It seems that the more effort you put into achieving something, the more important that achievement feels. And conversely, when something is just handed to you, that feeling of accomplishment is either diminished or just doesn’t exist at all.

You see, I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI for a long time, and the game has changed a lot over these past two decades. Around 2013, Square Enix essentially made the game far easier than it once was. At first, they added a level sync feature, which allowed high-level players to party with low-level players, which made partying much easier. And then, around the same time, they added new ways to gain experience points, which made leveling faster overall. And then later, they added a mechanic called “Trusts”, which are summonable NPC party members, meaning you no longer have to party with other players at all, you can just use Trusts instead, and this sort of destroyed the community feeling of the game in a way, making the leveling experience essentially a solo affair. And these Trusts are pretty much broken, being incredibly over-powered, so partying in the Dunes went from being a strategic thing with real people to a mindless thing with fake computer people, and leveling at this point was far faster than before, as experience yield is now super high per monster, meaning you can pretty much level a job from level 1 to 99 in a few days if you put your mind to it. But not only that, in an effort to make the game more accessible to a new generation, Square Enix made it far easier to obtain good gear, making most of it purchasable from merchant NPCs using easy-to-obtain currencies, meaning there is no longer a need to farm Cargo Crab Colin at all, unless you really want to, because you can just get a cool sword from the merchant instead. And, having played in all eras of the game, I can confidently say that that feeling of accomplishment the game once produced is just no longer there. Everything is easy now. There is no hardship. No suffering. No hard work required. Nothing. The game feels like some sort of Instant Gratification Machine or something now.

The other day, I was leveling the Corsair job class, and I wanted to wear this special race-specific set of armor. And from my experience having played the game, I knew that this armor could only be obtained by opening chests in Gusgen Mines, and these chests spawn every few hours, and they only contain the armor on specific days of the in-game week, and I had to open at least four of these chests, and to open these chests, I needed a special key that only drops from specific monsters in the Mines, but I had forgotten which monsters dropped these keys, so I went to Google. I pulled up the wiki page of the armor and saw that, as of like 2020, you can now simply purchase this entire armor set from a merchant in Bastok. This made me both annoyed and curious. So I calculated the time it would take me to farm the chests, which would be several days, and I compared that to the time it would take me to simply buy the armor set, which would take me several minutes, and then I considered the fact that I am a grown adult with children and a job, and I said, you know what fuck it, and I just bought the armor set from the merchant.

And now, I’m almost level 99 on Corsair, which took me like three days, and I’m wearing this cool-looking armor set, but I feel nothing, nothing at all.

“All plots tend to move Deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer Death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” 
―Don DeLillo, White Noise 

Death, perhaps life’s greatest mystery. What is Death? Where does it come from? Why is it a thing? Neither the what, nor the where, nor the when, nor even the why is known to mortals. Why, why do we die? What's the purpose? Where does consciousness go? Are our souls recycled, inserted into new life upon Death? Do we end up in some sort of Mysterious Otherside? Heaven? Hell? Valhalla? The great recycling plant in the sky? Perhaps we are consumed by Earth herself, fated to be nothing more than nutrients for the soil? Worm food, is that it? No one knows the answer. There are all sorts of theories, some scientific, some mystical, but no one really knows, and those who claim otherwise are almost certainly deluding themselves.

The most I know about Death is from the beginning of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, when Alucard, in all his bishonen glory, equipped with his most powerful artifacts, comes sprinting into Dracula’s castle, super cool afterimages trailing in his wake, only to be met by the floating specter of Death himself in all his cloaked skeletal grimness. “I’ve come to put an end to this,” Alucard says, to which Death responds, “You shall regret those words,” before stripping Alucard of all his artifacts, laughing a chilling laugh, and vanishing with an ominous warning, “We shall meet again.” This leaves Alucard effectively newborn and defenseless at the very start of the game until he powers himself up by collecting his stolen artifacts strewn all over the castle, around which point he crosses paths with Death again and stomps him good. But Death is never truly defeated. He returns again and again with each subsequent game, all while some valiant new hero goes dashing Deathward, which I'm sure symbolizes some profound thing that I haven't quite figured out just yet, but maybe I will stumble across it by writing this journal entry? Don't count on it.

This journal entry is not actually about Castlevania, however, it’s mostly about Death, and also White Noise by Don DeLillo, which is a novel that has been marinating in my mind ever since I finished reading it about two weeks ago. The book was first published in 1985 and is considered one of DeLillo’s best works, although this is the first novel I've read by him, so I don't really have much to compare it to. I got interested in DeLillo after seeing his name come up time and time again in reference to authors similar to David Foster Wallace, and I figured the best place to start was with DeLillo’s most popular novel, White Noise. I quickly found that the only similarity between DeLillo and Wallace is the fact that they write about similar subject matter, that being the subtle perils of modern life, ruminations on mindless entertainment and vacuous celebrity worship and the numerous distractions we all willingly engage in, both authors trying to tease out why it all feels so empty and gross. DeLillo, however, is a much more mature writer than Wallace. Reading DeLillo, one gets the impression that he has nothing to prove to anyone, even himself. He uses short, simple sentences. He doesn’t mess around with complex runaway paragraphs. He doesn’t overuse semicolons or em dashes or footnotes or whatever to make some kind of literary point. He has things to say and thoughts to express, and he does these things in a very to-the-point manner. There’s no fluff, no pointless wordplay. Every sentence, every word, every punctuation mark feels like it has a purpose. You never get the impression that DeLillo is doing the whole literary “Look Dad, no hands” thing, and because of this, his writing is very easy to digest, and not in a vacuous, unmemorable way either, because despite all his stylistic simplicity, the writing is still somehow multi-layered, full of double meanings and triple meanings that, considering how simple some of the stuff he writes is, kind of makes your head spin in a sort of “How the fuck is he doing this?” sort of way. Basically, if you can’t tell, I really like Don DeLillo’s style. I think he’s a brilliant writer.

And White Noise is a brilliant book that I would recommend to anyone. It’s a fast read, like 300 pages, and I read it in a few days on account of how engrossing it is. The dialogue in particular is fascinating in this darkly humorous way, and it’s written in the first-person perspective, which is my favorite perspective, so make of that what you will. The story is told from the point of view of a university professor specializing in “Hitler Studies” who is so afraid of Death that he comes up with all sorts of absurd plots and intellectualizations to hand-wave it away, all while being constantly thrown into situations that exacerbate his fear of Death, which results in a constant stream of humorous situations, like in the second act when this toxic-chemical tanker crashes, resulting in a billowing cloud of poisonous gas ominously hanging over the main character’s town, which, if I were to analyze, is a potent metaphor for Death’s looming influence over our lives. The novel also covers themes like rampant consumerism, family dynamics, and academic pretentiousness, all filtered through a sort of dark-comedy lens, which has resulted in many critics hailing the book as a quote-unquote “postmodern masterpiece of our age,” and I use the tag “postmodern” here kind of flippantly because I don't actually know what the fuck that means, and I don’t think Don DeLillo knows what it means either because he basically said something like “Postmodern? I don’t know what the fuck that means” in an old interview from 2010, which he later clarified by saying, “I think of postmodernism in terms of literature as part of a self-referring kind of art, people attach a label to writers or filmmakers or painters to be able some years in the future to declare that the movement is dead,” which illustrates that maybe Don DeLillo himself also has a preoccupation with Death, so perhaps there’s something autobiographical going on here too.

So, basically, White Noise is about Death, among other things. I had originally planned to write about the novel immediately after finishing it, but I kept putting it off because, well, surprise surprise, I guess I don't really like thinking about Death too much. In fact, I rarely ever think about Death, but the same cannot be said for the two main characters of White Noise, Jack and Babette, who are deathly afraid of Death and literally think about it all the time, and they have pretty logically convincing fears, too, considering Death is literally all around us just waiting to swoop in and take us away to the Mysterious Otherside, like you could step on a pebble the wrong way causing you to fall and bonk your head and that’s it you’re dead, or you could be watching your favorite television program while eating grapes and then all of a sudden a grape goes down the wrong tube and cough cough you’re dead, or you could be sleeping and your heater starts malfunctioning thus putting out some sort of invisible odorless gas and you never wake up because you're fucking dead, or you could be on a walk on a nature trail or something and you somehow touch some innocuous-looking plant and you have some ultra-rare allergic reaction to it and suddenly you’re throwing up and then bye bye dead, or you could be walking downtown and some random thing just falls on your head and bam dead, or a plane could just crash into your home for example, or you could be crossing the road and some drunk dude just doesn’t stop at the light and all of a sudden your guts are all over the windshield and just like that you’re dead, or your body could just say NO and trigger a brain aneurysm and that's it see ya you’re dead, and so on. Neither the what, nor where, nor when, nor even the why is known to mortals. No one knows. It's almost so absurd that it's not even worth worrying about, at least that's how I view it, like if I could die at any time, in ways often outside of my own conscious control, why expend time and effort worrying about it? Why get worked up? Why ruin my day? And that’s why I don’t fear Death, because like what’s the point?

But after reading White Noise and upon reflection, it turns out I was wrong, I do fear Death. Maybe I don't consciously fear Death, but I certainly subconsciously fear Death, at least on some sort of deep biological level. After reading White Noise, I started analyzing my habits, my daily routines, things like that, and came to the realization that maybe everything I do is actually motivated by some latent fear of Death, like Death is this terrifying primordial silence just lingering there in the background of things, always influencing literally everything I do, and I hadn’t even realized it until just recently. I started thinking that maybe even the stuff I do that seems so far removed from fear-of-Death, like reading and writing and playing video games, is actually just a subconscious distraction from the ever-present biological fear of Death. Maybe all the bullshit I do to keep myself occupied actually functions as a sort of white noise to drown out the silence of Death. This idea was new to me, and it spooked me a little bit. I didn’t understand it, but I wanted to. So I went on a quest to understand it, which involved the writing of this journal entry, and this quest led me to the soft conclusion that it’s likely very possible that everything we do is actually some sort of Death Avoidance Behavior.

There's obvious Death Avoidance Behaviors, like eating so that we don't starve, drinking so that we don't dehydrate, finding shelter so that we don't die of exposure, avoiding vicious animals so that we don't get mauled, forming communities so that we can help each other survive, establishing rules so that we don't take advantage of or kill each other, and so on, which, in the modern world, manifests as things like working shitty jobs so that we can buy food and afford a place to live, buying cars so that we can travel to all the places that supply various life-sustaining things, wearing clothes or whatever, obeying laws so that we don't end up getting murdered in jail or whatever, brushing our teeth and taking showers and whatnot, getting married and having children so that we can form our own close-knit communities so that we can have life-sustaining support systems, and so on, which is all very obvious stuff. But then there’s the less obvious stuff, like watching television or reading a book or playing a video game or writing a journal entry or painting a sunset or performing in a play or dancing on Saturdays or playing tennis or whatever, all so that we don’t quite literally bore ourselves to Death because, I suspect, if we just sit on our asses all day doing literally nothing, we’ll start thinking a little too much about our own mortality and thus the fear of Death will start creeping in. Maybe boredom is actually a latent fear of Death, our bodies telling us that we better getting moving because one day we will just up and die. Death is always there, in the background. So we distract ourselves. We turn on the white noise. Otherwise, we become depressed, despondent, miserable, all those dark adjectives that only serve to bring us Deathward, be it through suicide or self-neglect or whatever. What I’m trying to say is, it seems like everything we do is some sort of Death Avoidance Behavior, even the stupid behavior that seems counterintuitive to staying alive, like overeating food packed with high-fructose corn syrup or binge drinking alcohol or vegging out in front of a screen for hours or injecting heroin into our veins, these things serve as sort of Misguided Death Avoidance Behaviors, because even though this behavior is harmful, potentially bringing us closer to Death, they make us feel good in the short term by doing a really good job of drowning out the silence of Death, even if only temporarily, which becomes extra complicated when addiction comes into play, creating a sort of paradoxical Death trap wherein by trying to avoid the fear of Death you are actually hastening your own Death, or something like that, which only serves to show how cruel biology can be sometimes, tricking us Deathward. And we do these good and bad things, obviously, because Death just keeps showing up in each subsequent Castlevania game, he just doesn't go away, he is an ever-present force. Death is a hard-coded fact of life, and coming face to face with this is just downright unpleasant.

At first, this all struck me as very grim and depressing, but after finishing White Noise and ruminating on it a little bit, my perspective changed.

In White Noise, there’s this drug that basically eliminates the fear of Death. The main character becomes obsessed with this drug and comes up with all sorts of plots and schemes to get their hands on it, eventually leading them to the creator of the no-fear-of-Death drug. The creator of the drug turns out to be a man living in a cheap motel room. And from the very first scene with this man, we can tell that he’s obviously addicted to the no-fear-of-Death drug. He has eliminated the fear, drowned out the silence, conquered Death. He’s sitting in an uncomfortable metal chair in the middle of the room, no lights on, surrounded by broken bottles and candy bar wrappers and flies and stuff, just staring up into this little television set mounted in the corner of the room, mumbling to himself. He has clearly not bathed or groomed himself in months. He’s just wasting away, dying pretty much. He is no longer living life. He is just there, existing, doing pretty much nothing. The text makes it clear that this man is a sad, pathetic excuse for a man, a hollow shell, a ghost almost, someone who is both alive and dead simultaneously.

But he doesn’t care, why would he? He has no fear of Death.

It was a gray day. I had spent most of the early afternoon trying to write something, but my head was full of clouds as dark as those outside, so I ended up deleting about two thousand words and playing Zelda until my son woke up from his nap. After an hour of play and Paw Patrol and lunch, my son grew restless and unhinged, so I decided to get us out of the house, go to the playground, so I buckled my son up in his overly complicated car seat, got in the driver’s seat of the Toyota, revved up the engine, played “Nice to Know You” because I was on an Incubus kick again and it's like one of the best songs ever recorded no joke, backed out of the driveway and avoided ducks wading in a pool of hours-old rainwater while doing so, and then floored it out of the neighborhood at a brisk five miles per hour, stopping at all neighborhood stop signs and causeway traffic lights like a law-abiding citizen, passing all sorts of barely drivable junkers and politically incorrect bumper stickers along the way because this town is southern as hell but that's OK because I'm just trying to stay in my lane here.

Singing along, “To obtain a bird’s eye is to turn a blizzard to a breeze,” I drove to the playground by the abandoned school, the one surrounded by two little league baseball fields that get used by the local church about twice a month, the one with the Coke-sponsored scoreboards quantifying every American boy’s dream of making it to the big leagues and getting out of this backwoods southern town, the one where homeless people take shelter in the dugouts overnight. It must have been about 4:30 p.m. Eastern time. The clouds were a dusty old quilt draped over the planet, everything damp, yellow, and pale. I unbuckled my son from his seat and let him run unfettered through the mostly empty parking lot. There were only two cars, mine and some purple van parked a few spots down. The playground was just a few feet away, one of those small kids’ playgrounds with low slides, protective railings, miniature rock-climbing walls, paths of colorful raised plastic, and safety swings that look kind of like those things they strap astronauts-in-training into, all enclosed by a tall wire fence, containing the boundless energy of youth. There were three other kids there, climbing all over everything. Girls, Hispanic, I think. As my son approached the playground gate, he veered off, like he always does, toward one of the empty baseball dugouts, determined to step on some used syringes or empty beer cans or whatever, which is when I caught up to him, placed a hand on his shoulder, and gently steered him toward the playground. And that’s when I saw her, standing there, right by the dugout nearest the playground.

She must have been around thirty years old. Hispanic. She was wearing a black dress, and her blue-black hair flowed waistward in purple highlights. She was holding her phone way out, pointing it at the empty parking lot for some reason, and she was standing behind one of those cheap folding tables you can buy at Walmart. She was totally alone. The table was decorated with black and orange paper tassels, pumpkins and bats made of papier-mache, Halloween-themed grab bags full of candy and snacks, a large basket tagged with the word RAFFLE stuffed with cheap pencils and a Nightmare Before Christmas thermos and some Keurig coffee pods for some reason, two books propped up on little wooden bookstands, and a sign that said BOOK SIGNING in edgy cursive font, hanging from the table with two pieces of clear tape.

And of course, I was instantly intrigued by this. I had so many questions. But, being kind of naturally standoffish and weird, and having to tend to my son, I tried my damnedest to seem disinterested, passed the BOOK SIGNING table, and made my way through the playground gate, closing it behind me. Then I proceeded to climb the playground equipment and chase my son around. We played for a good twenty minutes, but the whole time I was like compelled to look over my shoulder every few seconds at the book-signing table, where the woman in black was pacing back and forth, phone extended, presumably filming the parking lot, totally alone. The whole scene made me feel weird, sad almost, embarrassed in that sort of hyper-empathetic way you sometimes get when something is just so embarrassing that you yourself are embarrassed just by witnessing it. Vicarious embarrassment, cringe, fremdscham, whatever they call it. But I also felt a sort of kindred bond with this woman. After all, I also like to pretend that I’m a writer sometimes, so I sort of respect anyone who makes an effort to write, regardless of the contents of their writing. To me, the desire to write sort of elevates people, romanticizes them in my mind into a more thoughtful, interesting person. So there I was, contradictorily feeling both fremdscham and kinship with this woman, and this created a sort of dissonant pressure in my head, which eventually became so intense that I had to walk over and talk to the woman, so that’s what I did. I walked right up to her and said, in a blunt, almost dumbfounded tone, “What’s going on here?”

She lowered her phone and said, in a chipper tone, “Hello, thanks for asking, I’m having a book signing. I’m the author of two books. I write romance horror thrillers.”

I plucked one of the books off the stand and observed it closely.

SHADOWS BELOW. The glossy cover featured a cloaked young woman standing in a dark forest. She wore a solemn expression and held a dagger real close to her chest. It looked like something you’d see on a high school girl’s Pinterest feed or something, that sort of brooding, semi-realistic, Twilight-esque artwork that may or may not have been AI-generated because like who can even tell anymore, the line between reality and irreality blurring more and more each day.

Then, awkwardly, and already knowing the answer, I said, “You wrote this?”

And that's when the woman's wine-colored lips curled into a smile. “Yep, that’s the first one. I’m almost finished with the trilogy.”

The book itself was thin, papery, light in my hands. I turned it over. It had a barcode and an ISBN number on it and everything. I wondered to myself if maybe she just came up with the ISBN number herself, like was any of this even legit or what? Is she just out here pretending to be a serious author? With no audience? Has she even sold one book? Don’t you need to like ‘graduate’ to book signings? Gradually work your way up to it? Don’t you need to sell at least a couple hundred copies? Don’t you need to be like an established author for people to even want a signature? I started thinking to myself, wasn’t she skipping steps here? The balls on this woman. What was she thinking? What truly motivated her behavior here? I found the audacity of this woman somewhat offensive but also somehow admirable. But that feeling of fremdscham was not going away, because despite her vaguely admirable qualities, there was something pitiful about the whole thing, but it was a sort of pity I could relate with, like the shared burden of authors unknown. And for some reason, I started thinking maybe she was actually like some sort of well-respected local author, because who in their right mind would be out here at an abandoned playground on a gray day holding a book signing event? I started thinking maybe she was an established author just having an off day or whatever, so I read the synopsis on the back of the book, hoping it would support my hypothesis, but lo and behold, it was riddled with grammatical errors.


“Never Sleep-some Secrets stay buried. Others wake you screaming.

When Luica Ashbourne returns to her hometown after a decade away, she finds more than dust and old photographs waiting for her, she finds the door to her sister sabine's room stilled locked, and her name still whispered in hushed tones. Sabine disappeared without a trace. Everyone has moved on.

Expect the house.

Except mirrors.

Expect Luica.

As buried memories resurface and old friends turn into strangers, Lucia begins to uncover the truth: what happened to her sister wasn't an accident and someone is willing to kill to keep it hidden. In a town that's forgotten how to speak the truth, Lucia will have to tear through layers of lies, family secrets, and her own fractured past to survive.

Because the dead don't rest.

And secrets never sleep.”


This was not helping. My fremdscham was worse, much, much worse, and now also mixed with something like disgust. “Expect the house,” it says. “Expect Luica,” it reads. I mean, did she even proofread any of this? The blurb on the back of a novel is like the solitary draw of the novel, the hook to catch the reader, and she didn't even bother to proofread it? I mean, was the character's name “Luica” or “Lucia”? And “Expect the house”? Are you fucking kidding me right now? I mean, I get it, I'm dyslexic, I mix up “expect” and “except” all the time, among a whole slew of other words, but this is a printed novel, something for people to take seriously, so wouldn't you extensively proofread the thing before publishing it? I started getting kind of pretentious, like does this woman even care about the craft? Is this some sort of joke? I wanted to get in my Toyota and punch the gas, get the hell out of there, make it all go away before I accidentally said some real nasty shit to her, but I felt locked in at this point, unable to escape, and I could hear my son having a blast, screaming his head off with the three girls behind the locked gate of the playground, so I had no legitimate excuse to remove myself from the situation. And after a long period of silence, all I could think to say was, “How long have you been writing?” which was a sly question asked almost solely from a place of mean-spirited judgment.

“About three years. I love writing.”

Her tone diffused my annoyance somewhat. Despite her black dress, goth makeup, and combat boots, her tone was actually quite cheerful, and her aura was very pleasant. She spoke in a matter-of-fact way but had some sort of speech impediment with her S’s going on, which I found to be endearing. She watched me with big, brown, expectant eyes. She was very still but gave off a sort of nervous energy. She seemed to be out there, at the book signing, at the playground by the abandoned school, totally unaware that this was like objectively the worst possible place to have a book signing, because like what is the audience you’re trying to target here, toddlers? And yet there was nothing furtive or creepy about her. She seemed confident in herself and what she was doing.

At a loss for words at this point, I started flipping through pages of SHADOWS BELOW. “Sabine vanished on a warm July night with no shoes, no phone, and no goodbye.” The formatting was awful. There were no line breaks between paragraphs. It was almost all dialogue, no descriptive text or mood-setting or anything, and the dialogue was neither line-broken nor consistently housed within quotation marks, and not in a stylistic way, but in a careless, inept way. The text was filled with ellipses and cliches. It read like some sort of high school girl’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction. “Some monsters don’t knock. They bled through the walls.” Her tenses were all fucked up. There were several instances of repeated pronouns at the beginning of sentences. Words were consistently misspelled. Whole chapters were just walls of text. I felt my fremdscham growing, my eyes widening, as I flipped through those pitiful pages. There were like three or four spaces at the start of every sentence for some reason. Em dashes were often used in place of commas. She constantly misused “there,” “their,” and “they’re.” The book read like it was written by someone who barely knew English, frankly. She obviously didn’t know the difference between “its” and “it’s.” I felt my face turning red on her behalf. She called herself a horror author, but the real horror was having to read her awful prose.

I put the book back on its stand, stared down for a few terrible seconds, then looked up at her with a forced blank expression on my face, trying to think of something to say that wasn't just flat-out mean. The whole time she was blinking at me with those big expectant eyes of hers.

Not knowing what to say, I said, “Anyone show up, you know, other than me?”

Her smile died for a second but came right back. “Yeah,” she said, sort of fidgeting, “a few people.”

She was obviously lying, but I wasn’t going to get into it with her, so I just asked, “What were you doing earlier, with the phone?”

“Oh, I was livestreaming, to Facebook.”

She was livestreaming to Facebook? To what, an audience of zero people? She was showing an audience of zero people on Facebook an audience of zero people at the abandoned-playground book signing? Was this like some sort of Schrodinger's book signing event or something? Some tree-falls-in-the-woods-with-no-one-around-to-hear-it type thing? Like, if no one shows up to the book signing event, and no one knows about it, then maybe actually the book signing event was a smash hit, because no one would know otherwise? I guess me and her being there kind of screwed that up, but the point is, what the fuck? All these incredibly judgmental, mean-spirited quips were running through my head, all while she was standing there, expectant eyes and all that, in her weirdly confident way.

Then she said, “So, did you like what you read of Shadows Below?”

And this was like a mental blow to the head, because no, I absolutely did not like what I read, but I didn’t want to crush this woman’s dreams, at least not out here at the abandoned playground with my son nearby, but I couldn’t not say anything, so I figured maybe I would let her down gently, and that's when I started rambling off the first things that came to mind.

“The thing about writing these days is that your work is probably going to be read by like two or three people, tops, and you're never going to get the recognition you think you deserve. That's just the sad truth of it. I mean, like, I read that the latest Battlefield game sold more copies than all of the books sold in the United States in 2024. Isn't that crazy? People are reading less and less. They're turning to these like quick-hit entertainments, stuff they don't have to think about too hard, you know? You can fact-check me if you want, but I think the Battlefield thing is true. Writing is just not the enterprise it once was. So, like, if you're trying to get famous on like BookTok or whatever, it's probably not going to happen. Reading is like a dying form of entertainment, and writing is a dying craft.”

Her smile was quivering at this point, cracking, starting to break, but I just kept going for some reason.

“That’s just something I’ve had to come to grips with, you know? Do I want people to read my writing? Sure. Do I want them to say it’s amazing, the most genius thing they’ve ever read? Yes, deep down I do. But I know it’s not going to happen. It’s a stupid dream, is what it is. And it’s sort of discouraging to think about, it really is. I’m not going to sugarcoat it here. Your books, probably no one is going to read them. That’s just how it is. Maybe your best friend might read them, maybe, but more likely they’ll just tell you they read them when they really haven't, to like make you feel better or whatever. There are also a bunch of free tools out there for spell check and grammar check nowadays that people who do read expect a certain level of polish to the writing, you know? Your stuff has to be readable, is the thing. Not that your stuff isn’t readable, I’m just, like, saying, it has to be readable. You can’t like mix up the tenses and use past perfect incorrectly and screw up ‘their’ with an I E and ‘they’re’ with an apostrophe R E, or else the people online are going to eat you alive. I’ve learned this the hard way, believe me. It’s not pretty. That’s all I’m saying.”

Her smile was no longer a smile but a sort of seriously straight line. She seemed to be listening very carefully. Her big expectant eyes locked on my face. So I kept going.

“So there are, like, two things working against the aspiring writer these days. The first thing is, like, one, it might be easy to start writing, but writing is very, very hard, there are rules at play here that are both punishing and difficult to master, and then, once you know those rules, knowing when to break them takes a whole ‘nother level of skill. I’m talking years of practice. And the second thing is, like, two, you’re not going to get famous writing, no one is going to care, no one is going to read your shit, and by ‘no one’ I mean, like, ‘not many people,’ you know? You’re not going to get famous writing. It’s just not going to happen. I mean, like, the best you can probably hope for is someone significant discovers your stuff after you die and suddenly you’re like posthumously famous, but of course you’ll never know because you’ll be dead. And there’s always going to be people out there that tear your stuff down, laugh at you, call your work shit, and that hurts. It hurts a lot. You know? Taking criticism is really hard.” 

She had averted her eyes to the table at some point during my ramble, so I had no hint as to what she was thinking, but I kept going anyway.

“But the thing is, and this is the kicker, I think, the thing is, if you still choose to write, despite knowing that it’s hard as hell, despite knowing that you’ll likely never become famous doing it, despite knowing that people are going to tear you down, if you still choose to write, despite all this stuff, then maybe that’s what makes someone a real writer or whatever, you know? Maybe that’s the hallmark of a true writer. I don’t know.”

She was still looking down, at the table, nodding her head in a sort of contemplative way, like she had paid full attention and was internalizing everything I had said, even though I felt like I was being kind of a pretentious asshole, because I kind of was. Then, after a few seconds, she looked up at me with this sad, pensive look on her face. But she didn’t seem sad herself, more like she felt sad for me, like she actually felt sorry for me or something, and that caught me off guard. I was at a loss for words. And it was around this time that I heard my son shout, “DADDY, DADDY, COME LOOK,” so I waved my hand at the woman and said, “Anyway, sorry for rambling. Good luck with your books,” then started to turn toward the playground, but as I was walking away, she shouted, “HEY,” so I turned around and saw her holding a book out to me, and that’s when she said, “Please, read the back of this one.”

So I stepped up to the table, took the book from her hand, SECRETS NEVER REST, which featured the same semi-realistic, Twilight-esque, possibly AI-generated woman on the cover, flipped the book over in my hands, and started reading the description on the back.


“This story was born from late nights and quiet questions about memory, about home, about what it means to lose part of yourself and still fight to reclaim it. Vaela's journey is one of courage, but not the loud kind. It's about the bravery it takes to return to the places that hurt you, to face the shadows of your past, and to choose your own future.

Through Vaela and Sabryn, I explored the strength of sisterhood, the complexity of identity, and the danger of buried truths. Magic is real in this world but it often looks like love, grief, or memory. Writing this book helped me understand that stories are how we pass down our fire.

I hope this one lights a spark in you, too.”


And that’s when I bought signed copies of both of her books.

For a moment there, on October 18th, 2025, I became an enemy of the state, a name on some government list somewhere, a statistic. I was one of the seven million people all across the United States who participated in the No Kings Rally. I was of statistical insignificance, sure, but I was still part of it, part of a vast sea of outraged but very civil people, in what is now being called the largest peaceful protest in American history. I didn't exactly want to be there, my wife pretty much guilt-tripped me into going, but now, upon reflection, I'm glad I went, because now I’m part of history. And I imagine, in like twenty years from now, when telling this story to my grandkids, I will feel similar to how all those baby boomers feel when they talk about Woodstock.

There were a lot of older people and veterans at the No Kings protest, which surprised me. There was also a large turnout of spiky-haired people, fishnet-wearing people, and rainbow-flag-waving people, which was not so surprising. I have a shaved head, so I was worried people might think I’m a skinhead or something, but I wear a silver hoop earring and was holding a sign, MY CATS COULD DO A BETTER JOB, which had pictures of my cats taped to it, and I'm not a skinhead, so it was actually easy for me to blend into the crowd. Many people stopped to take photographs of my sign. I wondered if these photographs would end up on some old liberal’s Facebook feed. My wife held one that read THINGS ARE SO BAD EVEN THE INTROVERTS ARE HERE, which was a slogan she had read somewhere online. It was a cool, breezy day. The sky was clear, and the air was electric with excitement. People were gathered in a huge mass at the waterfront stage pavilion overlooking the great marshes just beyond the East River. A DJ played loud music from an elaborate sound system. I watched as a man holding an RIP USA sign danced to Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” as if he were lost in some sort of trance, which seemed a little foreboding to me, like he was reveling in the oncoming destruction of America or something. Maybe this was his last dance before the silence, who knows. A woman dressed in a full-body frog costume gave a speech. “Dressed as this badass frog, I will leap over structural oppression and ribbit my grievances louder than any frog has before.” People clapped and waved signs fervently. “The current administration already has three strikes against me. First, I'm a woman. Second, I come from a family of immigrants. And third, I’m dressed as a gigantic green frog.” Everyone laughed and cheered. She talked about how the current administration is deporting people without due process and how the military is being used to oppress American citizens and how abortion should be a human right. I thought her last point called for a more nuanced discussion around human rights, where they come from, and at which point in the human maturation cycle they should be applied, but this was neither the time nor place for philosophical discussion, so I just kept my mouth shut and listened closely. She ended her speech with WE DID NOT VOTE FOR THIS and urged everyone to chant along. The voices were cacophonous. I did not participate in the chanting because it made me feel weird, like I was being manipulated in some way. This was my first ever protest. I would normally never go to one of these things. My wife pretty much guilt-tripped me into it. My two-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter were also there. My son was darting between people's legs like a crazy person, blissfully ignorant of politics and his part in the history being made. I was a little envious of him, to tell the truth. He eventually settled at the nearby playground with all the other children. Before the actual march started, I handed my sign to my daughter and told her to be careful, then she and her mother mingled into the crowd of chanting protesters. “When I say WE WANT, you say NO KINGS.” They all marched down to city hall chanting this and other anti-Trump slogans. Some people in pickup trucks yelled at them. I stayed back at the waterfront to keep an eye on my son because there was no way in hell he was ever going to stay focused long enough to march for an entire mile. The origin of the word “march” comes from the Latin word “Martius,” which comes from the word “Mars,” meaning the Roman god of war, which makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I enjoyed the cool breeze and watched sailors on the dock tend to their fishing boats. No one was pelted with rocks, stabbed, or shot. It was all very peaceful. When the march of protesters returned, they resembled more of a parade than a protest. Afterwards, we ate at the nearby pizza joint downtown. I hadn't eaten all day, so I ate way too many slices and spent the rest of the day feeling like a gluttonous pig. There was also a mini Comic Con going on. An entire city block was sectioned off for the event. There were about eight vendor stalls lined down the street, selling Pokémon cards, video game pins, comic books, anime plushies, and 3D-printed junk. Posters portraying Trump as a king with his face crossed out were plastered all over the old brick walls. Fake cobwebs and rubbery bats and animatronic skeletons dotted every street corner. People dressed as anime characters and superheroes carried protest signs and danced in the streets. It felt like some sort of super nerdy punk rock Halloween party. One guy dressed as Michael Myers walked around real slow, flashing his fake butcher’s knife at people, which frightened my son until he figured out it was just a costume, at which point he started circling the guy, tugging at the fabric of his outfit. All in all, it was a good time, but I was left wondering, do these protests actually accomplish anything?

I confess, even before I attended the No Kings rally, I had my doubts about the effectiveness of peaceful protests against tyrannical governments. It seems to me that if the current administration is not willing to play nice, perhaps we should not be playing nice ourselves. If you believe your human rights are being stripped, would you not want to fight like hell to reclaim them? How is marching peacefully going to reclaim what is being stolen from you? Imagine telling a slave in the 1700s that all they needed to do to gain their freedom was shout real loud and wave signs around, as if they had the education or wherewithal to withstand sustained lashings to even do that. If one is not willing to fight against what they deem as systematic violence, then how serious are they really? Structural oppression is designed to diminish the effectiveness of peaceful opposition. The current administration doesn’t even seem to care about the protests. They didn’t even give a weak sarcastic “no please stop” before the protests even happened, and they knew about these protests way in advance. In fact, the administration sort of just laughed it off. Trump even posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and dropping literal shit on protesters from a jet plane. The reason the current administration doesn’t seem to care, in my view, is because, despite high turnout, these protests don’t actually pose a threat to them. Nothing is at stake. They control both the House and the Senate. They regularly play fast and loose with the foundational documents on which this country was built. They do not play by the rules, yet we are playing by their rules. They allow us to protest, and that should tell us something right there. We are not blocking roads, cutting off supply chains, refusing to work, or being truly disobedient in any way. Hell, the organizers of the No Kings protest in my area went through days of paperwork and approvals with the local city hall to ensure that, one, they were legally within their rights to protest, and two, that the protesters would be protected when the protest actually happened. If there is not something deeply ironic about getting city hall’s approval to protest at city hall then we seriously need to consider changing our definition of irony.

I also have my doubts about these protests' effectiveness at changing people's minds. When I was at the No Kings rally, I looked around and saw only people who were already bought in. There were no MAGA hats on the sidelines going, “All these great signs are really making me want to vote Democrat.” There were no people taking fence posts out of their asses. There were no enlightened centrists in flame pants going, “Maybe they’re right, maybe Republicans and Democrats aren’t the same, maybe I should vote Democrat.” There were no terminally online Facebook moms breaking down in tears at the realization that their favorite president, who they had thought was just trolling to “own the libs,” is in fact a seriously deranged egomaniac. I mean, I can’t claim to know what was going on with every person in the crowd that day, this is all feels basically, but the people I saw already knew who they were voting for long before they came to the protest.

There is a much deeper problem at play here, I think, and it has to do with the internet and its ability to siphon people into little echo chambers. Those who fancy themselves on the right side of the political spectrum are on Twitter, Truth Social, Facebook, et cetera, sharing their anti-liberal memes, consuming their Joe Rogan misinformation about trans kids and death vaccines and Democrat-funded child sex rings, while those who fancy themselves on the left side of the political spectrum are on Bluesky, Reddit, Tumblr, et cetera, sharing their anti-conservative memes, consuming their Rachel Maddow opinion pieces about how the country is doomed and it’s all because of Trump and anyone who voted for Trump is a monster or whatever. And this has produced a society in which intelligent discourse just cannot happen. Everyone thinks everyone else is evil, and you cannot reason with evil. You hear about families being torn apart by this type of shit every single day. People are in their little camps, and each camp thinks the other camp is the problem, and now everyone thinks everyone else the problem. We have lost the ability to empathize with people. The whole topic really requires its own essay. But what it boils down to is this, when there’s a protest like No Kings, not a single right-leaning person will take it seriously because they have already been conditioned into believing that the liberals within the No Kings camp are dumbass morons who are also possibly full-blown evil. They have already made up their minds. No amount of sign waving and chanting is going to change that.

It seems to me that peaceful protests are not for persuading the other side but for gathering those already persuaded, and that’s fine if your goal is to let voices be heard and foster a sense of community, like a big help group, but the jury of my mind is still out on whether these peaceful protests actually produce meaningful change. They seem to just reinforce the fact that Trump is exceptionally good at making certain types of people hate him, but what good is all that anger if all we’re going to do is dance to Depeche Mode and wave signs around?

My wife says I am very fatalistic about the current state of US politics and that my mindset lends itself to a certain self-defeating path. I can’t say she’s wrong. I have sort of distanced myself from the whole political process at this point. I mean, I still vote, but that’s about it. She says I have diagnosed the problem but have not prescribed a solution. I counter and say that the solution is for people to stop participating in bullshit echo chambers, and then she asks me how they are going to do that, and I say by rejecting labels like Democrat and Republican and instead treating each other like human beings, and she says OK well how are they going to do that, and I say by turning the fucking phone off, and she says that’s unrealistic. She says I deal in idealism instead of realism. I say that if I can convince just a few people to turn the fucking phone off, even for just an hour a day, then the world would be a slightly better place, and she seems to agree with that sentiment, so then she told me to turn my own fucking phone off and go to the protest, so I did, and despite all my doubts, I’m glad to have gone.

I recently read some pretty harsh criticism of Infinite Jest on a random blog, and I wanted to talk about it. The person, whom I'll call Bob for the sake of anonymity, claims he didn't hate the book, but I would say, from my reading, that he did in fact hate the book. And that's fine. Infinite Jest is easy to hate. The question is, does he hate the book for the right reasons?

The art of evaluating criticism is a tricky slippery slope because criticism is often a highly subjective thing. One person's criticism might be another person’s praise. It often comes down to stylistic, aesthetic preferences. Etc. But some criticism is just flat-out stupid. For example, some people dislike The Catcher in the Rye because Holden Caulfield is “insufferable” or “immature” or whatever, but that's kind of the whole fucking point of the book, right? So, in that case, I would say that that is not valid criticism. If anything, that criticism highlights that the critic themselves did not actually understand the book, which kind of ironically calls into question the critic’s capacity for comprehension. In poorly criticizing a novel, the critic, in a roundabout way, reveals a criticism of themselves because although they think they're making smart criticisms, they're actually revealing themselves to be not as bright as they're pretending to be. This makes criticism a very tricky business indeed and is one of the reasons I tend to veer away from it in general, but I'm making an exception here because, although not my favorite book by any means, Infinite Jest is a book I enjoy quite a lot, and it also irks me when people misunderstand things, which I guess is a personal problem that I'm working through. Now, with all that being said, you may be asking something like, “Well, what is good criticism then?” And the answer to that is, well, I don’t know. It turns out that identifying bad criticism is much easier than identifying good criticism. Bad criticism usually misidentifies personal opinion as gospel, whereas good criticism is often packaged with a disclaimer that subjective opinion is not objective fact. 

So, considering all that, the rest of this entry should be taken with a grain of salt. That's my disclaimer.

Bob’s first point of criticism with Infinite Jest is that, despite review blurbs on the back of the novel calling the work "genius" and "laying it on thick," he would not personally use the word "genius" to describe the book. To his credit, I will say that I hate the publishing industry’s obsession with putting quotes of praise all over books. “A virtuoso display of styles and themes.” “The next step in fiction.” “It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy!” Whatever the fuck that means. I’m the type of person who is immediately put off by preemptive praise, as it stirs the old contrarian within me. I hate being sold stuff, so when I get a whiff of a sales pitch, which is what packing books full of quoted praise is, I immediately go on the defensive. My question to Bob, however, is, isn’t “genius” a relatively subjective noun or adjective, depending on the context? Why are we getting hung up over this? People are always calling stuff genius nowadays, it’s basically vacuous praise at this point. Instead of debating which adjectives best describe the book, perhaps we should instead just analyze the contents of the book. Bob clarifies his anti-genius stance with the following criticism, “No, I don’t find a page-long sentence genius.” And, as an opinion, that’s fine. But you have to admit that it takes some level of literary talent to write a sentence that’s a page long while also still having it be intelligible and easy to follow, which Infinite Jest’s page-long sentences often are, which says something about David Foster Wallace’s “genius” here, if we’re choosing to use that word. It’s also important to note that page-long sentences are not just used as literary flourishes in Infinite Jest, they're used as a form of pacing to both control reading speed and add urgency to the text. If a scene is intended to be frantic, with fast-paced action and dialogue, a long sentence sort of simulates this urgency and freneticism in the reader’s mind, forcing the reader to follow along at a whirlwind pace, which mirrors the urgent speed at which the scenes unfold. Wallace has always been loose with grammar, using punctuation not in a strict Oxford sense but more like traffic signals, slow down, go fast, yield, full stop, and so forth. And I personally like this grammatical philosophy. I will admit, however, that it does occasionally feel like Wallace is writing these page-long sentences just to flex, as if he’s taking his hands off the handlebars of the figurative bike of writing, turning to Dad, and going, “Look Dad, no hands.” But I’ll forgive Wallace’s pretentious flourishes here because, in most cases, the run-on sentences and huge paragraphs work really well for the high-speed craziness that is Infinite Jest.

Bob goes on to say that all the reviews gloss over the fact that Infinite Jest is jam-packed with pain, trauma, death, and addiction, as if this is somehow a bad thing. My question is, is life not full of pain, trauma, death, and addiction? Are we forbidden from covering these topics? If so, why? Is it so that we don’t potentially hurt someone’s feelings, make them feel uncomfortable? He goes on to clarify that Infinite Jest uses trauma and suffering to “shock” and “entertain,” as if one of the themes of Infinite Jest is not a criticism of that very thing. It could be argued that David Foster Wallace is walking a fine line here, as using shock-and-trauma entertainment to criticize shock-and-trauma entertainment perhaps puts Infinite Jest uncomfortably close to becoming what it is criticizing. I would not disagree with this more nuanced argument, but that is not the argument Bob is making. However, I do think some of the scenes in Infinite Jest are excessive, and I also think that Wallace was perhaps having a little too much fun writing them. The scene with the addicted mother carrying her dead baby around as if it were alive and the lengthy descriptions of all the associated smells come to mind, also that one scene where Hal and Orin accidentally leave a dog leashed to the back of a car before driving to the store, turning the dog into a bloody “nubbin,” and that one guy who gets impaled with a broom through his ass, and that scene where the homeless drug addict’s head explodes because he shot up Drano or whatever and the alleyway air blower they use for warmth at night blows all his head chunks around, but each of these awful stories led into their own lessons and commentaries on the human condition, which, personally, I found valuable. I never got the impression that David Foster Wallace was adding awful tragedies into Infinite Jest just for shock value. There was always a point. And, again, life is full of pain, trauma, death, and addiction. We shouldn’t veer away from covering these topics, even if they make us uncomfortable. And yes, Infinite Jest did often make me feel uncomfortable, but I leaned into that discomfort, and I like to think that I learned something from it. We can learn a lot about our own humanity by studying these uncomfortable topics in depth, it might even be necessary to truly understand the human condition, and by ignoring the uncomfortable stuff or applying some hyper-PC literary policy that forbids it, we are doing ourselves a disservice, both emotionally and philosophically. After all, life is not all sunshine and rainbows, and sometimes you have to come face to face with that, and if you don't want a novel to force you to come face to face with that, then don't read the novel. Infinite Jest makes it very clear very early on that it's filled with unsettling imagery, so if you choose to continue reading the novel despite all the obvious warnings and then you choose to complain about it, then maybe that says something more about you than the novel? Perhaps it is you who derives entertainment from trauma and suffering, not Infinite Jest. Just a thought.

Bob’s next point of criticism is, “I didn’t think DFW did a great job of capturing different verbal styles of groups of characters nor did I find the novel especially deep.” This is a two-pronged criticism, so I’ll address both separately.

The first point of criticism, about capturing different verbal styles, is one I actually happen to agree with. Ever since I started reading David Foster Wallace, which was about three years ago, I have often found myself thinking, “Do people actually talk like this?” Wallace excels at building characters descriptively, both by their physical descriptions and psychological descriptions, but he seems to have trouble making a character’s dialogue fit their described personality. Strung-out drug addicts are too insightful, too self-aware. Everyday Joe Schmoes are too profound, too intelligent. Teenaged high schoolers are too mature, too philosophical. Every character seems to have an excellent grasp of the English language, often going off on long-winded, very smart tangents, much like the third-person omniscient narrator does, which highlights that Wallace, who is pretty much the narrator in most chapters, has trouble separating himself from his characters. This is especially obvious if you take the time to listen to some of Wallace’s recorded interviews. Every character seems like some version of David Foster Wallace. This is Wallace’s biggest literary shortcoming, in my opinion. He is great with descriptive prose, can write well in almost any style, has an excellent grasp of philosophical concepts and can weave them effortlessly into almost any situation, and he's incredible at evoking emotion, but he’s not very good at writing dialogue, at least believable dialogue. I mean, who actually talks like this? “I'm sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist's ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition Mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom's redwood-paneled and overlooks a precipice. The sunlight's the color of bronze.” The answer is, no one, no one talks like this.

The second point, about not finding the novel especially deep, Bob clarifies by adding the following statement, “It reminds me of stoners getting high and thinking they are saying the deepest shit in the world when really it’s drivel.” And, I mean, that’s one way of putting it, I guess. I’m reluctant to use the word “deep” to describe anything, as I believe that a thing’s depth is influenced by the quote-unquote “depth” of the reader, meaning it is yet another highly subjective thing amongst the infinitely long list of subjective things. But I would both agree and disagree with Bob's take here, as Infinite Jest treads the line between superficial depth and real depth, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. I do think that, considering the almost nonsensical structure of the novel, it’s unnecessarily hard to follow and, considering that nearly every character is an unreliable narrator of sorts, the novel can come off as being purposely confusing, almost like a David Lynch movie, which was one of Wallace’s favorite directors if I remember correctly. For example, the story of Joelle Van Dyne and why she wears a veil all the time. In one section, Joelle herself says that she wears the veil because she's so beautiful that men become obsessed with her and can't stop staring at her or whatever, and that she views this as a disfigurement, which, OK, that's interesting. But in a different chapter, it's explained that Joelle’s father actually threw acid into her face when she was younger, which permanently warped her face, leaving her disfigured, which is also interesting. And then, in a few later chapters, the so-beautiful-it’s-a-disfigurement thing is reinforced again, so there's no way of really knowing what happened to Joelle. Now, it could be argued that Wallace uses this ambiguity around Joelle’s disfigurement to raise the question of like, could both extreme ugliness and extreme beauty be considered a disfigurement? What is ugliness? What is beauty? Does it even matter, considering Joelle believes herself to be disfigured regardless? And so on. But the fact remains, the book is full of contradictions. People are still arguing on the internet about what actually happens to Hal at the end of the book because Wallace’s prose is so vague and confusing on this detail that it's almost impossible to tell. Did he accidentally ingest the super-powerful drug DMZ, turning him into an incomprehensible mess? If so, how did he ingest it? Some people think that his father’s ghost laced his toothbrush with the drug, which is only vaguely supported by a few throwaway lines in the book. And there's some question as to whether Hal’s father’s ghost was even real to begin with. And if Hal didn't ingest DMZ, why couldn't anyone understand what he was saying? Did he slip into some inward psychosis spurred on by his extreme intellect, making it truly impossible for him to communicate with other people? I guess we will never know. Again, Wallace could have written it this way on purpose, leaving it open-ended to encourage the reader to either come to their own conclusions or to force the reader to put in some extra mental effort to figure it all out. It’s possible. But sometimes it reeks of the same intentional ambiguity that you might get a whiff of off a David Lynch film. Sometimes it feels like Wallace wasn’t sure of the details of his own plot or the points he was trying to make, so he intentionally left things open-ended and vague to sort of trick the reader into thinking something profound was going on when really there just might be nothing profound going on at all. But of course, this sort of intentional ambiguity is almost impossible to prove one way or the other. This is the tricky line this sort of weird fiction walks. But at times it certainly feels like some high-level literary mystification is going on. But while this might be true occasionally, it does not mean that Infinite Jest is completely devoid of quote-unquote “depth.”

There is tremendous prescient depth throughout Infinite Jest. Wallace predicted the sociopolitical entertainment landscape of the modern day in terms of its impacts on human behavior and society at large, and this is especially impressive considering that, since the novel was published in 1996, Wallace only had cable television, VHS, and Compact Discs to base his predictions on. He foresaw the rise of instant at-home entertainment through his idea of the InterLace Entertainment network, and he accurately foresaw its addictive, destructive effects on people and society as a whole, and then he paralleled that theme of entertainment addiction with hardcore drug addiction, and the MacGuffin of the book, the titular film Infinite Jest, which sucks you in and kills you if you watch it, is a potent metaphor for all this stuff, which I think qualifies as “deep.” And the numerous character vignettes about reaching your goals only to find out that you’re still unhappy and unfulfilled and starving for more, like the Clipperton saga and Hal’s father killing himself despite having achieved goal after goal, all provide valuable insight into the nature of personal achievement, making you, the reader, ask yourself, “What’s really important in life? If I publish my dream novel, will that finally make me happy? What is happiness? What am I really striving for here?” Bob later goes on to clarify, “If Wallace had been trying to come up with solutions rather than just shocking with exposition, perhaps I’d find his work more on the brilliant side.” But the questions Infinite Jest poses, like the nature of humanity and the path to contentedness, are deeply philosophical questions without easy answers, and the answers will vary from person to person, so expecting a book to lay out an easy-to-digest solution to these complicated philosophical problems that people have been wrestling with for centuries is frankly naive. And Infinite Jest does in fact provide some hints as to the solutions to the problems of addiction, instant gratification, and existential loneliness that pervade the text. I would encourage Bob to reexamine Mario and Don Gately’s sections more closely, for example, as they pose potential solutions to all of the aforementioned problems, like ditching intellectual irony in favor of unbridled sincerity and, in Don Gately’s case, devoting yourself to something larger than you, even if you don’t fully understand the thing you’re devoting yourself to. So, yes, there are proposed solutions to the hard questions and philosophical problems scattered throughout the novel, David Foster Wallace isn't just going to hold your hand and guide you to them, however. You have to put in some effort.

In my view, if a book makes you ask questions and examine philosophical problems, then that book is doing it's job, and Infinite Jest does that in spades, and it does it quite well, but it’s a work of fiction, not a self-help novel, so you have to put some existential work in. And if you’re not willing to do the work, then maybe you shouldn’t be criticizing the novel to begin with because, frankly, you just don’t get it.

And that's fine. Not every novel is going to click with every person. I get that. But don't pretend like your criticism is anything more than your own subjective opinion, especially when you're not willing to put in the work to understand what you're criticizing, otherwise it's just bad criticism.

Intelligence. People value intelligence, especially high intelligence. Intelligence enables us to solve complex problems, invent great things, write incredible novels and essays, and even go to the moon. But what if intelligence, instead of being this like great amazing thing, is actually a kind of curse? A curse that causes us to overanalyze things, get stuck in our own heads, become detached and despondent and cold?

That's the thesis statement.

About a week ago I finished reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's a big book. It took me like two months to finish, although to my credit I only read like a dozen pages per day, but I always looked forward to reading those dozen pages, which must mean I enjoyed the book a good bit, especially since sections of the novel intrusively invade my thoughts multiple times a day. The novel did leave me feeling somewhat confused and frustrated and sad though, but I've found that the best things in life often do that, leave you somewhat confused and frustrated and sad, maybe because those things are often the most rewarding.

Some people say that Infinite Jest has no comprehensible plot, that it's just a thousand-page ramble tied loosely together by a core set of themes, that it’s impenetrable and overwrought on purpose, that it's just a pretentious exercise in literary masturbation, and those people probably haven't read the actual book, but they're also not entirely wrong, because Infinite Jest is all of those things, but it’s also so much more.

Infinite Jest is a post-postmodern encyclopedic work of fiction set in a near-future version of North America where the United States, now called the Organization of North American Nations, led by former B-list movie actor slash Las Vegas crooner President Johnny Gently, who ran on a populist platform centered around “cleaning up America’s garbage” and bears a shockingly prescient resemblance to Donald J. Trump, has subsumed both Canada and Mexico and has “subsidized” time, meaning calendar years have been sold to the highest-paying corporation, for like advertising or whatever, so instead of numbered years you get stuff like “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad” and “Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster” and so on, and O.N.A.N. uses giant catapults to launch the nation’s chemical waste and radioactive garbage into a region near New England now dubbed “the Great Concavity,” which has turned the whole area effectively into a no-man’s land where unspeakable mutant horrors like giant babies and feral man-eating hamsters roam in packs, which is a detail almost inconsequential to the overall plot, because the story is mostly a rumination on addiction, sincerity, the dangers of irony, human connection, the importance of family, existential dread, and the fallacious belief that attaining all your goals will somehow make you feel happy and fulfilled, centering around the teenage students at a prestigious Boston tennis academy and the recovering drug addicts living in a nearby halfway house, and these characters’ stories are told through a collage of scenes presented in no sensible chronological order whatsoever, like if Infinite Jest were a photograph then David Foster Wallace took that photograph and cut it up into a million pieces and then asked you to put it back together with nothing but a magnifying glass and some Scotch tape, which is exactly what it feels like trying to piece together what the hell is actually going on in this book.

And I’m not going to try to explain what the hell is actually going on in the book, but I will give you just enough context to support my thesis statement up there. Needless to say but the rest of this entry contains significant spoilers.

The plot ultimately centers around the drama of this one particular family, surname Incandenza. The father of this family, James O. Incandenza, was this super-intelligent guy who invented some super high-tech fusion technology but got bored with that so founded a tennis academy but got bored with that too so decided to make indie films, pretty much. James was addicted to his interests and would play them out until he got bored, and although mastering each interest, they still left him feeling bored and unfulfilled. At some point before the events of the novel, James creates this film called Infinite Jest, and this film is so entertaining that, if you watch it, you cannot stop watching it, so you just waste away and die watching it. This film has been copied and sent to people all over North America, resulting in many deaths. Questions abound around the contents of the film, a detail that can't be confirmed because there’s no one alive who’s watched it, and why the film was even created in the first place, which the novel does address, although in a sort of lynchian fashion. The whole plot of the book sort of swirls around this titular film, as all the central characters have some connection to it, even if it's like six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon levels of connection. The symbolic significance of Infinite Jest, the film, and how it relates to our modern entertainment landscape, particularly streaming culture, phones, and having all this media at our fingertips at all times, is especially prescient and interesting, although none of that ultimately matters for my thesis, so I won't be covering that here. Anyway, shortly after creating Infinite Jest, the film, James Incandenza kills himself by cooking his own head in a microwave oven, which sounds like an impossible feat but is actually fully explained in both technical and gory detail. He leaves behind a wife and three kids. Hal, Orin, and Mario, who I will refer to as the brothers Incandenza hence forth. 

Hal is sort of like the main character of the novel. He’s the youngest of the brothers Incandenza. He's seventeen years old and enrolled at his late father’s prestigious tennis academy, Enfield Tennis Academy. He’s a super genius just like his father, able to recite dictionary definitions of pretty much any word on command. He’s also cold, detached, downright condescending sometimes, super ironic, unable to express his thoughts and feelings properly, and also super addicted to marijuana. It turns out that Hal is very much like his father in this respect, although his father’s substance of choice was alcohol. Hal was never very close with his father, they couldn’t connect emotionally, mostly because of their vast almost self-defeating intellects, and this haunts Hal both mentally and physically, like the wraith of his late father actually haunts him, like James’s ghost, literally, haunts Hal, in the book, in some weird lynchian attempt to bring Hal out of his detached intellectual shell. So when Hal’s not rigorously training for tennis or playing tournaments, he’s spiraling mentally into a depression by overanalyzing everything in his life, particularly his relationship with his late father, and when he’s not spiraling in some sort of over-analytical depression, he’s smoking weed in secret in the Enfield basement and blowing the smoke into a ceiling vent to hide the smell, to drown it all out, bury his emotional baggage, pretty much.

Orin, who is also incredibly intelligent, is the oldest of the brothers Incandenza. He's a professional football player and a sex addict. Orin spends a lot of time mentally torturing himself and getting anxious and harping on the old times and getting into all sorts of sexual trouble due to his sex addiction which all stems from some sort of unresolved childhood thing with his mom and dad or whatever that he's constantly thinking about and overanalyzing to death. He's also superficial, selfish, and incredibly manipulative, especially with women.

And then there’s Mario, the middle child of the brothers Incandenza. Mario loves his dad. He wants to be just like his dad. Mario makes films like his dad. Mario even wears a helmet with a tripod camera thing attached to it on his head, so he can film everything that's going on in his life, so he can use the footage for future films. He almost never leaves his room at the Academy without the helmet on, which makes for some very comical scenes. But Mario was born premature, and he has pretty much every physical deformity ever medically documented, so he’s hunched over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and he has claws instead of hands, and his head is humongous, and he has these big bulging eyes, and he’s just like, for all intents and purposes, monstrous, for lack of a better term, and he’s also not very bright, like stuck-forever-at-a-third-grade-reading-level levels of brightness. It would be unfair to say that Mario is “stupid,” because he can comprehend things just fine, but he has a lot of trouble communicating and sometimes can’t follow along in complex conversations. He’s more like incredibly simple. But the thing about Mario is that, although he gets sad sometimes about the death of his father, as anyone would, he never gets stuck in his head like his brothers do, he never questions if his father really loved him or whatever like his brothers do, he never waxes himself existentially into a spiraling depression like his brothers do, he never develops some sort of crippling addiction because of unresolved childhood stuff like his brothers do, he’s never sarcastic or ironic, and he never once says anything bad about anyone, like ever, because Mario is the nicest, most sincere, most loving brother Incandenza. Mario is like the beating cardiac muscle of the book.

And that’s why Mario Incandenza is my favorite character in Infinite Jest.

Mario is a stark contrast to almost every other character in Infinite Jest, especially Hal and Orin and James, who are all too smart for their own good. Due to Mario’s stunted intellectual growth, he seems to lack the faculties to overanalyze people and situations, taking everything at face value, and because of this deficiency he approaches everything with the naive innocence of a young child, harboring no preconceived notions or negative stereotypes about anyone, which leads to him treating everyone he meets with a level of respect that Hal, Orin, and James just are not capable of. I mean, Hal and Orin and James are often cordial and respectful to people, but behind the mask they are brooding, distrusting, and critical, whereas Mario just does not have the capacity to be like that. Mario is guileless, innocent, pure of heart almost. And Mario, despite being frankly hideously-deformed and a little slow in the head, is treated with respect by others because Mario himself treats everyone with respect, because he’s simply incapable of doing otherwise, because he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity and all the psychic baggage that comes along with that. And because Mario is like this, he’s viewed by many as a pleasant, guru-like person to talk to, so people often go to him for advice, especially his own brother Hal, who often calls Mario “Boo,” and who, in one scene, goes to Mario for advice on what to do about some extreme anxiety he, Hal, is feeling about not having smoked weed in a long time yet still perhaps failing an academy drug test and other stressful existential tennis-life things, this scene is also the only time Hal opens up to anyone about anything in the entirety of the novel, which is important, and Mario, in this scene, delivers the best advice delivered by anyone in the entire book, and this advice is not just the best advice in the book, it’s also like the thesis statement, the point, of the entire book, which sort of makes Mario like the most important character in the book, in my opinion. The scene hit me so hard that I had to put the book down and text one of my friends about it, so I’m going to just copy-paste the tail end of the scene here, for reference.

( Hal & Mario excerpt, Infinite Jest, pg.785 )

Mario is beyond intellectual obfuscation of any sort. He’s simple. He does not have the capacity to lie, either to himself or to others. He does not hide things. He is guileless, innocent, pure of heart. And because of this, he naturally just sees through the bullshit. He sees through intellectual rationalizations and mental decision-tree-like anxieties that stem from intellectualism. And because of this, when Hal opens up to Mario for the first time pretty much ever, expressing his emotions, fears, and doubts, and then asking Mario for advice on what he, Hal, should do, Mario correctly and simply points out the obvious, that Hal is already doing what he should be doing, opening up, expressing his emotions, admitting that he has a problem, coming out of his intellectually detached shell, which are things Hal literally never thought to do before because he’s just too damn intellectual about everything. Hal’s vast intellect, while enabling him to accomplish great mental feats, has also led him into a black hole of irony and insincerity that ultimately undermines his own happiness.

By the end of the novel, Hal has become so wrapped in his head that he can no longer communicate with other people, James has microwaved his own skull, Orin gets abducted by Wheelchair Assassins and tortured by being placed in a tumbler full of cockroaches, and Mario, well, Mario is fine. He’s just wearing his ridiculous tripod headgear, filming stuff, being nice to people, doing what he likes to do, not overanalyzing any of it, because what’s the point in that?

Some people might say Mario is stupid, since he does have a number of learning disabilities, but “stupid” is ultimately a subjective societal construct. I would say instead of “stupid,” Mario is simple. But regardless of whichever semantics you subscribe to, the point is, we should all try to be a bit more like Mario, be that more simple or more “stupid” or more whatever you want to call it.

Because if ignorance is bliss, perhaps “stupidity” is transcendence.

Considering the upcoming obliteration of my old blogging platform, howdoyouspell.cool, I wanted to repost this incredibly long list of my favorite pop songs, mostly for posterity, but also because I spent a lot of time copying YouTube links and pasting them into markdown format, and I don't want all that effort to go to waste.

So, without further ado, here is my so-called Perfect List of Perfect Pop Songs, with links, in no particular order, although the first few songs listed are those I would name if someone were to ask me to name a few of my favorites.

( Perfect List of Perfect Pop Songs )

My cousin is absolutely retarded.

Now that I have your attention, the word “retarded” is pretty interesting, because it's a good example of how language is ever-changing and fluid and societally constructed. Words and their meanings aren't just floating around out there in the ether. We make the words and we assign the meanings, and we change those meanings based on a variety of different factors. Nowadays, “retard” is a pejorative, a slur pretty much, an insult used to basically call someone a super idiot. The word “idiot” is interesting too, because that's another one of those words that highlights just how fickle language can be.

Until the 60s or so, the words “idiot,” “imbecile,” “moron,” and even “cretin,” according to Wikipedia, were widely used in the medical community to refer to someone with serious mental impairments, that is until mean-spirited people started using those words as general insults toward anyone they thought was annoying or stupid or whatever, at which point those words were reclassified as insults, after which the medical community came up with a new word to refer to people with serious mental impairments, that word being “retard,” that is until mean-spirited people started using that word to also refer to anyone they thought was annoying or stupid or whatever, at which point the word “retard” was reclassified as an insult as well, after which the medical community came up with yet new words to refer to people with serious mental impairments, those new words being “handicapped” and “disabled,” which have thus far withstood the pejorative tests of time, but it's really only a matter of time before mean-spirited people start using those words as insults as well, saying stuff like, “what are you fucking handicapped?” and “were you born disabled or what?”, and when that happens, the medical community will yet again have to come up with brand-new words to refer to people with serious mental impairments, and so on and so forth.

I'm of the opinion that any word we come up with for the mentally impaired will eventually be used as an insult, because it's just low-hanging fruit really, there are mean-spirited people out there, and no one wants to be labeled mentally impaired, so of course any officially dedicated medical term that refers to actual mentally impaired people will eventually be used as an easy insult by these aforementioned mean-spirited people, and these mean-spirited people aren't just going away anytime soon, so any mentally impaired classifiers we could possibly come up with are just kind of doomed to become pejoratives. The only solution here would be for people to just be nice to each other or whatever, but we all know that's a fucking pipe dream. But in the meantime, it's probably wise to steer clear of whichever words we societally designate as pejoratives, because, one, that's just the nice thing to do, and two, you wouldn't want someone to call you a “fucking retard,” so why call someone else one? The golden rule and all that.

So that brings us back around to my cousin, and why I'm calling him retarded. Because if I know, logically, that I shouldn't go around calling people retarded, then why am I so blatantly calling my cousin a retard? Like, what the hell’s wrong with me, right? Well, outside of the fact that I wanted an attention-grabbing opening line for this journal entry, the fact is, even if I were to call my cousin a retard to his face, he wouldn't understand what I meant because he is quite literally retarded. He is as retarded as they come. He is the prime specimen of retarded. He does not possess the necessary cognitive ability to know what words mean, much less even recognize that he himself is retarded. By the time he was like three the doctors had probably written something like “completely retarded” on his medical sheet. To this day, the doctors don't actually know what's wrong with him, just that something is seriously medically wrong with him. He walks around limp-wristed and flapping. He communicates by groaning and yelling and hitting and sometimes using one of those machines a really smart dog might use with big buttons that play pre-recorded messages like “Food please” and “I want to go outside.” As of typing this up, my cousin is thirty-five years old and still wears diapers. He often takes his clothes off and walks around the house fondling himself. He exclusively watches Disney films and gets violent when they're turned off. He was recently put on hardcore narcotics to control these violent outbursts, which puts him in a sort of light vegetative state. He is always dirty, with food and poop smeared all over his chest and face. 

So, if anyone fits the bill for retarded, it’s my cousin, because he's absolutely retarded. I mean, his own mother calls him retarded, if that tells you anything. My whole family, and my close friends, call him retarded, and sometimes we even make slightly off-color jokes at his expense.

Back when I was a young kid, I would live with my grandma during the summers, and eventually my aunt moved in and brought along her son, who is about my age and retarded, and I would share space with this retarded young man, who quickly became the focal point around which all things in that house swirled, because he demanded a lot of attention, on account of him being absolutely retarded. And when my aunt would go to work, she would hire a babysitter to watch her son, who she often comically referred to as retarded in the company of friends and family, and these babysitters were paid for by the government, through some disability program, but the babysitters were not always the most upstanding citizens, many came from sketchy backgrounds and had weird quirks and problems, like sneaking marijuana into the house then getting high in the backyard while they had locked my retarded cousin in his room, which is a huge no-no in the babysitting-mentally-impaired-people line of work, because the state government can and will take your mentally impaired children away if they catch you, or anyone else in your household, with illegal substances, so needless to say, many of these babysitters were very quickly canned, and sometimes it took my aunt a few weeks to find a new babysitter, meaning the babysitter would often end up being my grandma and me.

I would help my grandma feed my cousin, clothe him, make sure his diapers were changed, clean his poop off the walls, make sure he didn’t get out of the house and wander into the street and get hit by a car, hold his hand sometimes and take him on walks, ensure his pill regimen was properly digested, usually by mashing it into his food, make sure his Disney VHS tapes were properly rewound and replayed over and over, take him for car rides to calm him down when he got violent, and make sure the refrigerator and cabinets were all properly tied up with slip knots so that he wouldn’t get into everything and make a huge mess. And we did all this stuff until my aunt came home from work, at which point my grandma would go back to watching her old television shows and I would go back to playing my PlayStation and Nintendo 64 games. And we did all this without resentment or complaint, because, although absolutely retarded, my cousin was part of the family and he couldn’t help how he was born and we loved him, even if we sometimes referred to him as retarded and made slightly off-color jokes at his expense.

During those halcyon summers, I grew to enjoy my cousin’s company. Whenever he was gone, the house just felt weird. I remember he was always very receptive to physical greetings, like if I put my hand up in a high-five position, he would smack it really hard with his own hand, and then he would go back to flapping his arms around, groaning, and watching his Disney films. He always had this blank look on his face, like a sort of vacant stare, but whenever we did those high-five greetings together, I felt something shining through the retarded shell he was trapped in, something deeper than the body and the mind, something like his soul coming through whenever we did those little high-five greetings together, so I would do those greetings with him every time I entered a room he was in, to build a soul-bond connection with him. It got to the point where, whenever I came home from hanging out with my friends, if my cousin wasn’t in the living room, I would go to his room, the walls of which were covered top to bottom in Disney pictures, and his bed was covered in plastic so that it was easier to clean for obvious reasons, and I would do the high-five greeting with him there to help build the connection, before going back to playing PlayStation and Nintendo 64 games in my room, which was actually the garage because my old room was now my cousin’s room, which was something that I harbored no resentment or complaints about, because, although absolutely retarded, my cousin was part of the family and he couldn’t help how he was born and I loved him.

Back then, I was never embarrassed about my cousin. I never tried to hide him from anyone. A good friend of mine, Miles, would often come over to play Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64 with me, and I remember the first time he came over, I hadn’t even warned him about my cousin, because I didn’t even think to do so, because my cousin was just such a normal staple of my life or whatever that the thought hadn't even crossed my mind that someone unfamiliar with him might feel a little uncomfortable. I remember when Miles and I got to my house, opened the front door, and there my cousin was, in the living room, flapping his hands and groaning while wearing nothing but a diaper, I said something like, “yeah, that’s my cousin, he lives here,” and Miles just curiously nodded, not saying anything mean at all, so I showed Miles how to do the high-five greeting, then we all exchanged high-five greetings, and then Miles and I went to my garage room and started playing Nintendo 64. This went on for many summers. Miles eventually became so close to my family that, after hearing my aunt refer to my cousin as retarded many times, Miles and I adopted this language and would casually talk about how my cousin was retarded, and sometimes we would even make jokes at his expense, as if we were just young boys teasing each other, and we did this, I like to think, because we both saw my cousin as a friend, a weird retarded friend, who was just born that way and couldn’t help it and it was whatever because we were all friends here and we had each other’s backs like friends do. We had brought my cousin into the fold of adolescent friendship, as one of the boys, so to speak, and although my retarded cousin could not comprehend that he was essentially one of the boys, I liked to think he could.

But one time, I remember, Miles and I were outside playing with this new kid, Jordan, and I had mentioned wanting to go back to my place to play some Super Smash Bros., not even thinking to mention to Jordan that my retarded cousin lived there too. It turned out that Jordan loved Smash Bros., so we all went back to my place to boot up the old N64, and after a long walk from the clubhouse playground, through the many verdant alleys nestled between the pale blue vinyl siding of cookie-cutter homes, we arrived at my place. Everything was going great until I opened the front door.

My cousin was in the living room, stark naked, pacing around in circles, touching himself with one hand and flapping with the other. I remember Jordan looked at my cousin with this frightened, disgusted look on his face, then looked back at me, then looked at my cousin again, then back at me one last time and finally said, “Who’s the retard?”

Miles and I went completely silent. It was as if a dark cloud had suddenly descended right over us. Eventually, I turned to Jordan, my eyes squinted and my eleven-year-old face just one big scowl, and I said, “What did you just say?”

Jordan repeated himself, “I said, who’s the retard? What’s wrong with him?”

I was pissed and shaking and wanted to scream in the kid's face at this point, but before I could do anything, Miles all of a sudden shoved Jordan’s shoulders real hard, knocking him over, and said,

“What’s wrong with YOU?”