Gately and P.G.O.A.T/former P.G.O.A.T interface front office, Ennet house 0450h, 11 November, culminating in:

‘Jesus, why am I even here? Why don’t you just interface with yourself if you think you know all my issues and shames and everything I’m going to say? Why not take the suggestion to say No? Why come in here? Did I come to you, to talk? Was i just sitting in here trying to keep awake and do the Log and getting ready to go mop shit with a shoe-freak and did or didn’t you waltz on in and sit down and come to me?’
….
‘You want to see my professional Staff face here’s my Staff face. I nod and smile, I treat you like somebody I have to humor by nodding and smiling, and behind the face I’m going with my finger around and around my temple like What a fucking yutz, like Where’s the net.’
‘Believe what you want. I’m powerless over what you believe, I know.’
‘See the professional Staffer writing in the Meds log: “six extra-strong-kind aspirin for Staff after sarcasm and sideways refusal to walk through fears and sarcastic acting out by newcomer who things she knows everybody else’s issues.’
‘What position did you play?’
‘…that the Staffer wonders how come she’s even here in treatment then, if she knows so much.’

Teehee. This is like high school love. Splendid. Just top notch, the whole conversation.

Do yourself a favor and go read Infinite Jest.

Regarding the Moms’s profering of her apple to a starving Hal:
“Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: ‘Please, I’m not using this oxygen anyway.’ ‘What, this old limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.’ ‘But it’s a gorgeous bowel movement, Mario—the living room rug needed something, I didn’t know what til right this very moment.’ The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted, taking the apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin believed she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot” (523).

I read this 12 years ago on Hal’s side. Now I totally vote with Avril. She wants him to eat and doesn’t want him to starve of politeness. *sigh* What a difference a little life experience makes.

Happy halfway through Infinite Jest, peeps who are still hanging in by a “dento-dermal layer.”

One of my favorite scenes of the book.

“Now the ominous finger-pointing of street-aggression, this Roy fellow pointing first at Erdedy’s chest and then at his own: ‘So man what you say you saying I’m a hugger? You saying you think I go around like to hug?’
Both Erdedy’s hands were now up palms-out and waggling in a like bon-hommic gesture of heading off all possible misunderstanding: ‘No but see the whole point is that I wouldn’t presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don’t know you. I only meant to say it’s nothing personal having to do with you as an individual, and I’d be more than happy to shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple-handed ethnic handshakes if you’ll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake, but I’m simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.’
By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had Erdedy by his anorak’s insulated lapels and was leaning him way back over the edge of the Literature table so that Erdedy’s waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and the fellow’s face was right up in Erdedy’s face in a show of naked aggression:
‘You think I fucking like to go around and hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said….I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked. Puked, he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-weartng-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass motherfucking ass'” (506).

I really can’t pull deeply from Lucien and Bertraund hearing the squeak, because I still shudder at the description. I wanted to use some quote about angles and soupe aux pois but just can’t.

The most I can tolerate is: “The vigor with which Lucien shakes his head at the leader’s meaningless sounds can’t help but be misinterpreted, probably.
Does this shop have the 585-rpm-drive TP somewhere about here, for running Masters?
Sam vigorous negative-looking denial of comprehension.
Can a mask’s drawn smile widen?” (487)

Some day when I’m thinking clearly again, let’s talk language confusion and wordlessness and communication and comprehension and deadly result in Infinite Jest, shall we?
And some day when I have the energy, let’s pull all of the malalexical* fumblings of Orin and Lentz and others, mmmmkay?
Until then, make the broom and police lock images go away.

*I know there’s a real word for using the wrong word, but other than aphasia 9the word, not my own condition, though, haha, now that’s funny) I can’t think of the real word and I’m not trying to be clever, I swear, I’m just trying to get a quote of the day on the books then go to bed. Malapropism? Something? Shows how far I’ve fallen that I’m not leaping into the OED to find out. And kind of don’t care. For now.

“None but the most street-hardened Ennet residents would ever hazard an open crack about the food, which appears nightly at the long dinner table still in the broad steaming pans it was cooked in, with Gately’s big face hovering lunarly above it, flushed and beaded under the floppy chef’s hat Annie Parrot had given him as a dark joke he hadn’t got, his eyes full of anxiety and hopes for everyone’s full enjoyment, basically looking like a nervous bride serving her first conjugal dish, except this bride’s hands are the same size as the House’s dinner plates and have jailhouse tatts on them, and this bride seems to need no over-mitts as he sets down massive pans on the towels that have to be laid down to keep the plastic tabletop from searing” (469).

Everybody loves a bad-cook joke. Especially a bad-cook-with-jailhouse-tatts joke.

Can anyone tell I’m just posting Wallace quotes because I can’t think any clear thoughts of my own lately? No? Good. Just checking.

“Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection” (460).

If it’s not prescriptive linguistics with this guy it’s math. He’s so dreamy.

“The state employees who supervise the shelter at night are dead-eyed and watch soft-core tapes behind the desk and are all around Gately’s size and build, and he’s been approached to maybe work there himself, nights, supervising, more than once, and has said Thanks Anyway, and always screws right out of there at 0801h. and rides the Greenie back up the hill with his Gratitude-battery totally recharged” (435).

Um, yeah he does. I longed for my own Green line ride out of the head space the shelter put me in. Infinite Jest often jolts me out of complacency with the Hitting Bottom stories and the in-need-of-medical-intervention episodes and the dysfunctional-family-goes-off-the-deep-end sadness. But the Shattuck Shelter for Homeless Males is a bit more affecting that I can handle right now.

Join the conversation at Infinite Summer.

A third political party finally achieved viability “the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear” (382).

Oh, well, we need not fear that future for a while, eh fear-based politics?

*sigh*. Go read Infinite Jest. With us at infinite summer.

“How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting? Because ever one of the seminal little mini-epiphanies you have in early AA is always polyesterishly banal, Gately admits to residents” (358).

I’m so behind on quotes, y’all. But here are the selections for the three days I’ve missed.

re: Eschaton’s rulebook
it “is about as long and interesting a J. Bunyan’s stupefying Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, and a pretty tough nut to compress into anything lively (although every year a dozen more E.T.A. kids memorize the thing at such a fanatical depth that they sometimes report reciting mumbled passages under light dental or cosmetic anesthesia, years later). But if Hal had a Luger pointed at him and were under compulsion to try, he’d probably start by explaining that each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the game’s global arsenal represents a 5-megaton thermonuclear warhead” (322).
[Bonus points for knocking Pilgrim’s Progress, for the dental anesthesia, and for the narrative framing trope of ‘if the character had a gun to his head’. Silliness. Part of the beauty of this text is that it bounces from gut-wrenchingly depressed to silly in a couple of pages.

To wit: in the middle of the roll-playing thermonuclear war that is geek-athlete Interdependence Day frivolity, “a couple ostensible world leaders run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with their open mouths directed at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall’s first snow” (332).

“…even though Schtatt deep down believes that the substance-compulsion’s strange apparent contribution to Hal’s erumpent explosion up the rankings has got to be a temporary thing, that there’s like a psychic credit-card bill for Hall in the mail, somewhere, coming and is sad for him in advance about whatever’s surely got to give, eventually” (270).

Boy, oh boy, even within the spoiler limits we can say foreshadowing…like foresmacking us up against the head, given the opening scene.