Extraneous Etcetera

—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

I've been reading The Pale King for a while. There's been much of the above. It's a Debbie Downer of a book. And, as a fan of Wallace, I feel like it's a slap in the face. Reading it is like hanging out with the guy who is sharp as a whip, but wastes his talents at being brilliant at nothing but making himself and others miserable. Here's where Wallace gets to me. And here's where he disappoints me, as well. I've been a huge fan of him and his writing for years. One thing I love about Wallace's fiction  is the primary need for kindness in this miserable tedium we call our life. That's what fiction is for, he insisted. Fiction reveals to us that, though this life may be meaningless, what we do have is our story. And we are the main characters of our story. And since this story is all we have, it's up to us to make it a great one. It's up to us to be the hero, the one who is conscious of others and considerate and, above all else, kind. That to be petty and unkind was to make yourself the antagonist of your own story. It was to commit the writer's worst sin, to be self-consciously commonplace and uninteresting. That to, say, take every ordinary inconvenience and turn it into a personal insult (the lady taking too long in the shopping line, for instance) was to remain on an unenlightened, default setting. It was to deny your own humanness.

So, of course, I agree with Wallace in the above passage. Our lives are meaningless and insignificant and hopeless. But where I feel betrayed by Wallace is that he's come to decide to end the story there. To end with insignificance and emptiness. I feel betrayed because it was Wallace who taught me so well that even though it may be the darkest it's ever been, there must be an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Gratitude that we have what we have, meaningless and pointless and minuscule as what we have may be. That the point of reading and, most important, the point of a life well lived was to snap ourselves out of this default setting of pettiness and self-importance and see the jest of it all.

of the day (ha if by "day" I mean "late/early ass-bitch whore taint of the morning" then, yeah.), the fact that I made it through a ten-and-a-half hour shift without firebombing the cockeyed fuck out of my place of employ is a testament to my super-human patience and goodwill.

You pretty much can't, is the answer. At least, I'm not going to. Either way, this will be helpful for planning your next bank heist.

Also interesting is the former patrol officer's response:

n a 2008 paper called The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations, a group from Yale University demonstrated that including neuroscientific information in explanations of psychological phenomena makes the explanations more appealing, even if the neuroscientific info is irrelevant.

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation.