touchdown.

I still love my Pack. Hell of a game. I've got mad respect for a QB that can shake off such a bad first half the way Wilson did, and his boys pulled out all the stops; crazy as their fucking crazy fans drive me, Seattle is a team to whom I'm never sad to see Green Bay lose. I'll be backing the Hawks in the Super Bowl for sure. The Pats were the last team to win back-to-back NFL championships, if I've got my data right; let's see if Seattle can't wipe that record AND hand the East Coast's second-nastiest case of scabies (Big Ben's boys always get the top spot there) its walking papers in one fell swoop.

(it's worth mentioning at this point that, if you didn't know it already, though I myself was born in the chain-link coziness of White Center, my family is Wisconsin born and bred, and, like alcoholism, vowel lengthening, and a fervor for dairy, the Packers run in my blood.)

After my post-Infinite Jest-not-that-traumatic-but-still-stressful-disorder, I flirted briefly with a linguistics text that turned out to be - horror of horrors - not really intended for peop le with any linguistics training at all!!, churned through Laline Paull's unique but messy The Bees in un unexpectedly tidy 48 hours (reports of "Watership Down with bees!" were greatly exaggerated) and ended up panickedly speed-downloading Haruko Murakami's IQ84 via Amtrak Wi-Fi. And that's where I am now, following weirdly calm people down staircases of distorted spacetime, looking out my window at backlit blackness from the train tracks, listening to Ladytron because that's what I do, and realizing it's somehow Sunday all over again.

The youngster to my right keeps eyeballing my beer - Amtrak beer! Only $RIDICULOUS a serving, and thank god it's local - and I feel like he's teetering on the brink of asking me to pick him up a Something if I go back for more, but forget that guy. He can just be patient and wait til he's, oh, say, 16, like I'm pretty sure I did. (memory's fuzzy from all the beer since then.)

The train whistles arbitrarily, but passionately, and I empathize. Sometimes it's hard to control yourself when you know you've got a captive audience.



It's taken me most of the day to come to terms with it, but I'd do it with Richard Sherman, and I'd even let him be on top, and dude, I'd look right into those crazy eyes and ask him math questions, and he would answer them accurately because motherfucker is way smart.

But I don't think he wants to do it with me because he only has like half a left hand right now and that is a bigger concern what with the Super Bowl and all.

dirty.

"That no single moment is in and of of itself unendurable."

-- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

"To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the Universe."

--Frank Herbert, Dune

We are forced to acknowledge that, although it's difficult, it's possible; so we are robbed of the license to claim it undoable, deliberating only between Abiding (Wallace's term; "hunkering down" in "the space between heartbeats") and admitting/claiming that the struggle is more than we were prepared for, and we're through trying, thankyouverymuch, that's all, folks.

The surprise should never be that some people choose the latter; it should be that anyone chooses the former.

After approx. 4 months behind the pages, I finished Infinite Jest this afternoon, and now, I confess, I'm not sure what to do with myself. The thousand-plus-page book became less a book than a state of being; a long-term relationship with a view of the world that simultaneously thrilled and terrified me. Now that I've turned the last page, is that relationship over? Do I simply assess who I now am as a person, and move on from here? I feel like I've been fundamentally changed - like I am not occupying the same space I did four months ago. Am I the only one who has noticed?

The copy of Infinite Jest I finished belongs to the same person to whom I recently lent my copy of Dune. I don't have the faintest idea when I'll see this person again. This lack of knowing nibbles away a little piece of me, every minute I'm too slow to stop myself from remembering it.

You shouldn't hate something you don't know. You can't truly hate something you've never even had the guts to love.

It seems lately every time I open my mouth, pick up a pen, or touch a keyboard to write anything that doesn't include variable declarations, I am assailed by these same swords of guilt, of shame; don't air your dirty laundry in public, they've always said. As someone who thinks of their writing as readable, I think of my laundry as "well-worn," "artfully rended," "faded, in a trendy manner" rather than "dirty" per se. That's wrong, though. It's all just as dirty as the next guy's last day's leavings. I just don't see any reason not to throw it on this world's great towering laundry heap, the Concavity of our collective pain, great fans of prose blowing the stinking feelings northward, towards a captive audience that will maybe one day put a stop to it, once and for all.

bewilderment.

Last night, I was restless and achy, so I went to see Inherent Vice at the local Regal.

The only Thomas Pynchon work I've read was The Crying of Lot 49, recommended to me by K, whose recommendations are less "recommendations" than "demands, on the level of a hostage-taker negotiating with the frantic family." Luckily for me, I loved Crying. It was a dizzying stumble through a city and maybe a brain or two; a weird adventure of the sort one might have on a daily basis without even noticing, except this time someone noticed; only tolerable because the protagonists were as confused by the proceedings as I the reader was, and if they could accept it, slammed as they were right into the middle of it, then by golly, so could I.

Inherent Vice is, if the movie's anything to go off of, more of the same—and devastatingly, thrillingly so. As noted, I haven't read the book off of which this film is based. I've been told, though, that Crying is fairly typical of Pynchon's writing style, so I approached Vice as a film with the hope of seeing on the screen the atmosphere I so loved in Crying—that franticness, that befuddlement, those moments of unsettling tenderness and heartbreaking humanity interspersed with pure, unadulterated drugged-out pants-on-head crazy. And boy, oh boy, did I ever see exactly all of those things.

Word on the street is that Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the screenplay by typing up the entire novel and selectively deleting. Paul Thomas Anderson himself being pants-on-head crazy, it wouldn't surprise me if this were true. It also doesn't surprise me to hear that Pynchon gave the screenplay his blessing. I can't adequately judge the screenplay, having never read the book, but to my uneducated eyes, it was a thing of goddamned brilliance.

Pynchon's language is weird in the truest Dr. Thompson sense of the word. Like most of my favorite authors, he writes like a man whose vocabulary of experience is on a level above that of most people you know—because it is. He's one of those people who sees the fantastic, the diabolical, and the insane in every aspect of mundane life. But, while most of us get driven to distraction if we notice the madness, Pynchon nods, makes note of it, and shrugs it off, ambling through the madcap acid trip that is everyday life with the dry observational humor of a society lady at a cocktail party. Depending on who you ask, Pynchon is either babbling to himself in a corner, or the chillest cat you've ever laid eyes on, and that's why I love the guy. And who better to star in a film based on this dude's writing than the ultimate babbling cool cat, Joaquin Phoenix?!

Joaquin Phoenix is Vice's protagonist, a dude who fixes things in spite of himself, a mild disaster of a human being who bumbles his way into every possible fiasco and yet still comes... if not out on top, at least out. Phoenix's character is a hero to every loser and a shining example of what's wrong with society for anyone who's ever spent most of their time obsessing over the finer nuances of Right and Wrong... people like, for example, the jerkface jock-cop (who just might just want to be loved) portrayed to creased-pantsed perfection by Josh Brolin.

Setting Phoenix and Brolin opposite one another—seeing them act together, in the dialogue scenes of which they are, intelligently, given quite a number—is just a fucking treat. The audience is paralyzed with hilarity at the sheer nonsense of their interactions; the petty jabs, the petulance, the sheer vitriol, obviously loathing each other with every denim-and-corduroy fiber of their beings. Yet simultaneously, we see that these two men have every reason to love each other, every reason to be best friends, brothers even, because who among us hasn't had that one best friend who was as different from us as we could imagine, whom we hated the same way we loved, fiercely and without reserve? That's Phoenix and Brolin's relationship—except instead of coming out hugging, they came out of that ring swinging, and it's beyond repair, what they might have had, and that kills us to see, even as it brings tears of laughter to our eyes.

I could write all night long about this film, I really could, but most of it would be gibberish and no doubt inferior to the experience you, dear reader, could take away just by going to see the damn thing yourself—or, hell, by reading the novel! Read Pynchon, you losers. You read me, for chrissake, and I'm peanut shells on the floor of a dive bar compared to him. Novel or no novel, GO SEE THIS FILM, I urge you; revel in the languid tidepools of its language, the sudden cold-water plunges of its humor, the seasick dizziness of its honesty. Don't try to chart its path; let it wash over you, curling waves of feeling and nonsense and profundity, and emerge damp and rimed with salty cynicism, flush with swells of passion that you might later let break, cyclical, crashing, on the shores of your mundane, weird everyday life.

recognition.

If at some point I were to lie dying - unlikely, I don't like to lie down for too long, aggravates the back and slows thought - and if during that time a nameless Someone were to ask, offhandedly, "What did you do?" - with the understanding that whatever I did was about to give way permanently to all the things I had done - I would say:

I loved too well, or not well enough, depending on the season and the weather and on the voice of the person to whom I proclaimed love; I tried too much, too often, with too little commitment to the yield of the effort, and as a result, I was always three-quarters-pleased with half a result; I never forgot anything, no matter how hard I tried, and I was constantly straining to recall something I suspected might have been a dream.

There's no way around it but to admit that I miss everything I've ever lost, because if I didn't miss it, it wouldn't really be a loss, it'd just be something that isn't around anymore, and I probably wouldn't even remember it.



These are all just words, but I like the look of them here better than I like the sound of them in my head.

the best loves last less than a season.

"We all have to decide for ourselves how much sin we can live with."

My brother lent me the first four seasons of Boardwalk Empire on DVD, and I've been indulging over the past week, when I'm not deep in the HTML5 trenches.

It's a good show; thus far, not a great show. I've just finished season one. Perhaps it improves, as things of this nature frequently do. The fact of the matter is, HBO has forced itself to hold itself to a higher-than-usual standard. Ever since the age of Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The Wire and the like, HBO can no longer be content with "yeah, sure, it's a good show". Now HBO must strive for "I would rather watch this show than fulfill several of the basic functions which underlie my continued existence in modern society." HBO's little cross to bear, I suppose.

One thing this final episode of S1 has elicited in me is the thunderous realization of how intoxicating it is when someone tells you that you know them in a way no one else does. Think on this. It's a drug, really, isn't it? What this person - and always, it is a person with whom you are involved, entwined, in whom you are somehow Invested - tells you is that you, YOU, of ALL people, you who deserve nothing (if you think of yourself the way I and others think of themselves) who have somehow groped and grabbed and bumbled through the muck of their clean exterior to the bubbling pure swamp beneath - to a place that, for whatever reason, yours are the only eyes to see. Maybe once, another person saw this - the more tragedy, then! - or maybe not; one way or another, now, you are this place's sole lessee, its sole resident besides the Owner, your beloved, the one who let you in the door. And what a drunken hideous roller-coaster rush this gives you, the knowledge of what you know, though frequently you have no idea what they mean when they tell you its meaning.

And the sick, reeling horror, the drop in the gut, the recoil when you realize that none of this is of any use to you, and that in the end, you, being as you are, human, keep only that for which you have use.