DFW

So, here's what I wrote last week and then forgot to post:

I feel like I throw the word "absurd" around a lot. Because that's exactly how most of life feels. Especially this past decade where so many things have happened that have no other word that fits. Or, the word that fits sometimes makes things less palatable. There are a few contemporary writers that have made this process of engaging in the absurd without feeling utterly depressed by the cynical nature of what is behind most of what makes life absurd--like, Kurt Vonnegut, or Milan Kundera, or Salman Rushdie, David Sedaris, Chuck Klosterman and right at the top of the heap was David Foster Wallace. And I found out this morning, along with the rest of the world that he is dead--an apparent suicide. It made me really, really sad. In the same way I felt when I heard about so many other people I have been fans of who just up and did themselves in. My friend Liz put it best when I talked to her today: "He just seemed like someone we could be friends with." Which is probably why it made me feel so sad. Like someone who I really enjoyed and someone who was able to put crazy and mundane things into perspective and make me laugh was gone. Granted, you can't be friends with an essay exactly, but it can make you feel a lot less alone. Though I do think that DFW would appreciate my father's bizarre comment on the subject: "Do you think it was, you know, like a weird sex thing?" Not only did I feel completely uncomfortable with my father automatically jumping to that conclusion the fact that we now live in an era of the acceptance of lewd actions as just normal. Not that there's anything normal about how my dad's brain works.