David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008, Vol. 1

Fuck. I'd rather be writing anything else - research grants, instruction manuals, my mother's holiday letter, I promise you anything - than this right now. Anything. Because this will all read conversationally and shitty, something stream-of-consciousness-like, or, in a word, trite, which isn't how you as a person who kinda (unpublicly, or maybe not now) aspires to be a writer, a writer in the vain or Let-Us-Be-Honest exact fucking tradition of a certain celebrated author, ought to write when writing about the death of said author. Fuck.

When you work on Monday mornings, it is best to write off Sunday nights. I'm not sure how the network still draws over a four-point-five for primetime football, but maybe I haven't aged enough to realize that Monday mornings don't matter and that mailing it in on the first day of the week is not only acceptable but expected and maybe moral. So while the rest of the country enjoys more than just the first half-hour of J. Madden and A. Michaels, I am in bed by nine. Which explains why I didn't read D.'s text message until late this afternoon, despite that it was sent last night and unquestionably stamped urgent upon mailing.

"Wallace hanged himself on Friday. Romantic."

No first name. And in this case, no middle name. Just Wallace and suicide and a perfectly appropriate exclamatory adjective. Fuck. One of those moments where you know right away but are very, very afraid to have the Internet confirm what you already know because, despite what your professor continues to warn you, mostly all the information on the Internet is approaching about as true as things are any more these days.

So now it is official. McSweeney's is dark. The Times has a ridiculously un-Wallace-like headline, and its west-coast counterpart is running a pictorial retrospective, which is just a silly thing to do for an author (a fact I am sure the editor must realize and becomes grossly unbearable when the seventh picture turns out to be a scanned image of The Novel). All the print services are running these pieces called "Appreciations," which despite having had my proverbial nose buried in print for over a quarter of a century, I have never seen before. And now I hate them and it.

Here's a macabre admission: I read D.'s text while walking across town to buy cigarettes. (You will forgive me for switching from lights to standards just for today, I am sure.) And as I sat on the steps of store, watching the deep blue sky turn to black and the random patrons pushing in and pulling out of the door with the bells that jingled, I thought twice, "I'd so rather that guy right there be dead than Dave." That's worth an uncomfortable shudder.

And now I am trying to write all of this away, and it is killing me; I only want to curl up, listen to whatever makes me cry, and hold someone who feels the very same.

Which probably seems a bit dramatically unreasonable to you...

But I've read more of Dave's words than those of anyone else, living or - and now this is hard to write - dead...

I simply can't write any more tonight...