A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

I think everyone on earth should drink alcohol except for me. I’m kidding, of course, but given the date today I wanted to state for the record that this isn’t a preachy missive or an irreligious altar call. It’s just a piece of graph paper with a couple of lines drawn on it and a circle around a seemingly inconsequential intersection. A moment when my life had so many different fingers on the little wooden planchette that I couldn’t tell who was moving it around the Ouija board and who was just as spooked out as I was.

I hadn’t read him yet when someone came into our sophomore American Lit class in the Fall of 2008 and announced that “Dave Wallace has passed away, they think it’s suicide” or something to that effect, but it seemed pretty important to everyone else in the room. I didn’t realize then just how strong of a following his work had, or how many people shortened his name to imply a certain kind of familiarity with him. Looking back now, I can’t think of many writers from the last couple of decades that more people have pretended to be like than David Foster Wallace (myself included), and it would be a few more years until I understood why.

I didn’t get around to reading him until 2014 when I picked up a copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a collection of essays that included the title piece documenting the primal gore of a 7 day tour of duty through a Caribbean cruise. I put it down several times because I felt like the Hubble Space Telescope has been flipped around and trained on my house, but by the time I finished it I was hooked. It was the first time I’d ever wondered if hell might have a conga line.

I bring him up today because I realized last week that I stopped drinking on 9/13, one day after the anniversary of his death. That doesn’t mean anything obviously, at least not outside of my own skull, but it did remind me that a few years before I stopped, I threw a party on 9/12 in his honor called Consider The Red Lobster and hosted it at one of their local chapters. I dressed up and bought books as prizes for 1st. 2nd, and 3rd place for stuff like Best Dressed or Best Disaffection, and I wasn’t at all surprised when only 3 of the 20 RSVPs showed up.

I didn’t get fucked up that day or do anything stupid, but as I was driving home the whole thing felt a little bit too on the nose. Trying and in some senses failing to celebrate a guy who had regularly tried and in some senses failed to find much worth celebrating about modern life felt unintentionally astute. And the truth of it was probably that the whole thing was just a poorly planned party serving as a cover for wanting to eat cajun shrimp pasta and impress some girls with books, and I was only upset because none of them showed up.

The connection point here is going to take a moment, but I feel the same way about not drinking anymore. Which is to say, giving it up often feels accidentally profound. I stopped for a very basic reason: I wanted to stop wanting to die all the time and this felt like only obvious way out. The wonky stuff that came afterwards doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter that I don’t go to AA anymore, or that I don’t use the word sober. My reasons for those things are just a distraction for me from the crux of this issue, which is that alcohol doesn’t have a place in my life anymore and regular self-confrontation does.

DFW’s work (see what I mean?) gave me one blistering example after another of the importance of describing something as it actually is, and I first resonated with it because at the time I was waking up to just how willing and capable my own mind was of ripping my spine out through my stomach. I was in one of those seasons where I just needed somewhere constructive to panic, and the idea that a super-computerish capacity for self-hatred could be channeled into Fabergé egg-like essays on anything imaginable felt like a way out. In reality, though, it served as something closer to a warning and when it came time for me to stop getting lost in the sauce, I found that I needed to stop thinking and start feeling. My personal historian, rustling around in his little apartment in the attic of my mind, has called down the stairs after reading that and said something to the effect that my deep love for emotional avoidance is probably what got me into that level of drinking in the first place, and that what I blamed for years as existential despair or philosophical rage was just plainclothes, unsexy personal grief that needed to be sent to the processing plant. Whatever, dude.

If there is a point to any of this, it’s only that there are many different paths up the same mountain of healing, and all of them seem to contain the same lessons and the same degree of discomfort. In my case, not making a big deal about the process is the way that works for me to keep taking the process seriously. And I wanted to pause after all this time and say how grateful I am for the last 18 months, and the many people who have helped me along the way, and that I’m so glad I found a collection of essays stuffed with nuclear-grade neuroses all those years ago.