— with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’
– David Foster Wallace, ”Good Old Neon”
In a way I had already been considering the idea of myself as an opponent. No doubt because of Infinite Jest though, now I think about it. This Hanoiain purgatory has highlighted the need to push forward, now bereft of the tangible charge through the countryside that filled the gap so easily. For me this means the need to write. And perhaps work out so I can be a ripped cunt.
But then why should I need a reason to be happy? A few neurochemicals seems to solve the problem quicksharp, and without having to have accomplished x amount of things each day. If a state of mind is all I'm after than that should, in a way, be the easiest thing in the world. Just believe that I'm happy. Change the prerequisite to being alive. I mean that is the goal in the end, right? The one we've lost sight of: to survive. It's just that it's so easy and taken as a given in this modern era our minds, which are made to keep us alive, need something else to gnaw away at. But it's unnecessary. Our father's fathers have solved the problem in advance. So maybe I can work on that: being happy to be alive. Sounds easy, no?
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