A Thought Which Has Surged Since David Foster Wallace Killed Himself -by Noah Mogey

When she told me she was not happy I asked why and she told me she did not know. I thought I did so I told her it probably had something to do with her maturing and that she was realizing the negative side of maturing which involves the realization that she can't take her best friends' seriously anymore and that so much of what everyone does is petty and ridiculous and should not be taken seriously. But it is taken seriously and it is petty and ridiculous.

My friend Amanda was depressed and became even more depressed when she read your story Good Old Neon. She told me that Ernest Hemingway believed happiness to be the rarest thing in intelligent people. I want to be happy and to die a white haired dinosaur who goes on cruises and finds solace in micromanaged prepackaged entertainment and who takes seriously who he is and looks back on his life and feels it was worth it and was noble but I also want to make things and to see who I am and who other people are and get it and not feel like an asshole. But Ernest Hemingway shot himself in the head and David Foster Wallace hung himself¹. Last Friday, I sat silently in someone else's dining room eating a burrito and now a week later it occurs to me that I should have cried. It isn't a choice.

1. Last Friday Charlie sent me a text message that read dude DFW died and at the time I was sitting in at the dinner table which I promptly left and ran upstairs and in a trance searched the internet ignoring people and my burrito dinner cooling downstairs. Two or three years ago I read the newspaper and in it was a ten page article about Roger Federer [N.B.:August 20^th, 2006, precisely. Federer won Wimbledon a bit before that. He beat Nadal badly. He looked like he knew what he was doing and Nadal looked like he lifted a lot of weights. Nadal beat him this year.] whose talent I thought merited the time and because I like it and because the writer seemed silly when I later followed my mother dutifully to the library I grabbed one of your books and that night pruning in the bathtub I lapped up the terrors of luxury and state fairs. In november two thousand six I bought Infinite Jest because it was long and heavy and these things impress me. I love to read books and I love them and I love reading and I think that the catalyst for that lies quietly somewhere in your footnotes but I hate that I hate myself for liking books and I hate that I cant write this without hating myself the narcassist.