To David Foster Wallace

So who’s an asshole now, Mr. Wallace? I mean, your selfishness is jaw-dropping. In like, I am shocked at how selfish you are, or were. To just think that you could take yourself out when there were so many people waiting for you, depending on you, almost, for their, like, sanity, as a voice of, well, sanity and rational calm logical reasonableness -- a refuge from all the shit the shit rain that rains daily in our collective world community here today. Who are we supposed to turn to now? Thompson is gone, in the same selfish way, but he had already seen his best and we all knew it—except for some of that ESPN stuff, which could still be, at times, brilliant, magical. George Saunders is still producing but at a painfully small volume, and only one collection of essays so far, a place that you made really outstanding. And now the vultures are circling, picking off what is left – the Commencement Address, some guy from Rolling Stone, the stump of your half finished next work, which, did you really want to see that published? This stuff is not at all anywhere near adequate in terms of what we need to sustain us. Eggers made a nice try with that book about floods, but that is just not going to be sufficient, you know? And we would have had that anyway. You thought you could just, that you had dominion over your soul that you could just—don’t you remember that passage in The Recognitions where Stanley points out that – okay, I know you are not Catholic, but damn it, you don’t have to be religious, you don’t even have to be a deist to – the idea still applies—the principle is the same—for whom the bell tolls, y’know? Every diminution is a diminution of me too. Humanity is The Borg, don’t you see. Didn’t you see that? How can you not have seen that? You just can’t take yourself off line without, without, without saying good-bye for crissake. Its not even – the rules of societal politeness have a purpose, okay? They have a purpose and that purpose is to, to, … the purpose is to bring order to disorder, you see, as a salve for the rest of us when we realize that the world is random. If there is no order, we need to impose order. That is what humanity is about, to start with. And part of that order is a set of social rules that require greetings and salutations, addresses and ceremonies. It’s what works, for us, is what we have collectively figured out, apparently. Like that stuff they do in AA, which you seem to know very well. We need it. This bringing of order. So don’t’ rain on our parade, okay. Stay in step and let us know when you feel like checking out so we can, well, we won’t stop you necessarily, because that would open a whole new can of worms and the issues surrounding right to death are no where near being anything like “resolved”, like I don’t even think that word would ever be useful in the context of the societal terror of having to face questions for which different groups have arrived at different answers and the answer for one group is going to be an affront to the other group, which is what the Founding Fathers, were, I think, trying to avoid in the first place. So anyway, David, if I may call you that, and I feel like I have earned that right now that I have plowed through your “gargantuan, mind-altering comedy” to quote the book jacket, and thoroughly enjoyed, but I-will-be-the-first-to-admit, not necessarily understood, every word of, your essays, but certainly the gist, certainly; anyway, David, what I am trying to say is that I am really going to miss you, dammit, every day, for what are my own totally selfish reasons.