Yay Thanksgiving and my mind wandering.

At the time of writing this I'm still recovering from the feast and basking in the familiar sunbeam of Long Island. Though it did take a record of 4 hours for me to realize how much I dislike the people around here. Maybe the distress of the 9 hour work day has destroyed my patience with idiots. I don't really care much for most of the people I went to high school with because I think my disdain with the way that teenagers treat people has grown as I've gotten older. In reality, it's probably not very fair since I'm certain at least some of them have changed over the past 5 years or so but that's hardly reason for me to go out and seek their approval now. This seems especially stubborn considering how profoundly I feel like I've changed since high school. Looking back, I'd have been pretty OK of where I am today all things considered.

I've been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace lately and I'm not sure if he's a certified genius or his thoughts just articulate my feelings way more than I ever could. It's rare to find someone with such a refined literary and mathematical mind and to realize how much he suffered due to this is extremely disconcerting to the nature of human psyche. Hemingway himself said "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." Unfortunately in the context of DFW's life, that remains alarmingly true.

They say that ignorance is bliss, but I can't imagine a world where I wouldn't be compelled to at least try to understand my surroundings or where I curb my awareness on the off chance that it makes me happier. Anyways, here's a passage from DFW's unfinished book The Pale King, possibly the last thing he ever wrote. Dem words, man

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the AM heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”