Hello, friends. This week I’m writing about passion and its obverse, which for me has become a kind of emotional and psychic listlessness akin to boredom without the yawning smugness of boredom. I’m not calling it depression—the world is colorless and all that; I remember what that’s like and this isn’t it. No, it’s more that lately I’ve found myself disinterested in so much, unable to get exercised or even angry about, you know, the news, the world, life. Reminds me of a professor I once had in college who told me back then that as you get older, you put on blinkers—not by choice but by necessity—so that you can get through your days, your job, your parenting, etc. I remember greeting this news with scorn. The day I don’t burst into flames when reading the paper is a day I don’t want to have. And yet here we are.
In my bed, instead of a breathing human next to me, I’ve got books. Seven, ten, fifteen—all started, all discarded. I want to say my reading life has become a wasteland because of my new mattress topper—a spread of memory foam that remembers nothing, on the contrary it receives all my juts and moods anew every night—but I actually think the problem is me.
One, two pages in, I get bored. I am boring!
One thing that helps with the problem of feeling increasingly divested from everything important to me, I’ve noticed, is travel. Which suggests my listlessness isn’t comprehensive so much as contextual (yay?). So: I try to travel whenever I can on my budget. And over the past few weeks, I’ve decided I should go to Alaska with my kid. On a cruise, no less. I’ve never been on a cruise. I get sea sick. And I think cruises are appalling, based on little more than the idea of being trapped with a bunch of people in the middle of the ocean being appalling.
To help me decide if I should go, I decided to read David Foster Wallace’s essay on the subject of cruising—on the subject of a cruise he took in 1995, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” Now, I have a pretty tenderized relationship with DWF’s generation of white male writers. I used to revere them. I thought they were so clever. The way they brandished their grief, their pain and self-loathing like a flag—it seemed authentic to me when I was in my twenties. It seemed real and funny and poignant. Then I got older and all of it started to seem precious, self-indulgent, and almost criminal in its neglect of anything that wasn’t white and privileged. Blech.
So, I can’t say I expected this essay to be anything but the above but who cares because I wasn’t expecting to get through more than two pages before succumbing to the self-annihilating embrace of the memory foam, anyway.
And yet! I read and read. Every sentence a small universe. Every experience so vibrant and, yeah, anguishing for DFW, which anguish felt authentic again, if only for the depressing reason that DFW took his own life about 14 years after writing this essay. Also in the middle of all this anguish: levity. DWF was hilarious. He’s still hilarious. I laughed out loud. Turns out cruise culture is about nine times more appalling than I thought.
Tonight I’ll finish the essay and then probably go catatonic again for a while, at least until we go to Alaska. Who on earth would book a cruise after reading this essay? Me, it turns out. The ecosystem of the cruise may well be appalling, but appalling can also be fascinating and alive. Which is what I’m looking for. Thanks, DFW.
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In Name Your Shame for the week, again I got nuthin. Which just means I spent the whole week with my head down, learning nothing (insert: weary sigh).
And now: My first poll! Because I just noticed this option in the drop-down.
If you’re enjoying these weekly dispatches, you know what you can do:
Very relatable. Made me smile with recognition!
In 58 years, I’ve gone on one cruise, a reunion after the family matriarch died. I’ve never gone again, but Alaska? I might try that. And vacations cheer me up too! It’s like plugging in again, alive!
Cheers,
KK