David Foster Wallace (1962 - 2008) and a little bit of why I hate the Whiskey a Go Go

“The dreads and dangers of abstract thinking are a big reason why we now all like to stay so busy and bombarded with stimuli all the time. Abstract thinking tends most often to strike during moments of quiet repose.” -DFW

She’d been anticipating this moment: the inevitable occasion in which she would write down her own story, so depressingly authentic, filled with inexhaustible instances of pathetic social encounters, failed conversations that end in awkward silences which seem to hang in the air for hours, until the discomforted other-person would ultimately give her a sort of slight nod and half-smile, and just get up and leave her sitting there without even saying anything, unable even, to make eye contact with the girl, since she always resorted to keeping her eyes on the floor to give the illusion that she was in deep thought when in reality she just couldn’t bear to literally face the truth that she guessed she’d be able to make out from the other person’s sympathetic but bewildered expression if she ever did decide to look up and watch him leave, even though as she stared at the floor, she (the socially challenged one) would involuntarily end up imagining how the other person’s face looked as he silently left her sitting there, alone, while everyone around her would all be engaged in advanced techniques of social fluency. There would be no doubt in her mind of what she would write about – those uncomfortable silences that seemed to accompany her to every social gathering of any kind, the type of social discomfort that led her to cherish moments like this, where she required no external interchange and could just write down all that was wrong with her (and she knew it was a problem that stemmed from her own inability to cope with others and not from their inability to cope with her) to the point (she would hope) where the person reading of her heartbreakingly embarrassing handicap would scribble in red ink in the margins at the side of her assignment, “NEEDS HELP DEVELOPING SPEECH/RHETORICAL SKILLS…OR SOMETHING MORE…?” and would contact her through a non-threatening medium such as e-mail (which she likes better than face-to-face interaction since she doesn’t have to worry about when to smile or laugh or how many ums she needs to throw in to sound unrehearsed), and reassure her, console her, sympathize and grieve with her, and ask her the type of questions that would finally release her in a sort of cathartic way from her self-made psychological dungeon of unmodifiability, the kind that developed as a shy child, labeled “cute” by adults who unknowingly influenced the girl (as a child) to act “cute” until well after individuals should have enough self-confidence and integrity to stop acting “cute” and start acting like grown ups do (and since she was now 22, this would seem to include her), and when the word “cute” would be replaced by the phrase socially underdeveloped or even worse, disturbingly boring. That was it. She no longer wanted to be boring, and in some strange way she believed with all her internally insufficient might, that with this assignment (and, more importantly, with the reader of said assignment*), all of her social misgivings, anxieties, doubts, annoyances, punishments, misfortunes, afflictions . . . would be decisively and permanently resolved. . . .


I thought I was being very clever when I wrote it. Now I know I was just being honest...

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Also, hanging around on Sunset reminded me of the time when Pre-Garden Face (real band name intentionally withheld) played at the Whiskey and I had $40 stolen backstage during a security check. Honestly, who steals from the backpack of a 15-year-old(-looking) girl?

Also, performance-wise, the Whiskey show ranks up there with the AlterKnit lounge on the list of worst unpronounceablebandname moments.



*But who’s to know if this assignment will have a reader at all? The assignment was going to be canceled, after all, and was only necessary to meet some sort of ambiguous writing class requirement, even though the strain that ultimately comes from 5-week summer courses would usually force such a class to cut certain assignments out of the schedule out of the goodness of some Head of the Writing Department’s heart.