Bizzaro World

Yesterday was a visit from bizzaro world.

The day before yesterday I had been trying to write an optimistic anti-sucide song, called "Don’t Give Up."

Then yesterday morning I called an old friend, who is actually old (in her 80’s), to learn that her old male friend of some 30 years had committed suicide the day before yesterday. He was in great physical pain with no hope of recovery.

I have a bad cold and feeling fit to be tied I picked up the recent New Yorker and thumbing through it I noticed (the workings of the unconscious) out of nowhere the name of a guy I met and talked with a couple of times in my days at San Diego State. He is the good friend of a good friend of mine. Noticing his name I decided to read the article.

The article was about David Foster Wallace, a novelist, who recently committed suicide. The friend of my friend’s name appears because he did a long interview with David Foster Wallace and that interview is cited a number of times by the author of the article in the New Yorker, one D.T. Max (which has to be a pseudonym).

I noticed then that the New Yorker had a short story written by David Foster Wallace. I wasn’t going to read it–and in fact I still haven’t–but–again the unconscious working–I see the word "Tingle." That’s tingle with a capital "T." Here it appears: "He wasn’t from any Tingle that Lane Dane had observed on his own." Or: "Mr. Bondurant’s high hard gray hair was just visible four Tingles down." Maybe if I read the whole story I could figure out, from context, what a Tingle is. But I have no intention of doing so. From the little I can infer by the context supplied in these quotations, a "Tingle" appears to be an object of some kind.

Then Carol called to say she had backed the Honda into a telephone pole.

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