Blog: Writings That Are Not Drug Induced But Have Nothing To Do With Anything Especially David Foster Wallace

New idea for character: carrot man. Second thoughts: perhaps limited in emotional aspects, but possibilities for merchandising good. Read today that David Foster Wallace died. Strange because I read it today, but it happened a week ago, but at least my world-awareness gap is getting smaller; earlier this month I read that Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes had died on the same weekend, a month before I read about it, which made me feel bad, but not as bad as their loved ones, and perhaps for different reasons.

Hayes and Mac had just completed work on a movie about a man whose only joy in life is composing internet blogs about dearly departed celebrities, or dead celebrities as people with other joys in life call them. In the film the man (unemployed, alive) had an unhealthy appetite for loneliness but constantly failed at it, acting out by going out all the time and meeting lots of people. The man, not apparently based on the screenwriter or any of his family or friends or internet favourites, despite being memorable to all those who remembered him, had the strange fear that he was completely unmemorable; that even his very own mother would just walk past him on the street, even if he was bleeding from the eyes and she recognised him. The man also had a private paranoia that there was very little money in his bank account, even when there was none at all. To assuage this, the man retreated into the internet, like Hollywood Star in one of those 80’s sci-fi movies where special effects are hand-drawn. The rest of the picture dissolves into self-reference and the greater bulk of the audience are lost, with only those who can find a good book or supermarket brochure on their person not realising that the final twenty minutes don't make sense.

Apparently its Citizen Kane meets David Bowie; sad about Mac and Hayes though.

More thoughts on carrot man: definitely a promising idea. Refer to Coles docket from January; I remember I left another vegetable themed character there who would go nicely with carrots.

Have begun painting my nails with this cleverly titled don’t-chew-your-nails paint, which looks just like a bottle of nail-polish, which seems flammable enough to add fuel to the fires of my masculinity, ongoing ever since I began walking like my first female “crush.”

I’m always too shy to admit it, but when I hear about a celebrity who’s died I feel kind of like the first time a grown-up gave me free money. I sit there, helpless as to when the good news will next return. My days are long and quiet, and aside from packages arriving bearing the latest Bryce Courtney, which I need because I have a squeaky door that disturbs my writing, all that keeps me going is the hope that each dawn will be greeted of something significant.

For what is more significant than dying? I mean, not many things we have no control over, aside from being born. Everything else we can influence to happen to some degree: getting married, getting a job, voting to encourage the politicians; its all stuff that in a free and right-thinking society we have full control over. But I have to admit that aside from writing another book, dying is one of the only ways I can get any excitement out of David Foster Wallace; and I find that sad, which is why I say I’m sad he’s died. But J.D. Salinger is another story. That bastard has for years stubbornly refused to let me read any of his unpublished books or died, so I get nothing from him.

If I ever do something significant, I’d like it to be very reckless; like wearing a bath-robe and slippers to the shops; because I think I’ve been through my sensible period. The only times I’m scared about are the puritan period and the idealistic period. As soon as I start shouting at dinner parties because of baby seal farming or baby Jesus farming just shoot me dead with a witty insult and bury me in hypocrisy.

Final decision on carrot man, and any derivations of the vegetable theme: I retract all these ideas and deny I ever had them.