Apres moi, le deluge.

Tonight the car was running on empty as I picked up Ransom, delivering him from the squalor of moving out to a brief respite of dinner and then an incongruous trip to Wal-Mart, where every conceivable utensil and cleaning and maintenance item was gutted by the droves of people all over this town moving out of their places and into new ones, which when you think about it this is a pretty big town with a garish cross-section of people and ages and ethnicities all trying to serve their own agendas while attempting to maintain the civility and generosity for which this region is known. But then, anyway, I dropped Ransom off and the needle was on E and I dropped the car into neutral as I crested the hill that turned Greenwood into Myrtle, my old stomping ground, and cruised the few hundred feet into the parking lot of the Kum & Go at the bottom of the hill for gas and beer to serve us well later in Portugal, this convenience store our old mecca, staffed still by mild-mannered Joe, who was pleasantly surprised that I dropped in, asking after Neil and Selena as always, which jarred me back into nostalgia and wondering as I drove away from the place, marveling that this is the same life within which two years ago I drank cheap wine with those two kids in a small cozy apartment just up the hill in those cookie-cutter dwellings, going there night after night for refuge and silliness and never thinking, or maybe denying, that it could ever end with the simple but far-reaching decisions on the parts of Mssr Stone and Mme Magram to relocate to the left coast. And so. It works out, it always does, on myriad porches all over the continent.

So, Kat. You’re speaking of course of the classic fable “Appointment In Samarra,” most famously retold by H Somerset Maugham. Now it’s getting referenced in all kinds of sanguine paeans to Operation Iraqi Freedom (TM), but it still remains one of the best examples of irony I know.

There’s a special brand of delusion I used to know all too well, but I dropped it along the adopted highways patrolled by your cleaning crews. But now I’ve got my own space to fill, the reassurance of added affinities, cotillions in silver ballrooms, my imaginary sons and daughters. This particular strain of grief cannot be identified by time or predictions hammered home amid arrogant replies. In the cleaning of the house or the settling of accounts, we’ll surely miss something that will surprise us later.

Okay. So I promise that my excerpts from Infinite Jest will be few and far between, and I’m not just using them to be a prick, but that I’m including them because they are like little nuggets of wonderful advice and observation and mirth and a somehow familiar sagacity, and the passages I actually end up including are very down-to-earth and just plain easy to ID with and pretty much True, however you slice it.

“It’s the same Denial Gately can see at work in the younger BU or -C students when he’s driving … when they’ll fucking walk right out in the street against the light in front of the car, whose brakes are fortunately in top shape. Gately’s snapped to the fact that people of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they’re immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they’re exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else. They’ll piss and moan your ear off if somebody else fucks with the rules, but they don’t deep down see themselves subject to them, the same rules. And they’re constitutionally unable to learn from anyone else’s experience: if some jaywalking BU student does get splattered on Comm. or some House resident does get his car towed at 0005, your other student’s or addict’s response to this will be to ponder just what imponderable difference makes it possible for that other guy to get splattered or towed and not him, the ponderer. They never doubt the difference—they just ponder it. It’s like a kind of idolatry of uniqueness. It’s unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for him to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry.”