I’ve been on edge all week, as I imagine many people in the Twin Cities, regardless of their political stripe, have been. Emily and I were discussing it today and agreed it’s a combination of the prematurely autumnal weather and back-to-school week and of course the Elephant in the Arena-Shaped Room. Anxieties and fear and rancor had been slowly building for a week / year / decade—until this week they cracked and burst and were then hastily sealed back up again during and after skirmishes and ill-considered displays of indiscriminate force by the authorities and indiscriminate hooliganism by a small faction of so-called anarchists, on either side of what has lately felt like a rapidly widening cultural and ideological chasm.

What I’m about to say might sound shrill and obvious, but violence on anyone’s part—whether that of the government, the police, or the young brash and bored—makes me sick to my stomach, and a week’s worth of that violence only compounds the sickening trumpeting noise already generated by the aforementioned elephant, resulting in a cacophony that has drowned out the majority voice: a voice of thousands of reasonable and peaceful and constructive people who put a lot of hard work into waging intelligent, inspiring opposition. But intelligent opposition (some of it extremely compelling, well-organized, elegant opposition, with a clearly articulated message that’s above reproach and a delivery mechanism that left me in tears on Monday) isn’t nearly as mediagenic as the hype and the chaos, so it’s lost in the din.

But it’s more than that; it’s something more insidious and constant: it’s the sensory overload. Tonight I attended this event so I could write a review of it. It was entertaining and a good time was had by all. (My full review will be a bit longer than that.) Afterward, the Parkway Theatre stayed open so that the three hundred drunk liberals assembled could watch a live feed of McCain’s speech. For a while it was fun listening to the crowd hoot and boo the screen, and the Xcel Center’s oppositional infiltration was exciting, but the cumulative effect was just more nauseous noise, so that I found myself taking fewer notes and just sitting there, occasionally with my head in my hands, occasionally massaging my temples, unable to stomach any more of it from any person, institution, screen, page, blog, or ideological node on the multipartisan spectrum.

In short, I felt edgy, sick, disconnected, lonely, sad, and scared. There have been cultural, political, psychosensory intruders in our midst all week and around the point when the green screen on the cross-shaped stage showed its last hackneyed image, I reached my breaking point.

Also it probably didn’t help that I hadn’t eaten any dinner except for some trail mix and a bag of Whoppers.

So I left. I went outside into the chilly air and called my mom, which made me feel a bit better even as I realized I was regressing to a panicky childlike neediness, reaching for comfort and familiarity. Ideally I would have been lying on my grandmother’s couch in footy pajamas, simultaneously eating cinnamon toast, playing with Transformers, watching the Cosby Show, listening to Tears For Fears, and reading I, Robot, but that wasn’t going to happen. So instead I talked to my mom and felt a little better. Then I went back into the theater, where lo and behold Dan Wilson was playing “Closing Time” by himself on his acoustic guitar to a small crowd of smiling people sitting on the couches in the front rows, and I felt even better.

And better still, somehow, upon driving back into the heart of the beast of the lion’s den of the hellmouth that was downtown Saint Paul this week, parking and walking upstream against sidewalkfuls of drunk Republicans—loud beefy guys and tall severe Aryan women, flooding the bars and swarming the cabs and snogging against store windows—so I could hang out at a bar across the street from the Xcel Center with the editors of Wonkette until way too late on a school night. And when I drove home I again took refuge: listening to Crowded House and Jawbox and, yes, Tears For Fears, remembering why I love these cities, and why I want them back so desperately.

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“Now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die—and let its children die, each one—for the so-called perfect Entertainment, this film. … Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes. We will make only available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to partake or choose not to.” (318)

Wallace also presages the Bush era (very cleverly and presciently, by having a future [2009] character voice a fictionalized version of a real-world eventuality that hadn’t yet transpired in 1992-1995, when Wallace was writing the book) and the Bush doctrine’s response to 9/11, when Marathe says, “Your Sans-Christe Gentle was in this one part correct: ‘Someone is to blame‘” (319). An enemy must be identified, and blame must be placed. But never internally; never on the Self. Always externally, on the Other. Us versus them, with us or against us, etc.

Likewise with the platitudinous appeals to Freedom, wielded like a cudgel against dissent and dissatisfaction: “Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do” (320).

So what happens when no one tells our precious selves what to do, and we are more or less able to do pretty much whatever we want? We confuse the ability to do something with an imperative to do it. Self-will run riot, in the language of AA, produces a nation of people out of control, indulging every appetite without limits. Marathe observes the way postmodern American culture turned its back on God and religion during the latter half of the 20th century: “Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples” (319).

By Marathe’s lights, we threw the baby out with the bathwater—getting rid of spirituality’s good bits along with religion’s bad ones, supplanting our temples with the religion of the Self and the primacy of individual appetite fulfillment until we had no spiritual compass. “And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible” (320).

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I came home from work and even though it was late, like approaching eleven, I decided to go for a run, which is terrible for my sleep but pretty much excellent for everything else. With the kind of week I’ve had, I needed it more than I needed sleep. And earlier in the day I’d taken a sad nap (a phenomenon I promise I’ll explain and expound upon at some point in the future) and I’d spent much of my shift drinking caffeinated beverages, so I had some energy to burn.

On this run I decided to follow my new longest and therefore best route, approximately 4 miles, even though it takes me down some poorly-lit paths, and to try out Path Tracker on my iPhone, because I am a jerk like that.

The moon was hidden; the sky was whitish pink, like it was going to rain. There was even a little chill in the air, the first sign of autumn. It reminded me of the September eight years ago when I was first getting serious about running and went for a run around Ahrens Park every night after a long exhausting day of student teaching, but that’s neither here nor six dozen of the other.

I ran across the Stone Arch Bridge and back north along the west bank of the river, listening to the usual: Subtle, and Battles, and LCD Soundsystem, and also this hot-off-the-press track by the band I just recently joined—this particular song being the band’s entry in this songwriting competition, at whose website one can apparently vote for us (and I say “us” not so much because I had anything to do with the song’s creation, which I didn’t, but rather because the other night we practiced acoustically and the evening sort of [d]evolved into us sitting around singing as many songs from The Wall as we could remember off the tops of our collective heads, which spontaneous unforced kind of experience makes me feel included in this new group in a valuable way for which I’m unquestionably grateful, in addition to which we have a show here tomorrow at 7, if you want to stop by).

I saw a lot of other people out, some other joggers but mostly couples, literally walking hand in hand, and I ran past them as unobtrusively as possible. (Maybe there’s a metaphor there but I refuse to see it.) I ran back across the river on the Plymouth Street bridge and the breeze was really picking up, coming in off the water.

One of my favorite things about this route is that I can see the Mpls skyline at almost any given point. I came home via Nicollet Island, behind the Grain Belt sign which some enterprising anarchists have decorated thusly, in anticipation of the RNC’s arrival next week. I ran over the railroad tracks and back into my neighborhood through the sprinklers in front of the condos. Path Tracker helped me make this.

And now I’m lying on my couch about to read the Eschaton chapter and drinking a ginger beer. I think I’ve written most if not all of this under the influence of endorphins, and look forward to being disconcerted at my own candor when I read it tomorrow, like a person who wakes up from a bender to recollect the previous night’s embarrassments.

But no, I’m just dragging my feet a little, while at the same time streamlining things: addressing bigger chunks while skipping others, in an effort to really focus on what I’m finding most important and striking during this particular read-through.

pp 219-240 One of a handful of darkly epic chapters, like the 1960 Junior and Senior Incandenza scene, from which all the book’s themes radiate outward, triangles cut from the gasket. The drizzle accompanying Joelle to Molly’s party fits the mood of what she’s about to do, and the description of her walk toward the party portrays a slice of outdoor urban Boston even as the narration deepens in its interiority, going further and further into the mind of the woman about to demap herself.

Joelle is walking toward “that most self-involved of acts, self-cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin’s bedroom or bath and get so high [high, like an arrow that must return to earth] that she’s going to fall down [the descent of the arrow] and stop breathing and turn blue and die” (222)—turning blue, going back into the blue, from where so many things in this book spring but where people go to die and where Joelle’s headed, to join Jim himself—Himself—in the blue.

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