You first woke, startled, to find yourself in the living room, with your friend on the couch opposite yours. You felt guilty, because yours was the more comfortable couch—you should have gone to your bed upstairs. She looked cold and uncomfortable—you had taken the only pillow as well as the warmest blanket. She started to wake up. You planned to give her the pillow and the blanket, but she stopped moving. You figured that she had already woken up, that she was pretending to be asleep so you wouldn’t feel bad for waking her.
You wonder how many times in a day people play this awkward game, how frequently we engage in polite poker, where everyone hiding their cards, checks to see how another wants to play, lies to see what someone else wants—and how many times people play this game without questioning themselves, without giving it a second thought. You wonder how many similarly quotidian interactions go by without our awareness, never caught to be caught in a book or in film, never to have that sort of self-reflective awareness that is seemingly always required for one to take pleasure in one’s actions—to notice, to be grateful for, one’s environment.
It is as if we are constantly flying through microcosms, leaping through interstitial infinities, and are unaware of the galactic dance we perform with each forgetful thought. You often think about time this way, as a kind of bounded frame, within which there are ever-hidden gems, beyond which there are purposes and meanings too wonderful to be captured. It is a disorienting way of living (excruciatingly so), and comes most frequently, affects you most strongly, after you smoke weed.
There was one time you got so high that you experienced a visual representation of Zeno’s paradox, wherein every phenomenon seemed to be the integral of ever smaller phenomena: such that the representation of depth on a flat screen required a simultaneous understanding of the composition of elements along the x- and y-axis; such that each shade of blue required an understanding of the various pigments that compose blue, the pigments from which that blue is differentiated; such that each movement required a simultaneous superimposition of two positions—such that we are all always still, but are really derived into our velocities, but are really derived into accelerations, which are themselves the sums of our jerk—such that our movements are already pre-determined by some ever-smaller factor, and whatever you do, whenever you realize it, the thought comes too late.
That time you got high, you had to leave the room, with a severe migraine, as your friends watched Rick & Morty, because (as you thought about how a curve transforms a line into a multi-dimensional object; how the relation between the integral and its curve could represent the way that dimensions are born from other dimensions; how an orange is infinitely separated from an apple, just as each phenomenon could never be fully explained as a result of, a composite of, or translation of another phenomenon; how each moment breaks from the encasing of a present now past) you felt that a swarm of colors were blooming and exploding from the screen’s overbearing, rainbow-colored surface.
You went to the bathroom and gripped the edge of the counter, staring at your reflection, hoping that the relentless race of being alive would stop, at least for just a moment (even though you could no longer imagine what a moment like that would look like), so that you could catch up. You stare at the broken watch that you are wearing, with its time stopped at 2:30 (its former owner was a dentist, and you have a low-brow sense of humor), then wondered how it felt on your grandfather’s skin, wondered if he felt this relentless racing of time in his final hours, and thought about how it was only a short time ago that you placed dirt on his coffin, that your dad and your uncle had given you this watch—its golden luster in sharp contrast to the dull, brown kitchen table.
You wondered if this is the kind of epileptic fit that inspired prophets of old, asked yourself how it was that you had never thought about time or life in this way, and wondered if you would ever be able to explain life as you were now living it, or if you would be able to return to the way you had lived before. You heard your friends’ housemates laughing outside the bathroom door, and were terrified at the prospect of being unable to function normally, while also being unable to explain why you were so incapacitated, or what it was that you needed; you remembered, just a few moments ago, trying to speak to your friends who were watching Rick & Morty, to say that you didn’t feel so good, and being unable to get the words out.
You remembered the beginning of Infinite Jest, where Hal eats some brain-altering mold, and becomes intelligent to the point of experiencing the world with the supernatural sensitivity of an oracle, but without the supernatural modes of expression required to get others to understand what it is that he is experiencing. You think about the tragicomic juxtaposition of the sublime and the unseemly, as the kid combines the fate of Cassandra and Shakespeare’s Fool (who both speak the truth, but are unable to be understood, and are persecuted for it) with the banal, paste-eating stupidity of a random childhood occurrence. You think about the irony of your having a seemingly life-altering epiphany after getting stoned, and thinking about this worsens your anxieties re: being unable to ever express yourself, to ever be believed. You think that this admixture of low farce to high tragedy is what makes the whole thing so excruciating, and you think about the irony of your being another entitled, narcissistic idiot who loves David Foster Wallace.
You also wondered about the tragic irony of there being that kind of omnipotent, monotheistic, he-knows-if-you’ve-been-bad-or-good God that you grew up on with scrambled eggs and chocolate milk—such that God, with His all powerful love and foresight, somehow chose to send you this epileptic, divine inspiration the day after your grandfather’s funeral, as a way of rewarding you for your filial piety and of punishing you for getting high. In an interview that you’ve watched multiple times on Youtube (the part in question comes about 4 minutes in), DFW talked about writing tragedies that other people find funny, about how Kafka’s neighbors complained that he would laugh maniacally as he wrote his grim fables; you now tell people, pretending that Kafka said it first, that you like to laugh at yourself the way that you imagine God laughs at you (it’s a subversion of the common saying that your grandparents and CCD teachers liked to repeat ad nauseam: “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”)
The thought of that God, and of your grandfather somehow being at peace with Him, sends a chill through your spine; you raise your head to look at your reflection, hoping to find within your irises the knowing and redemptive gaze that your religious education had promised, and the world begins to slow down just a tad—as if you had put your head out the window, so that your motion sickness began to fade.
To return to another present, eventually, she did give you some clear indication of being awake (you can’t remember what it was, but you figure that you must have made eye contact) and you tossed her the pillow and blanket while still lying on the couch, as if you were bench-pressing the weightless fabric. As she said thanks, you got up from the couch; you were temporarily blinded as your head rose above the cushions. You looked out the bright, sunny window—which framed jagged, barren branches in a pale-blue background—and were quite annoyed to find that the day had already begun. You headed up the stairs, laid down on your bed, and wondered if you had taken your sleeping meds last night, or if you should take them right now. Eventually, you fell asleep (you don’t think it took that long), without taking the meds.
A few hours later you woke up for the second and final time this morning, and felt that the mere act of leaving your bed was an unbearable burden; you were quite irate with a world that would demand such martyrdom of you, and quite irate with your stubborn self, who was feeling so much pain and self-pity for a meaningless cause, and who was unable to feel otherwise, despite knowing better.
You decided to take a shower, and, coming to and from the bathroom, you heard voices chattering downstairs. They were both laughing, in a way that was endearing and entertaining, but to jokes that should have missed the mark, that you felt were slightly and painfully awkward to overhear. You then felt guilty for judging them so severely, and wondered if your constant judgement of other people is also inflicted upon yourself, and if this critical attitude prevents you from living authentically and happily.
Both voices speak in hushed, hesitant tones, and you imagine that your friends are shy about their affections for one another. You swear you heard the phrase “Okay, I guess I’ll really go now” at least three times. On the third declaration, the door opened, the shoe-rack banged against the wall in the ante-room, and then the voices stopped for a moment. You think you heard a sigh of relief thereafter, and someone say: “Thank God; I was wondering when you would get the message.” You interpolated that your friends had been awkwardly flirting all through the night—which you at least partially witnessed, before falling asleep—and had kissed only this morning, just before leaving.
Even now, you’re unsure that you heard correctly, and feel that you’re reading too much into things. But, you feel that this moment was something that you must save for yourself, to have heard but to speak of to no one. You feel this way not merely because of some embarrassment at having heard too much, nor some fear that the value of this knowledge would be diminished in its being shared, nor even your strong moral stance against gossip (you often wonder about our willingness to speak about others in their absence, about how our quotidian behaviors reflect hidden but significant acts of violence and indifference, how those behaviors are changed by the mere physical presence of another). You decide to keep the moment secret, because you feel that your thoughts could only lose their truth in the attempt at explication: that if you were to bring forth this idea to anyone else, it could only be denied. For if you were right, and these lovers could not confess what they were, then what would questioning them do, how could they ever admit that you were right?
You think about the tragic and poignant film The Lives of Others, of which you are quite fond, in which a spy falls in love with the subversives whom he is meant to report, in which his love is deepened precisely because of his inability to speak it. You think about how much you yourself must appear to others, without being aware of your appearing, and wish that you could see yourself from another’s eyes, the way that you yourself are seeing and appreciating your friends. You think about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner: the way that the mariner, having survived his shipwreck, can appreciate life and love more fully than the bride and broom whose wedding he crashes; the way that tragedy makes a surprise guest appearance in our moments of joy, so that we can greater feel the magnitude of our good fortune; the way that, despite our gratitude, we can never appreciate our blessings as much as those who still desire them; the way that lovers cannot see the shared spark that has consumed them, though it appears bright and bold before its envious observers.