This Is Juice

I am on a serious David Foster Wallace jag this last week or so. I was going to buy his opus work Infinite Jest but then calculated that I would probably be like the 99% who would buy the book, try to read it, then put it like a tombstone up on the cemetery book shelf.

Instead, to save money, I travelled through the labyrinth of the Lancaster Library Online System where I downloaded the book through Overdrive. In July, I fortunately had renewed my Library Card which really struck me as odd because why should one have to update a Library Card, particularly in person? It is not an ID, has no picture, and the details of where I live and etc. could easily (or should have been) easily handled online.

But no, in some homage to days gone by, one has to come to the temple and present one's card to the clergy to gain entrance into the sacred world of knowledge. And while you are here, spit out your damn gum young man. Or, middle-aged man.

Downloading the book involved a complex, hours' long journey through the tech conflicted systems of Adobe, Apple, Kindle, Overdrive, and the Lancaster Library's own web-based system. I finally figured out that the main snag in the process was that my Adobe ID was no longer valid as a password because it didn't fit the security parameters of caps, no caps, using a symbol, a certain amount of characters. No prompt anywhere on the third-party Overdrive App. about this.

It is was ironic that I was able to log into my Adobe ID account with the old password, that only worked there but not on third party applications like Overdrive's epub Application, to then change the password to fit the current security parameters. It reminded me of the Dissertation process. Just keep trying and stick with it until the known becomes larger and the unknown becomes more discrete. The Ph.D. taught me the value--perhaps taught is far to mild a word--the Ph.D. burnt deeply into my motherboard the ability to persevere and find solutions to problems until said problem forks over the key to open the door. A combination of wit and grit. And a decent amount of dumb luck.

With the release of the film, The End of the Tour, which is the story of the last four days of David Foster Wallace's book release tour promoting Infinite Jest, I was prodded to finally try and ride his magisterial work to glory. I have skirted around interviews, articles, and other media with him and about him. I decided now it was time to take the bull by the horns, if for no other reason to be gored by the sheer immensity of the work and admit that I wasn't even man enough to read his book. How someone could write something like this tome astounds me. It is a crazy riff based on serious reflections on American consumerist sensate culture. Set in the future, which was an extrapolation of what Wallace observed in the 1990's and where it saw it heading. His insight into addiction is particularly trenchant and I surmise intensely personal.

Wallace committed suicide before the 21st century dawned. The act of annihilation throws into question the underlying premise of his most well-known speech This Is Water. Where he posits that selfishness is the root of all unhappiness and that we all worship something....God, Mammon, etc. He says to the graduating class of Kenyon College that they should take the time to examine their lives in light of the lives' of others, to remind ourselves that what we see is often a function of what we choose to see and how we construct meaning. Just because we think something does not make it true. In fact, our preconceptions can lead us to dead-ends. In the talk, he uses the illustration of suicide by gun with a shot to the head as the final result of being so trapped in one's head as to end it all in one final destructive blow. Perhaps he thought of this when he hung himself.

All of his insight caused a suffocation of self. In the end, we are all subjectively attuned. And, the air of ego is never enough. Lends credence to Jesus's saying that we have to die to self, otherwise the self, like an unplanted seed in no soil of ontological meaning, dies by not living. So, die by growth or die by isolation.

To put a personal twist on this--and to explain my title to this week's blog--when my Mom and I returned from the Family Reunion she had a bag of apples that looked like she had not refrigerated in the four days we were at Raystown Lake. Since she was flying back to Florida, she had to jettison them as well as some cheese and crackers. The apples were in a state of decay, not all of them, but some of them were bruised and in general, the fruit was getting soft and mushy, like apple sauce within skin. Soft apples gross me out. I like apples crisp and crunchy. Some type of apples are mushy even when fresh. Ewww....

I felt kind of trapped. I don't like to throw out food but I also don't like mashed potato apples. I had no way out because it was obvious that if I didn't take them, they were destined for the trash. Since I hate to throw out food and rarely do so now that I have learned the wonderful options of frozen vegetables, having a garden out back, and making my preserved veggie drink E-8, All three strategies have helped me avoid the all-to-common of turning my fridge into a composting bin. Veggies were the food group most likely to go rotten.

When I gazed upon the bag of apples the next day, it struck me that I could grind them up in the Cuisinart blender and make apple cider, where the sloppy fruit could be hewn into a homogeneous drink, skins and all. I cut out as much of the rottenness I could, and then threw the remaining 95% of decent but decaying apple flesh into the equalizing blades. After a day of chilling it, I drank it down. It was great. No muss. No mush. No fuss.

Life hands you rotting apples? Make juice.