michael-dean-k/

I just did some research on David Foster Wallace’s decline (albeit, through Gemini 3.0, so there might be some hallucinations). The surface level understanding is: 1) his medication stopped work; 2) they gave him electroconvulsive shock therapy, 3) he hung himself. But I never quite knew the gruesome and heartbreaking details of his “medical episode” (as described by his wife to his agents).

It was like a biochemical meltdown: he was struck with tremors and convulsions. He completely lost his appetite, stopped eating, lost 60 pounds, and his parents moved in to try to cook him familiar foods from childhood. Probably the worst: he could hardly speak, which is something like hell for who might have been the most articulate writer of his generation. He describe his situation as “the bad thing” and “the black hole with teeth.” Often, he couldn’t make basic decisions, and had extreme paralysis in deciding which room to occupy. He could barely comprehend the complex literature he’d been reading, and devolved into self-help books and basic spiritual texts to help him through the situation.

After, I think, 16 months of this, he decided to kill himself; he convinced his wife to leave to get groceries, who agreed because he seemed unusually well, but then organized his manuscript (the Pale King), wrote a two page letter to his wife, and hung himself on the porch. I imagine he assumed his new condition was permanent, and maybe it was, but I can’t help but think that maybe, in 5-10 years, it could have restabilized, but that is easy to say when you’re not in it (a year of this might feel endless/excruciating).

I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of these details are fake (AI-hallucinated). It nonetheless is a more detailed version than the caricature, and it’s possible that a wrong sketch of the details is more true in essence and tenor than an accurate meme-level compression. Perhaps one day I’ll really read into this to make sense of the whole episode. I think now I’m at a place where I don’t quite believe my original understanding, nor the new one, so overall I’m skeptical and unlodged, which is maybe better?

(PS: apparently the details all do check out with D.T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.)

As Brian the FIOS technician worked on the house outside, I sat on the porch to inspect and make myself available for questions, also while reading DFW’s “Everything and More: A History of Infinite.”

I just moved to a new apartment, just a town over, but with much more space, and so I've been in the process of corralling all my possessions into smaller and smaller boxes and then hiring men with trucks to lug everything. I've been unable to work for the last few days, both because of packing logistics, but also because this new unit is not already wired for Internet, unless I want to split the bull with my landlord, which is a no-go.

Brian was yelling back and forth with his assistant up in a cherry picker, connecting loose wires into the Verizon hive mind, and in that moment, as I read DFW write about layers of abstraction, I thought about the layers of abstraction in this very event. I've built a whole career on the Internet, and really, I could barely explain the fundamentals of it to a child. To some degree, not even Brian or his technician could do this, and fixing wires is their job. Could the guy up in the cherry picker explain the physics of data transfer or electricity? . You can exist within one layer without knowing anything about lower or higher layers. Here's how I'd map it: L1) the science of harnessing materials and natural forces to wield power, L2) building infrastructure to scale and deliver that power, L3) knowing how to edit/patch that infrastructure (Brian and his co-worker), L4) the general user of that infrastructure, and then L5) one who is able to navigate the social puzzles the emerge when millions of people use that infrastructure.

I can't operate outside of L4-L5. It is rare for someone to be competent at every layer of abstraction. Electricity has no understanding of “Verizon.” Brian might know very little about physics, but when you watch someone do their job at L3, you see the mystery of mastery at a non-adjacent layer. I can barely explain to you the infrastructure of the Internet, but I wish I could, and learn I should.