Infinite Jest

“Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other. We countenance each other from either side of some unbridgeable difference on this issue. Let’s lie very quietly and ponder this.

I’ve been reading this novel, a magnum opus, and perhaps a lasting work of genius called “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. It has been my evening dose of pleasure, humility, and pleasure in humility. His craft is top notch, and if I shared his divergent thought process, I wouldn’t bother getting out of bed in the morning, rather, I would entertain myself with thoughts for the next 16 hours, and then pass out into a world of dreams banal in comparison.

I’m through recommending books to anyone ever again because it’s a no-win situation, and nobody reads these days anyway. So don’t read this book. Instead, read this excerpt of the aforementioned book, and then rot your fucking brains with whatever is on television:

An oiled guru sits in yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top. He’s maybe forty. He’s in full lotus on the towel dispenser just above the shoulder-pull station in the weight room of the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield MA. Saucers of muscle protrude from him and run together so that he looks almost crustacean. His head gleams, his hair jet-black and extravagantly feathered. His smile could sell things. Nobody knows where he comes from or why’s he’s allowed to stay, but he’s always in there, sitting yogic about a meter off the rubberized floor of the weight room. Tank top says TRANSCEND in silkscreen; on the back it’s got DEUS PROVIDEBIT in Day-Glo orange. It’s always the same tank top. Sometimes the color of the Spandex leggings changes.

This guru lives off the sweat of others. Literally. The fluids and salts and fatty acids. He’s like a beloved nut. He’s an E.T.A. institution. You do like maybe some sets of benches, some leg-curls, inclined abs, crunches, work up a good hot shellac of sweat; then, if you let him lick your arms and forehead, he’ll pass on to you some little nugget of fitness-guru wisdom. His big one for a long time was: “and the Lord said: Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.” His advice on conditioning and injury-prevention tends to be pretty solid, is the consensus. His tongue is little and rough but feels good, like a kitty’s. It isn’t like a faggy or sexual thing. Some of the girls let him, too. He’s harmless as they come. He supposedly went way back with Dr. Incandenza, the Academy’s founder, in the past.

Some of the newer kids think he’s a creep and want him out of there. What kind of guru wears Spandex and lives off others’ perspiration? They complain. God only knows what he does in there when the weight room’s closed at night, they say.

Sometimes the newer kids who won’t even let him near them come in and set the resistance on the shoulder-pull at a weight greater than their own weight. The guru on the towel dispenser just sits there and smiles and doesn’t say anything. They hunker, then, and grimace, and try to pull the bar down, but, like, lo: the over weighted shoulder-pull becomes a chin-up. Up they go, their own bodies, toward the bar they’re trying to pull down. Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. And I like how the guru on the towel dispenser doesn’t laugh at them, or even shake his head sagely on its big brown neck. He just smiles, hiding his tongue. He’s like a baby. Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life towards me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle.