Oblivion: Stories

by David Foster Wallace

sometimes without feeling as if he could help himself masturbated to thoughts of having moist slapping intercourse with Darlene Lilley on one of the ponderous laminate conference tables

sat with his satellite TV’s channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider’s 220 regular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way

Precursor to doomscrolling

legendary E. Peter Fish, the mind behind both shark cartilage and odor-free garlic supplements,

Of course his last name is fish

talk at some length about the stresses on individual consumers caught between their natural God-given herd instincts and their deep fear of sacrificing their natural God-given identities as individuals, and about the way these stresses were tweaked and-slash-or soothed by skillfully engineered trends, and that but then, by sort of the Third Law of Motion of marketing, the MCP trends spawned also their Antitrend Shadows, the spin inside and against the larger spin

looking good and living long and squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second,

Denise Kone and her mother saw Mr. Johnson in the A&P, and Denise said his cart had been full of frozen foods, which her mother had associated with the fact that he was unmarried.

A&P Alantic and Pacific was the first grocery store that the customer would take a cart through the isles. Prior to A&P's revolutionary idea, customers would line up at a counter order what they wanted from there

A series of panels in the very top row of mesh squares, which is often reserved for flashbacks and backstory elements that help fill in gaps in the window’s unfolding action,

Mrs. Marge Simmons’ idling car

The Simmons or the Simpsons?

For it is true that the most vivid and enduring occurrences in our lives are often those that occur at the periphery of our awareness.

castigates her for the Plato figurine

I love that he calls the playdoh figure Plato

For my own part, I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven.

You move, gradually, from merely thinking about something to experiencing it as really there, unfolding, a story or world you are part of, although at the same time enough of you remains awake to be able to discern on some level that what you are experiencing does not quite make sense, that you are on some cusp or edge of true dreaming.

stow it in some very complicated way all detailed in glyphs on the instructional safety card that on so many commercial airlines is very nearly impossible to interpret with any confidence.

They make me think of IKEA instructions

although I put up a very good front as somebody who could have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand who she was inside.

What was the quote about sincerity? If you can fake it you got it made or something like that?

I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies.

Well that's creepy reading since the author did commit suicide

cement overpass so covered with graffiti that most of it you can’t even read. (Which sort of defeats the purpose of graffiti, in my opinion.)

But the reality is counsel proves to be abundant if you are the aggressor but not if you are merely prey, they’re parasites, daytime TV is infested with their commercials urging the viewer to wait patiently for the opportunity to attack, handled on a percentage basis, no fee of any kind if you are the aggressor!

I once had a t-shirt that had a picture of a shark with read letters saying"trust me I'm a lawyer"

trouble in my Dept. of the company for which I served as Assistant Systems Supervisor

A.S.S.

once referred to Skip Atwater as an emotional tampon,

although one of Atwater’s notes was a reminder to himself to consider whether a word like craftsmanship really applied in such a case.

Crapmanship

‘My parents had this running joke—they called a fart an intruder. They’d look at each other over the paper and be, like, “I do believe there’s an intruder present.”’

and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of themselves.

with a decorative and terribly detailed metal scarab over the knob,

Ladybug>scarab>dung beetle?

Moltke’s company van was parked in the duplex’s other driveway, which bespoke some kind of possible arrangement with the other side’s occupant

The intern's dream an arrangement with evil then? Did he go down to the crossroads for his commode abilities? Or did he get posessed by some dung demon during his deployment in Iraq???

The Style journalist had been seated on the bed’s edge on a spread out towel, checking the status of his injured knee.

Like the brother in Infinite Jest and "the Leg"

What he eventually decided was to prepare both a hot and a cold compress, and to alternate them,

My personal recommendation

The executive intern’s skirt was made of several dozen men’s neckties all stitched together lengthwise

That brings back some memories!