A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

by David Foster Wallace

human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

It’ll be 90+ by 1000h., you can tell: there’s already that tightening quality to the air, like it’s drawing itself in for a long siege.

There’s a compelling frictionlessness about the local TV reporters, all of whom have short blond hair and vaguely orange makeup. A vividness. I keep feeling a queer urge to vote for them for something.

tiara bolted to the tallest coiffure I’ve ever seen (bun atop bun, multiple layers, a veritable wedding cake of hair),

the sky is the color of old jeans.

The Mrs. Edgar/McDonald’s Help Me Grow Program, when you decoct the rhetoric, is basically a statewide crisis line for over-the-edge parents to call and get talked out of beating up their kids.

Governor E. is maybe fifty and greyhound-thin and has steel glasses and hair that looks carved out of feldspar.

I’d bought a notebook, but I left the car windows down last night and it got ruined by rain, and Native Companion kept me waiting getting ready to go and there wasn’t time to buy a new notebook. I don’t even have a pen, I realize. Whereas good old Governor Edgar has three different-colored pens in his knit shirt’s breast pocket. This clinches it: you can always trust a man with multiple pens.

Kids are having like little like epileptic fits all around us, frenzied with a need to somehow take in everything at once.

I’ve rarely been this close to fine livestock.

Pigs are in fact fat, and a lot of these swine are frankly huge—say ⅓ the size of a Volkswagen. Every once in a while you hear about farmers getting mauled or killed by swine. No teeth in view here, though the swine’s hoofs look maul-capable—they’re cloven and pink and kind of obscene.

All the carny-game barkers have headset microphones; some are saying “Testing” and reciting their pitches’ lines in tentative warm-up ways. A lot of the pitches seem frankly sexual: “You got to get it up to get it in”; “Take it out and lay’er down, only a dollar”; “Make it stand up. Two dollars five chances. Make it stand up.” In the booths, rows of stuffed animals hang by their feet like game put out to cure.

Its off-white paint is chipped, and it sounds like a shimmying V-12, and in general it’s something I’d run a mile in tight shoes to avoid riding.

A scum of clouds has cut the heat, but I’m on my third shirt.

A theory: Megalopolitan East-Coasters’ summer vacations are literally getaways, flights-from—from crowds, noise, heat, dirt, the neural wear of too many stimuli. Thus ecstatic escapes to mountains, glassy lakes, cabins, hikes in silent woods. Getting Away From It All. Most East-Coasters see more than enough stimulating people and sights M-F, thank you; they stand in enough lines, buy enough stuff, elbow enough crowds, see enough spectacles. Neon skylines. Convertibles with 110-watt sound systems. Grotesques on public transport. Spectacles at every urban corner practically grabbing you by the lapels, commanding attention. The East-Coast existential treat is thus some escape from confines and stimuli—silence, rustic vistas that hold still, a turning inward: Away.

Performance- and other anxieties abound here, with upwards of twenty guys all flanking and facing each other, each with his unit out.

(I’m starting to develop an eye for livestock).

Again, the Official wears a simply bitching white cowboy hat and stands at ease, legs well apart.

Sun erumpent, mid-90s, puddles and mud trying to evaporate into air that’s already waterlogged. Every smell just hangs there. The general sensation is that of being in the middle of an armpit.

There’s a neon-bordered booth for something called a RAINBOW-VAC, a vacuum cleaner whose angle is that it uses water in its canister instead of a bag, and the canister is clear Lucite, so you get a graphic look at just how much dirt it’s getting out of a carpet sample. People in polyester slacks and/or orthopedic shoes are clustered three-deep around this booth, greatly moved, but all I can think of is that the thing looks like the world’s biggest heavy-use bong, right down to the water’s color.

Something ever so slightly over-groomed about them suggests a Bible-college background.

Most of the Expo vendors won’t answer questions and give me beady looks when I stand there making notes in the Barney tablet. But the THIGHMASTER lady—friendly, garrulous, violently cross-eyed, in (understandably) phenomenal physical condition—informs me she gets an hour off for lunch at 1400 but is

The special community of shoppers in the Expo Bldg. are a Midwestern subphylum commonly if unkindly known as Kmart People.

Kmart People tend to be overweight, polyestered, grim-faced, toting glazed unhappy children. Toupees are the movingly obvious shiny square-cut kind, and the women’s makeup is garish and often asymmetrically applied, giving many of the female faces a kind of demented look. They are sharp-voiced and snap at their families. They’re the type you see slapping their kids in supermarket checkouts. They are people who work at like Champaign’s Kraft and Decatur’s A. E. Staley and think pro wrestling is real. I’m sorry, but this is all true.

One big girl with tattoos and a heavy-diapered infant wears a T-shirt that says “WARNING: I GO FROM 0 TO HORNEY IN 2.5 BEERS.”

She’s looking at me very intensely, but there’s something off about her gaze: it’s like she’s looking at my eyes rather than into them.

They wear Westernwear tops and midiskirts with multiple ruffled slips underneath; and every once in a while they’ll grab handfuls of cloth and flip the skirts up like cancan dancers. When they do this they either yip or whoop, as the spirit moves them.

There’s an atmosphere in the room—not racist, but aggressively white. It’s hard to describe. The atmosphere’s the same at a lot of rural Midwest public events. It’s not like if a black person came in he’d be ill-treated; it’s more like it would just never occur to a black person to come in here.

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.

The coaches look like various childhood friends of mine’s abusive fathers—florid, blue-jawed, bull-necked, flinty-eyed, the kind of men who bowl, watch TV in their underwear, and oversee sanctioned brawls.

do not like crowds, screams, loud noise, or heat. I’ll endure these things if I have to, but they’re no longer my idea of a Special Treat or sacred Community-interval.

Nor, I have to say, do I understand why some people will pay money to be careened and suspended and dropped and whipped back and forth at high speeds and hung upside down until they vomit. It seems to me like paying to be in a traffic accident. I do not get it; never have. It’s not a regional or cultural thing. I think it’s a matter of basic neurological makeup. I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic life goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible.

I get kicked off the ride when the whole machine’s radical tilt reveals that I weigh quite a bit more than the maximum 100 pounds, and I have to say that both the carny in charge and the other kids on the ride were unnecessarily snide about the whole thing. Each ride has its own PA speaker with its own charge of adrenalizing rock; the Kiddie Kopter’s speaker is playing George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” as the little bastards go around.

One of the minor reasons Asymmetrical Productions let me onto the set is that I don’t even pretend to be a journalist and have no idea how to interview somebody and saw no real point in trying to interview Lynch, which turned out perversely to be an advantage, because Lynch emphatically didn’t want to be interviewed while Lost Highway was in production, because when he’s shooting a movie he’s incredibly busy and preoccupied and immersed and has very little attention or brain-space available for anything other than the movie.

nothing sickens me like seeing on-screen some of the very parts of myself I’ve gone to the movies to try to forget about.

Fact: in my three days here for Premiere magazine I will meet two (2) different people named Balloon.

I’ve noticed that, while I can’t help but respect and sort of envy the moral nerve of people who truly do not care what others think of them, people like this also make me nervous, and I tend to do my admiring from a safe distance.

Jennifer, a statutorily young female who’d be gorgeous if she didn’t have Nosferatic eyeshadow and cadet-blue nail polish on,

“genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath”

And I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go to see a movie. I like my heroes virtuous and my victims pathetic and my villains’ villainy clearly established and primly disapproved by both plot and camera. When I go to movies that have various kinds of hideousness in them, I like to have my own fundamental difference from sadists and fascists and voyeurs and psychos and Bad People unambiguously confirmed and assured by those movies. I like to judge. I like to be allowed to root for Justice To Be Done without the slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either.

We hope fervently that this is so because we need to be able to believe that our own hideousnesses and Darknesses are secret. Otherwise we get uncomfortable.

he looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell and seems in general just way too scary ever to try to talk to.

But we prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll pay lip service to these sacrifices—we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the privations, the prefight celibacy, etc. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up bovine hormones until they collapse or explode.

abacus of sweat

There are only two men’s rooms open to the public, 54 and the lines for both always resemble a run on a midsize branch bank.

he has the body of an upright greyhound and the face of—eerily, uncannily—a fresh-hatched chicken (plus soulless eyes that reflect no light and seem to “see” only in the way that fish’s and birds’ eyes “see”).

I have heard a professional comedian tell folks, without irony, “But seriously.”

she of the dimples and broad candid brow, who always wore a nurse’s starched and rustling whites and smelled of the cedary Norwegian disinfectant she swabbed bathrooms down with, and who cleaned my cabin within a cm of its life at least ten times a day but could never be caught in the actual act of cleaning—a figure of magical and abiding charm, and well worth a postcard all her own.