I’ve decided to start something new. Which, if you know me from Facebook or real life (or are one of the dozen or so people who listen to my podcast, well, God bless you) then you know I am quite fond of starting new things. Or, to be more honest about it, dreaming about starting new things and then spending an insufferable number of hours fretting about how or when or where to do this new thing. And if this is at all familiar to you, then I encourage you to keep thinking about how much thinking goes into the battle of deciding, not merely whether to do something but how.
Consider this. This new thing isn’t new to my mind. I decided to start a newsletter on Substack over two years ago. Hell, it was so long ago, that I don’t even remember, but I remember the furious back-and-forth about setting up shop in yet another ecosystem (remember Medium?) The fact that the first newsletter is coming to you now rather than back then is representative, not of the desire, but of the internal struggle.
Internal struggles are so rarely as straightforward as we pretend they are. Like, standing at the register of the refurbished Starbucks, deciding on a drink is often not a big decision for me, because I order the same thing every day: a grande iced coffee with half & half in a personal cup. My preferred cup is an orange Yeti, but I will often use whatever which happens to be clean. But today is my birthday, and everyone familiar with the Starbucks experience understands that I would be getting a free drink today. So the question isn’t only what I ordinarily want, but what I might want given this new information — that it is free regardless of size or type.
Similarly, if I were hungry, the question of ordering food is made difficult by the question of timing, whether I actually am hungry or perhaps I am simply bored. Then whether I plan to have something fun for lunch (I do).
I did not, in fact, order the usual; I got my splurge, a vanilla sweet cream cold brew. Which is not everyone’s idea of a splurge, but it is certainly mine.
Today, I’m sitting at a table at Starbucks, writing to you about the complexity of decision-making on my birthday. Which is, in one way, what I actually want to do today. It isn’t a matter of habit or inertia, but a conscious decision to do a new thing with the one day the world says: celebrate. This is a kind of celebration, then.
The other thing I am doing at this Starbucks on my birthday is reading Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. Wallace is the late author of the great Infinite Jest, a novel that seemed like every one of my friends from undergrad read while we were in school together at Alma College in the late 1990s. When I finally looked at it and flipped to the last page to see just how many pages are in that tome I wondered how any of my classmates could get through it during a semester at school since I was struggling to finish my readings of Virginia Woolf. And to my chagrin, I have yet to even pick the book up again.
I received a different encounter with David Foster Wallace a couple of years later when I went to Emerson College to start an MFA I never finished. One of my classmates offered a lecture about misogyny in the great novelists of the 20th Century and she argued to include Wallace in the list. Having still not read anything by him, I didn’t have anything to go on but to trust she was right. Isn’t it strange the things you actually hang onto?
I come to Wallace now, nearly two decades after his death by suicide and mental illness, which is not only to say that the two are related but as a reminder that treating mental illness as if it weren’t deadly is a grotesque erasure in modern life. I am drawn to both the character of the writing and the moment from which he was writing these essays. They captured the life that was my early adulthood and the world that was very real to me. And I find myself wishing I could hear his voice speaking to this moment we are now in — which also invites a different kind of speculation, too. That the insights of a man in his early forties, dealing with the birth of the 21st Century with wit and the familiar postmodern angst of self-awareness which was both common and normal for the age, but was also singularly deployed with deftness and ease, would have some genuine insights to us now, in this age.
But that question, itself seems dependent on a kind of surviving into 2025 that was neither possible by his medication nor by the act of time passing and turning that forty-something into a sixty-something with twenty more years of experience. That he, too, would experience the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the changing of sexual and racial conversations, and that modern preoccupations have both evolved and not, through that time. And because of that, there is a non-zero chance that the literary hero of so many would have become a goat of an older man.
I’ve similarly speculated about what Kurt Vonnegut would have made of the moment. And because we got to see his development into old age, there is no question that his wit and wisdom would be a genuine joy. This gives me hope.
As for me, I am now officially older than Wallace was when he died — an idea that resonates in ways that are barely tangible yet obvious. And to celebrate, I am starting a newsletter like it is 2008 again. The great irony is, of course, that I hate email and this makes me the epitome of hypocrites. But it is also a bet on the future. And that you and I will be in it.
Happy Birthday!