David Foster Wallace

I might be alone in this opinion, but I thought that David Foster Wallace was a bit like Wes Anderson... meaning white people love him. In reality he seems a bit masturbatory  and a tad pretentious. I don't feel sorry for angsty upper middle class white guys who have everything that many minorities, genders, and socioeconomic classes would give a right nut to have an opportunity to accomplish. "I had a great batting average, I was the golden child, I got my sister in trouble and I don't know if ever forgave me, I don't want to bore you with the process of killing myself"..shut the fuck up. Screw you Hamlet, Screw you Heathcliff, Screw you Daisy Buchanan, Screw You Holden Caufield. I am tired, so very tired of listening to you whine. Nabokov never claimed to be anything but happy, at least Humbert did something, as atrocious as it was, to remedy his aching heart. 

I had a Grandmother who got pregnant at sixteen to an alcoholic husband who tried to kill her twice before she put all of his possessions on the porch and left. She never complained of anything in spoken word or script. She died selflessly. 

I had a great aunt whose daughter was raped and killed by a neighbor. She shot him in the head and the sheriff helped her bury him in the apple orchard.  She was buried next to her daughter after never speaking another word about it, with the exception of a letter to her husband explaining why she never visited the apple orchard anymore. 

My Jewish Cossack Grandfather came here on the bottom of a shrimp boat from Russia after watching an entire Shtetl burned to the ground. He stepped out onto the port of New Orleans, not speaking a word of English,  and made his way as best as he knew how, writing solely in Russian about his life. 

 "Someone else's pain is as real to them as anyone else's". Oh how I disdain that argument. It's like saying "That poem my six year old wrote is as good as Shakespeare because it means something to me.". It's ludicrous. Not everything is about number one.   

And I realize that in writing this and expecting others to read it...I'm being as self indulgent as David Foster Wallace. I guess that's the price I pay. I'm done ranting.