50.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear. But I cannot make myself understood. Call it something I ate.

It seems like time is passing now with some kind of alarming frequency, red X's scrawled in an exponential fashion on my UglyDoll monster calendar. Los Angeles sunlight merging into the milky odor of a pale gelatinous Lake Erie fish carcass, only to be burned away by the sting of Chicago wind. And you close your eyes and open them and a day goes by and you ride the train and eat a sandwich and you close your eyes again and suddenly it's October and the summer is over and you look in the mirror and you don't necessarily recognize yourself and you close your eyes and open them and you're 24 years old and it seems like only yesterday that you were 7 and submerged in an oatmeal bath with your brother, water over your ears, safe, quiet, red dots of chicken pox speckled all over your tiny bodies like sprinkles on a birthday cake.

And it seems that time, like water, has an erosion quality they don't necessarily prep you for in kindergarten. Another few degrees of curvature in the spine. A slumping of the shoulders. A creeping murkiness that injects itself into your imagination, a murkiness with a voice that says: "time to grow up, time to grow up, time to grow up," repeating on loop until it starts to sound like pretty sound advice. And so you grow up, and you start to forget the things that are actually important and instead place new importance on things that don't seem to really be all that important, to you, except that society has deemed them as important, so you guess they must be important after all. The endless pursuit of green paper money. Maintaining certain numbers in a bank account. Remembering passwords and schedules. Paying your rent $$ on time. Keeping your intake of unsaturated fat to a healthy low. Filling the laundry detergent to the second line. Making sure to buy toilet paper before the last roll runs out. The mundacity (which I realize is not a word but strongly feel that it should be) of it all. It's hard not to get swept up, overcome, saturated, by real life.

And I think back to years ago, the 1980s, the 1990s, when things didn't seem to be this way. I replay memories. I flip through family photos, and I see two smiling curly haired boys in fluorescently striped green and purple shirts, raking crackling leaves into garbage bags adorned with scary plastic faces, drinking steaming mugs of hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows, bundled up in puffy coats and mittens, waking up to find snow coating the streets and almost trembling with anticipation while watching ABC news to see if Pittsburgh Public Schools was closed for the day due to weather conditions. The magic of a snow day. Opening a fresh packet of fruit snacks. Jumping into a swimming pool. The feeling of having your whole life ahead of you.

I guess my point is, what I'm trying to say in a very long-winded fashion, is that living with Infinite Jest for the past two months has reminded me that life is not, in fact, simply a steady incessant flow of time and age and a general watering-down of expectations that real adult existence appears to be at first glance. Or rather, that it doesn't have to be. That the feelings you felt as a child, brimming with something, hope, excitement, it's all still there, only in a more complicated format. That life is full of mysteries and incredible occurrences and colors and textures. Of accidents and coincidence and chance. Of family and sadness and exploration and surprises. And the really cool fact that I think I sometimes forget is that it all happens under the same glassy blue sky.

Whether it's the complex pock of a fuzzy green tennis ball connecting with strings, or what exactly happens between 2216 and 2226h when a man armed with a Zip-loc bag full of cornflake-meatloaf, a Browning X444 serrated blade, and five lines of organic Bing prowls the sodium lamp-lit alleys of Enfield, MA. Or what it would be like to live in a time when the years are no longer numbered, but instead named after the top-bidding advertisers - so you have the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, Year of the Whopper, Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster - and the greater majority of New England has been ceded to Canada and turned into America's primary toxic waste dump, with the giant ATHSCME fans' steady hum keeping the chemical clouds at bay. Eating speckled fungal basement mold while Wagnerian clouds gather in the sky above. Reflecting on your Quebecois life as a man with stumps for legs impales a sharpened wooden broom through the organs of your body and your soul flies home to be where it started. The fine line between addiction and recovery. The sadness of a father who chooses not to hear the words that you speak.

Infinite Jest is so teeming with life. Overflowing. Every page is filled with such heart and such astounding amounts of imagination. And it goes on and on and on, an impossible length to maintain something so beautiful. And yet David Foster Wallace does it. He creates a world that is so original and yet at the same time so achingly close to home that you can't help but open your eyes and look a little closer at things. To remember that life is happening everywhere, and that you only get one chance, maybe 80+ short years if you're lucky, to soak in as much as possible before it's all over. And I don't really know. It was something. It was definitely something. And my pores feel open again.