Day 77: Ideas, experiments, imagination

This track reminds me of driving at home in Scotland, accelerating over hills to huge views of low-lying islands and the sea. I'm going up to visit for the first time in more than a year this week - for a wedding - and am looking forward to seeing my parents, the farm and the open skies. Unfortunately, though, I've still not got around to getting my driving license back.

I've finished my ten weeks 'full time' at the treatment centre, and just have three and a half more days there. I was never confident I'd get here. The guys in the group have grown fond of me and joked that I should stay but (unlike previous peers) I am ready to go: my plans are starting to turn back to the real world (and away from this blog, also).

I'm coming around the idea that alcoholism is a form of mental illness (rather than just, like, a habit or a lack of control). Although I know that everything good that's happening in my life right now - re-gaining the trust of my family, suggestions of future writing work, the kind of confident step I've had the last few days - is reliant on me staying sober; just now, as I cycled over the bridge across the Eastway in the sun knowing I had a free afternoon, I had the thought that a couple of beers would not only be a nice idea but would be the only thing that would give me satisfaction right now. Although I don't think I am crazy in general, thoughts like this are literally insane. I think. I have to stay vigilant.

But I don't always 100% hate the fact that I'm an alcoholic. This is my story. My drinking - and the fact that I still smoke - means that it's hard for me to ever take the moral highground. When I see someone else being self-destructive or inconsiderate or short-sighted, I can understand. I think this is healthy.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 808-864
- DFW is a master of conversations where two characters are speaking a cross purposes - each carrying on with their own stories, only half responding to what the other is say. Like real life.
- An exciting passage where a military-style interrogation of Molly Notkin reveals a lot of missing details: about Madame Psychosis, the circumstances of Himself's death and Infinite Jest the entertainment.
- In the book, a lot of the story has been told in retrospect through conversations and interviews (notable exception to this Don Gately's fight with the Nucks).
- Some of the book's first pop-cultural references - a bedridden Gately remembering Seinfeld, Ren and Stimpy, and Cheers.
- Recovery joke: "In Boston AA, newcomer seducing is called 13th Stepping" HAHAHA.
- Hal's a week off the one-hitters: "I'd felt for almost a week as if I needed to cry for some reason but the tears were somehow stopping just milimetres behind my eyes and staying there."