RIP - David Foster Wallace

In the middle of blogging the post below on Chuck Thompson's 'Smile When You're Lying' that I had started sometime on Friday evening, The Social Worker sends me this link in the SF Chronicle letting me know that David Foster Wallace was found by his wife hanging in his garage on Friday evening in an apparent suicide. Sigh...

DFW has been one of those writers, the ONE writer that has spoken to me in ways that no other recent writer has ever come close. It's hard to explain right now, or ever. You and your words, at times, have meant the absolute world to me. Thank you.

Thanks for your mind-bending wit, overly intelligent-at-times insight, literally laugh-out-loud words and all of those tiny footnotes. You were able to understand and write things (Truths) that I've only scratched the surface of experiencing and then begin to understand but never knowing actually how to describe those feelings and observations.

For anyone that is not familiar with DFW's work, he has written the BEST travel piece on the Caribbean and cruising in the Caribbean ever. This from the LA Times travel section:

"For example, here’s the intro paragraph: “I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.”

This same essay was also re-published in one of my favorites by him, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." But then I just came across this text, a commencement address to Kenyon College on May 5, 2005 which gives some real insight, not only into his mind and his own Truths of late by about all of us, our beliefs and our daily lives and the choices that we can make on an individual and daily basis. RIP DFW.