Hitched.

I am not a person who really likes audiobooks. You can’t hold them, they don’t weigh you down. You can’t glance back a few words, you can’t observe the careful and considered placement of commas and semicolons. You don’t have to struggle to turn the page of a crowded train that jostles it’s riders back and forth like liquid in a glass. In short: Audiobooks remove the wanting, I guess, and the frusturation and the dirty mechanichs of writing that make reading one of the baser pleasures of life.

I realize this puts me in a severe minority, to say something like “I enjoy the pre-modern version of this because it is more difficult.” is a vaguely lunatic statement. But that’s that, it is what it is. So, moving on- While I feel like novels are a particularly bad application of the audiobook, I’ve recently become really fond of authors reading essays. Hence, The David Foster Wallace audio project. Wallace is a spectacular reader of his own work, it’s roping linguistic coils looking less messy and more zen when he reads them out loud. It’s become a huge distraction to the point I left my headphones at home today for fear I’d squander another hour or two letting him tell me a story.

As far as life advice, I stumbled upon this yesterday and it has followed me since, begging me to put it into practice without any real advice in that regard:

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.