CHEERS to Bobby Moynihan, good friend, star of Derrick sketch "Bro Rape" and our movie "Mystery Team," who made his Saturday Night Live debut last night.
JEERS to David Foster Wallace killing himself in California. (LA Times Article)
"...his own father had told him that talent is a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and it is either lived up to or lost."
- "Infinite Jest"
UPDATE: My buddy John wrote this about DFW's death.
I think John's mention of Kurt Cobain's suicide is particularly apt, and I think Courtney Love's message to Kurt's mouners after his death pretty much sums up my feelings any time somebody I really respect takes themselves out. "So why didn't you just fucking stay?" (You can read the whole thing here.)
You and all the people whose work you admire and who you want to emulate, you're all points in a big network of anti-loneliness. You love them for the messages they transmit, things you've always felt but couldn't articulate, stuff you thought made you strange, and what these messages are telling you is, those things actually make you cool. And no matter what they're saying the big over-arching theme of the messages, the really important thing that isn't even in their content but in the fact of your receiving them at all, is that you are not alone.
And when they willingly extinguish themselves, there is one less point in the network, one fewer big transmitter of it's-not-all-in-vain signals. There is one fewer. And you're a little more alone.
John touched on this, but after reading "Jest" I was like, if I ever wrote anything one-tenth this ambitious and funny and layered and satisfying, I'd be so happy. Well, Wallace wrote something exactly that ambitious and funny and layered and satisfying. So by my logic, he should be ten times the amount of happy I would find more than satisfactory. And he killed himself.
So what are we, the little points in the network sustaining ourself on signals from the heavyweights, supposed to do? Despair a little, I guess, then reaffirm for the other points in the network that despair is not cool.
Like Courtney says: "Just tell him he's a fucker, OK? Just say 'fucker.' 'You're a fucker.' And that you love him."