The Suicidal Ideation of David Wallace

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When David Foster Wallace took his own life I remember thinking like how's this guy taking for granted all of the shit that went his way and here I am barely you know striking out looking and dropping balls in right field. He was a professor who seemingly had all of the things that we would want as a professor thing including things that not most professors could never have. In that brief moment when we formed that impression of what we thought David Foster Wallace must have been thinking about Neil, he fleshed it out into something much more than just an idea.

Our whole lives we’ve been frauds. We’re not exaggerating. Pretty much all we’ve ever done is try to create a certain impression of us in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. This episode is a perfect example, Tamler pretending to be a cinephile (check out his four favorite pieces of 2019 “pop culture” in the first segment), David trying to connect with the people (Baby Yoda, Keanu Reeves etc.) – and of course what could be more fraudulent than a deep dive into a David Foster Wallace story, rhapsodizing over the endless sentences, the logical paradoxes, the seven-layer bean-dip of metacommentary (Jesus Christ I’m surprised there aren’t like eight footnotes in this episode description), and meanwhile the Partially Examined Life dudes refresh their overcast feeds and wonder through the tiny keyhole of themselves how David and Tamler have sunk so low that they’d ramble on about “Good Old Neon” like a couple of first year Comp-Lit grad students trying to impress that girl who works at the Cajun bakery.