Everything Is Green

This is what it means to start a blog: when someone famous dies, you feel sad, and then you think, I know what my next post will be.

This is what it means to be a writer, too. A teacher told me a story once, of a drunken, sobbing friend calling him on the phone from a bar. He told my teacher he and his wife were getting a divorce, that his kids would stay with her, that he kept forgetting to breathe. And then his tears stopped, and he said, "I'm getting a lot of great material for writing, though."

I don't know why so many great writers kill themselves. I'm not even sure so many really do, or if that's just the way it feels right now. I don't think any of this is supposed to make sense. That's why we have stories.

Here's the end of one written by David Foster Wallace:

Everything is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I know.

I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.

She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me that can not close up in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.