Pat cried but did not Accept that he cried

Recently I’ve met a couple men on what I’ve started thinking of as “the tech to therapy pipeline.” In this case that term specifically refers to quitting jobs in tech to pursue careers as therapists, but it could just as easily refer to me as a guy who stays in tech and (for reasons which may or may not be related to the job but are outside the scope of this post) also becomes a therapy client.

As a therapy side quest I have also been reading books like The Miracle of Mindfulness and The Dance of Fear and Atlas of the Heart and Radical Compassion about inhabiting and navigating one’s internal world, noticing the stories one habitually tells oneself and investigating their sources, things like that.

I also recently read this essay — much of which I myself could have written, were I a better writerI still unthinkingly start paragraphs with “And so but” and probably write other things that unmistakably mark me as a onetime Wallace acolyte. My digressiveness, for example, though in my defense I probably picked that up from Neal Stephenson before Wallace got to take a crack at me.

— entitled On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace. Its author Julius Taranto describes DFW’s writing as “sort of juvenile and aggressive in a way I didn’t sense before,” and says “I have spent the last few years affirmatively avoiding his shelf in my living room.” I have to admit I have done the same. Even though I don’t attach a lot of sentimental value to physical books, and I get most from the library and sell or donate those I don’t once I’ve finished with them, I do in fact still have a David Foster Wallace Shelf. But I don’t revisit it very often anymore.

Taranto’s essay sort of reacted with my therapeutic reading list above and the precipitate was a memory of a specific scene in Infinite Jest, my first DFW novel and the one that turned me into a probably-insufferable-at-times Fan. It’s about 800 pages in. Hal Incandenza, one of the novel’s two or maybe three protagonists, addicted to marijuana in a way that threatens to ruin his promising career as a tennis prodigy before it even really starts, feeling desperate and out of options about it, goes to what he thinks is a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

Spoiler: it is not an NA meeting. It is, as Hal realizes about halfway through, > one of those men’s-issues-Men’s-Movement-type Meetings > K. D. Coyle’s stepdad went to and Coyle liked to mimc and parody > during drills, making his stick’s grip poke out between his legs > and yelling “Nurture this! Honor getting in touch with this!” and as the scene proceeds excruciatingly toward its conclusion in which a grown man named Kevin, snot running down his face and clutching a teddy bear in one arm, crawls on hands and knees toward another member of the group in a combination of total mortification and a hope of getting his “Inner Infant’s” “Needs” met, we as therapized adult DFW readers and fans who have done “inner child” work of our own and found it helpful or at least instructive might, if we were so inclined, employ a technique that Radical Compassion acronymizes as “RAIN” to look at what’s happening in this scene and our response to it.

We would first Recognize that Wallace has written this scene in a way apparently intended to evoke repulsion and amusement. In the parlance of 2025, it is written for maximal cringe. The meeting’s facilitator is “almost morbidly round, his body… globularly round… the smaller but still large globe of a head atop it.” A CD player that he sets up emits “a kind of low treacly ambient shopping-mall music.” The narrative returns periodically, in a kind of revolted fascination, to the progress of a string of mucus from Kevin’s nose. The room has “a stale meaty cheesy smell” with “whiffs of a hot sick-sweet civety smell.” A man with a beard makes “moist sounds” eating yogurt from a plastic cup.

Having Recognized the environmental-emotional tenor that Wallace is evoking here, we can proceed to _Allow_ing it.

No, wait, sorry. This is too clever, and I’m indulging in too many Wallace-length sentences already. Plus I didn’t really think through all four of these stepsThe other two are “Investigate” and “Nurture,” in case you were curious.

, hoping that I’d figure out how to translate them as I got to them, and I don’t actually think it will work. Let me step back a bit.

I started to write this to look at Infinite Jest’s relationship to earnestness and emotional honesty. DFW has claimed that under all the post-modern trickery and formal sleight of hand, the book is actually a paean to these things and an assertion of their value. But his portrayal of a bunch of men encouraging each other to new heights of vulnerability and emotional openness is so coarse and distasteful as to be outright mockery, bordering on satire. It does bear remembering though, that the point-of-view character here is the emotionally constipated Hal Incandenza, who lives perpetually shrouded in a haze of ironic distance and can only even begin to approach emotional honesty with his brother Mario in the dark of night in their shared dorm room. The “men’s-issues-Men’s-Movement-type Meeting” could in fact be exactly what Hal (or his “Inner Infant”) needs and he’d be wholly unable to recognize it, would in fact recoil in revulsion from the prospect of being seen to have such fundamental needs as acceptance, belonging, nurturing.Or, Nurturing.

Because even just a casual flip through the beginningAs in, the first few hundred pages.

of Infinite Jest reveals signs of Hal’s impoverished emotional environment everywhere. Hal assuring Mario that their mother did get sad about the suicide of their father (who they refer to as “Himself,” a moniker that could not more clearly connote emotional distance), but just dealt with it by doubling down on obsessive overwork and hardening her cheerful veneer. Himself, in a flashback, inconvincingly LARPing as a “professional conversationalist” in an increasingly naked and unsuccessful attempt to get Hal to open up to him. Hal bragging to his other brother Orin about getting one over on the “grief therapist,” hired to help him process his feelings about Himself’s death, with a “grief-therapist-textbook breakdown into genuine affect and trauma and guilt and textbook ear-splitting grief.”

So, considering that Hal, the gifted and precocious tennis prodigy and employer of many long words, is in many ways an obvious stand-in for Wallace himself, it seems impossible to know who’s really recoiling from the Inner Infant setpiece. Is the grotesqueness of its depiction a sign of Hal’s aversion to vulnerability? But then, in one of the most-popular Goodreads quotes from IJ, Wallace says:

Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile

and — emphasis mine, by the way, but come on — what is Kevin in this scene but really human according to this definition? Can Hal just not walk the walk? Can Wallace? It’s worth noting that for all the revulsion in the narration, Kevin’s fellows in that room are never portrayed as being anything but completely empathetic and supportive of him. But the scene is indisputably memorable because it’s embarrassing and loathsome. A charitable read would be that it’s Wallace saying, Here’s what being really human looks like. Are you down to clown? Because Hal’s not! And I’m probably not either! But even if that was the intent, I think this scene is a failure: it feels too one-dimensionally contemptuous not to stand athwart the better things Infinite Jest is supposed to stand for.

I guess the reason I care about this so much is that as I’m reading books like Radical Compassion and trying to seriously ask questions like “what does this soft and wounded and vulnerable part of me, that lashes out at myself and others when it feels threatened, actually want, and how can I help it get that?” it’s calling to mind these works that really spoke to me in my youth for reasons that I would only partially have been able to articulate, if at all. And it’s just really interesting to me to revisit them and consider what I might have gotten out of the stories they were telling, and whether that seems to square with what the stories were supposed to be about.Worth noting, also, that my father, who by his negative example ultimately got me started on this process, was named Kevin.

That brings me, sort of, to the title of this post, which is from Achewood, another keystone of my relationship to language and another circa-turn-of-the-millenium work by a white guy who seems to recognize the value of vulnerability and emotional honesty but has trouble holding it closer than an arm’s-length away.

To be fair, Achewood is not coy or obfuscatory about this like Infinite Jest tends to be. One of its story arcs literally has a main character inventing “Cards for Dudes” and a panel where having the sender’s signature on the card is branded with a big banner reading “Way Too Baring of the Emotions.” But it’s another example of this kind of thing being absolute catnip to me. “This kind of thing” being: linguistic cleverness dancing on and sometimes over the edge of showboating, occasionally venturing out to prod at earnestness before immediately retreating behind ironic distance, or mockery, or juvenilia. That this kind of thing tends to be male-centric, with exclusively marginal female characters, seems kind of incidental on first glance but probably isn’t. The more I think about it the more all of it seems of a piece, this playing with language as a way to get at things that feel too gauche or unmasculine to say directly.And if you did just say them directly, dudes like 20-year-old me would not have been receptive to it.

The opportunities to be lauded for being kind of clever, and kind of an asshole, in the traditional young man’s pastime of affectionately roasting each other (one of the main acceptable venues for expressing male-to-male affection in the cultural environment from which these media emerged).

Even at 40 I often find it incredibly difficult to acknowledge my own needs for validation, acceptance, love.Or, less pertinently to the main body of this post, even recognize them.

But one of the common kernels of therapy and its attendant books is that that difficulty didn’t come from nowhere. Certainly I wasn’t born thinking that being needy and craving affection are signs of being fundamentally pathetic or deficient in some way. Certainly I didn’t think these things as, not to put too fine a point on it, an infant. But I learned them somewhere, probably a lot of places. Probably a lot of places that David Foster Wallace and Chris Onstad learned them.

I’ve had a lot of conflicted feelings about my love for Infinite Jest, in particular, since it’s become a locus for the “lit-bro” stigma and its author has been revealed to be a real shithead, to women in particular. Sure, separate the art from the artist and all, but as Julius Taranto observes in “On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace,” it’s hard for what we know about the artist’s behavior in this case not to cast suspicion on a lot of the more admirable parts of the art. I want to think of Infinite Jest as aspirational: born of late-90s cynicism, striving for something less jaded, author too caught up in his own precociousness to really get there, and for whatever reason unable to take his own advice in his personal life. And I’m probably never really going to outgrow it, because some of its aspirations are too like mine, and even now, revisiting it for this post, I find almost every page I flip to absolutely captivating.

I didn’t start this post with a thesis in mind and I didn’t magically develop one along the way, but, some scattered concluding thoughts: It sucks to have had Infinite Jest hit me as hard as it did and then find out that its author — who famously suggested in a Kenyon College commencement address that it might be worth your while to consider the possibility that the person in the Hummer who just cut you off on the freeway is a father frantically driving his son to the hospital — apparently couldn’t or wouldn’t extend one iota of that grace or compassion to the women he stalked and abused. It sucks to still be chasing the feeling of reading it the first time twenty years later, even though when I revisit it I can see its author’s meanness and immaturity shining through. But it’s also an opportunity, because that chase has led me to other books like Ducks, Newburyport and In the Dream House and, hell, Ulysses, that have challenged me and spoken to me in different ways, even if none of them inspired in me the adolescent fervor that IJ did, and probably none of them ever will, because I’m no longer an adolescent. So I guess an appropriate note to conclude on is that everything in this paragraph is still something I can Accept?