Infinite Jest (213 page)

277.
Trois-Rivières-region idiom, meaning basically ‘reason to get out of bed in the morning.’

278.
Where was
Mrs
. Pemulis all this time, late at night, with dear old Da P. shaking Matty ‘awake’
until his teeth rattled and little Micky curled up against the far wall, shell-breathing,
silent as death, is what I’d want to know.

279.
The kid’s the former E.T.A. whose name keeps eluding and torturing Hal, who hasn’t
gone over twenty-four hours without getting high in secret for well over a year, and
doesn’t feel very good at all, and finds the kid’s name’s elusiveness infuriating.

280.
Anhedonia
was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century
Psychologie des Sentiments
says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of
analgesia,
which is the neurologic suppression of pain.

281.
This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come
up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for
something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling
that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the
universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.

282.
(the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around)

283.
S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors.

284.
A crude and cheap form of combustible methedrine, favored by the same sort of addictive
class that sniffs gasoline fumes or coats the inside of a paper bag with airplane
glue and puts the bag over their face and breathes until they fall down and start
to convulse.

285.
This has got to be a mispronunciation or catachresis on R.v.C.’s part, since Clonidine—2-(2,6-Dichloroanilino)-2-imidazoline—is
a decidedly adult-strength anti-hypertensive; the infant’d have to be N.F.L.-sized
to tolerate it.

286.
Kate G.’s never done Ice, or crack/’base/crank, nor even cocaine or low-impact ’drines.
Drug addicts tend to fall into different classes: those who like downs and Mr. Hope
rarely enjoy stimulants, while coke- and ’drine-fiends as a rule abhor marijuana.
This is an area of potentially fruitful study in addictionology. Note that pretty
much every class of addicts drinks, though.

287.
Since last winter, when a stale smell, litter of dental stimulators, and single slender
spit-wet butt signified that a certain upperclassman had been smoking panatelas late
at night in V.R.3.

288.
The Continent’s Best Yogurt
^®
.

289.
In point of a fact wholly unknown to Hal,
BS:OTN
was in fact a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself’s part, a veiled allegory of
sponsorship and Himself’s own miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive
platitudes of the Boston AA that M.D.s and counselors kept referring him to.

290.
Whether the girl’s hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident
is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that’s
the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and
more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity
strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock.

291.
After a heyday during the pre-millennial self-help craze, CA’s receded back to being
a splinter of the still-enormous Narcotics Anonymous; and Pat Montesian and the Ennet
House Staff, while they have nothing against a resident with cocaine-issues hitting
the occasional CA venue, strongly suggest that residents stick with AA or NA and not
make splinters like CA or Designer Drug Addicts Anonymous or Prescription Tranquilizers
Anonymous their primary fellowship for recovery, mostly because the splinters tend
to have way fewer Groups and meetings—and some none at all in certain parts of the
U.S.—and because their extremely specific Substance-focus tends to narrow the aperture
of recovery and focus too much on abstinence from just one Substance instead of complete
sobriety and a new spiritual way of life in toto.

292.
Fearful partly because the Ennet House Staff strongly discourages residents forming
any kind of sentimental attachment to members of the opposite sex during their nine-month
stay,
^a
to say nothing of attachments to Staffers.

^a.
This is a corollary of Boston AA’s suggestion that single newcomers not get romantically
involved for the first year of sobriety. The big reason for this, Boston AAs with
time will explain if pinned down, is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves
an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer’s
supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by and pray to have filled by Boston AA and
the old Higher Power, and intense romantic involvements offer a delusive analgesic
for the pain of the hole, and tend to make the involvees clamp onto one another like
covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in
a Group and Surrender, and then if the involvement doesn’t pan out (which like how
many between newcomers do you suppose do) both involvees are devastated and in even
more hole-pain than before and now don’t have the intensive-work-in-AA-dependent strength
to make it through the devastation without going back to the Substance. Relevant gnomes
here might include ‘Addicts Don’t Have Relationships, They Take Hostages’ (
sic
) and ‘An Alcoholic Is a Relief-Seeking Missile.’ And so on. The no-involvement thing
tends to be the Waterloo of all suggestions, for newcomers, and celibacy’s often the
issue that separates those who Hang from those who Go Back Out There.

293.
Apparently the current colored word for other coloreds. Joelle van Dyne, by the way,
was aculturated in a part of the U.S.A. where verbal attitudes toward black people
are dated and unconsciously derisive, and is doing pretty much the best she can—
colored
and so on—and anyway is a paragon of racial sensitivity compared to the sort of culture
Don Gately was conditioned in.

294.
It’s a Boston-colored thing on Commitments to make all speech a protracted apostrophe
to some absent ‘Jim,’ Joelle’s observed in a neutral sociologic way.

295.
Boston Housing Authority.

296.
Mixes 5/1 with ferric chloride to produce ‘A + B Blood,’ an F/X staple of low-budget
splatter-films.

297.
The cartridge’s repetitive emphasis on the Mother Superior’s desire to
silence
the novitiate leads B. Boone—a lazy student but very bright girl—to opine that the
silent brown-cowled Trappists who’ve been hanging superfluously around the film’s
edges like some mute Greek chorus have been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative
function, which strikes Hal as perceptive.

298.
It’s also a sly Schtitt-directed à-clef, of course, amounting to something like We
Are What We Revile or We Are What We Scurry Around As Fast As Possible With Our Eyes
Averted, though when Schtitt mentions the motto he never attaches any moral connotation
to it, or for that matter ever translates it, allowing prorectors and Big Buddies
to adjust their translations to suit the needs of the pedagogical moment.

299.
© the Commonwealth of MA’s Lottery Authority.

300.
Easily found when pawning a cordless M. Café
^®
Café-au-Lait Maker at a Brookline shop of pawning, for Fortier and Marathe and the
A.F.R. knew well M. DuPlessis’s passion of breakfast café au lait.

301.
Having in her M.B.A. program absorbed the litigatory lessons of music producers v.
cassette-tape manufacturers and film-production companies v. videotape-rental chains,
Noreen Lace-Forché protected InterLace’s golden goose’s copyrights by specifying that
all consumer-TP-compatible laser cartridges be engineered as Read-Only—copyable Master
cartridges require special OS-codes and special hardware to run,
^a
and you need licenses for both the codes and the hardware, which keeps most consumers
out of the bootleg-cartridge business but is not a hard hurdle to clear if you’ve
got financial resources and political incentive (i.e., to dupe off a Master).

^a.
N.L.-F. had even rigged it so that Masters have to be run at 585 r.p.m. instead of
a consumer-TP’s cartridge-drive’s 450 r.p.m.

302.
Thanks to the betrayal of Marathe, this pure-malice agenda is known to the Office
of Unspecified Services, though it is not impossible that Fortier deliberately allowed
Marathe to pass along this datum, Marathe knows, for the hope of instilling even deeper
chills of fear in
Sans-Christe
Gentle and his O.N.A.N.
chiens-courants.
Suspected but unknown by Marathe, Fortier plans to have Marathe view the Entertainment
by force before plans for the dissemination of copies from a Master are firm in execution.
This not because Fortier for a moment suspects Marathe’s love of his wife’s health
of prompting his betrayal of
Leur Rai Pays
—Fortier had overseen both
jeux du prochain train
^a
at which Marathe’s elder brothers had been struck and killed, and Fortier has long
nursed a suspicion that Marathe nurses dreams of redress for this.

^a.
Q.v. Note 304
sub
.

303.
Though hope springs eternal in the breasts, this news had been expected by Broullîme
and Fortier the moment they witnessed the shop’s brothers active and alert. For they
believed no Master cartridge would have lain unshelved in a bag or damp box: even
the dim brothers Antitoi, seeing the unique case and slightly larger size of a Master,
would have put this to the special side, and arranged for the special 585-r.p.m. hardware
to view it to check for special value, and been already lost.

304.

Q.v. @ 2030h. on 11 November Year of the D.A.U., 308 Subdorm B, Enfield Tennis Academy,
where James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. sits slumped, chin in hands, forehead slathered
in (C
₂
H
₅
CO)
₂
O
₂
^a
, elbows on tiny cleared spots on desktop, TP compactly humming, word-processing converter
plugged into its green-lit dock, HD screen set atop the cartridge-viewer chassis on
its fold-out support like a loved one’s photo, keyboard hauled out of McGee-like chaos
of closet and set on Heavy Touch, cursor throbbing softly at screen’s upper left before
Struck, hunched blearily over what’s starting to emerge as like unabsorbable amounts
of research material for his post-Midterm termpaper for Ms. Poutrincourt’s History
of Canadian Unpleasantness course thing. Struck always refers mentally to his classes
as ‘things.’ Original hopes for at least originality of topic have long since gone
over the side of the boat, emotionally. It turns out the more luridly absorbing the
angle of topic you choose, the more people have already been there before you with
their footprints to fill and their obscurely academic-type-journal articles to try
and absorb and, like, synthesize. Struck’s been at this over an hour, and his original
sights have lowered considerably. He’s been feeling a bit punk all day, sinuses with
that infallible storm’s-on-the-way feeling of weight and clot and a goalie-mask headache
that throbs with his heart, and he’s now trying to find some new resource in the piles
that’s obscure and amateurish enough for him to transpose and semi-plagiarize without
worrying about Poutrincourt having read it or smelling a rat in the woodpile.

‘Almost as little of irreproachable scholarly definitiveness is known about the infamous
Separatist “Wheelchair Assassins” (
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
or
A.F.R.
s) of southwestern Quebec as is accepted as axiomatic about the herds of oversized
“Feral Infants” allegedly reputed to inhabit the periodically overinhabitable forested
sections of the eastern Reconfiguration.’

A B.P.L. ArchFax database search off the conjunctive key terms
A.F.R., wheelchair, fauteuil rollent, Quebec, Québec, Separatism, terrorist, Experialism,
history,
and
cult,
which you’d think would narrow things down nicely, yielded over 400 items, articles,
essays, and papers, in everything from
The Continent
to
Us,
from
Foreign Affairs
to something called
Wild Conceits,
a woebegone little marginal archaic desktop-pub.-looking thing put out by someplace
called Bayside Community College up I-93 in Medford, nowhere near any bays, and edited
by the same-named guy whose
Wild Conceits
wheelchair-killers essay Struck, after having to read the first sentence a bunch
of times to even make sense of it, gauges he’s pretty safe in ripping off, since no
way Poutrincourt’d have spent the time to E.S.L. her way through U.S. Academese this
insufferable:

‘… that the prenominate oversized infants reputedly do exist, are anomalous and huge,
grow but do not develop, feed on the abundance of annularly available edibles the
overgrowth periods in the region represent, do deposit titanically outsized scat,
and presumably do crawl thunderously about, occasionally sallying south of murated
retention lines and into populated areas of New New England.’ In a twist on the usual
plagiarism-situation, the hardest work for Struck here is going to be sanitizing the
prose in this
Wild Conceits
guy’s thing, or at least bringing the verbs and modifiers down out of the like total
ozone, which the Academese here on the whole sounds to Struck like the kind of foam-flecked
megalograndiosity he associates with Quaaludes and red wine and then the odd Preludin
to pull out of the grandiose nosedive of the Quaaludes and red wine. Plus let’s not
even mention repair-work on the freewheeling transitions; Poutrincourt has a fetishy
thing about transitions.