Yikes, it’s been well over a month since my last post. The hit-tracker that you don’t get to see tells me that people (very few people…) still check out this page.
I have excuses for my lack of posting. The past month has been a bit hectic. I hit the floor running as soon as I returned to work with an uninterrupted schedule. I had deadlines to meet and work to make up. I started working out on regular basis to get this worn down body back into shape–the bald head coupled with a concave bird chest is not the smoothest look. I started studying again, too, which is proving very difficult. My attention span for C and S Corp taxation is about as thin as Bernie Madoff’s moral fiber. And more than anything, keeping an up-to-date page is hard work. Producing even semi-interesting content is difficult. I suppose my ball(s) were interesting, but for the sake of my posterity I’m hoping they’re (it) never again a topic for discussion.
—-
I’m reading David Foster Wallace’s latest and unfinished novel The Pale King. If you aren’t familiar with the author or his work, do yourself a favor and familiarize yourself with him. And if you want to do yourself an even bigger favor, read something he’s written. He wrote The Broom of the System, which he penned as a college student and published when he was 24 years old (NO BIG DEAL) and wrote the epic, 1,100 page Infinite Jest (which I have not read, but plan to). He also wrote a few books worth of short stories and ton of articles for magazines like Harper’s, Esquire, and The New Yorker.
DFW hung himself before he finished The Pale King. Before he died his editor recalls him saying, “Writing this book is like trying to carry planks of balsa wood in a wind storm.” (I did that quote from memory, so don’t quote me..on that quote….) In it he explores the complexities of ordinary life and boredom. He follows the lives of IRS examiners in small town Peoria, IL. DFW, it seems, finds heroism in IRS examiners–people he, by implication at least, considers to have the most boring and least rewarding jobs/lives. A professor, on the last day of the main character’s Advance Tax Strategies class, leaves his students with this: “Welcome to the world of reality–there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth–actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.” In other words, true valor is signing up to be a cog–a single bolt–in a complex machine. Expect no one to notice or care about you, regardless of how vital you are.
Pretty dreadful, right? Perhaps, if it weren’t that DFW is without peer in his ability make tedium and despair a wellspring of life and nuance. I’m eager to see how it ends, considering there is no ending, and to continue my journey through the catacombs of obscurity.
Anyway, I gotta get back to studying for the tax section of the CPA exam.
What I'm Reading Today 