I don't really like using Instagram but sometimes I do like posting blurry closeups of my face with a statement about what I am currently doing as a story. Right now I am running a poll to let my cherished followers (kittens) choose daddy's next read. The options are Infinite Jest, Modelland by Tyra Banks, and a long sci-fi novel entirely in French (I'm Annoying, I obviously speak French).
Last time I tried to read Infinite Jest, I got about an eighth of the way through laying out in my yard while the ex I was dating at the time was somewhere cheating on me. I did not know this in the moment, but there were weird vibes in the air. My mom saw one of her dead relatives watching her from the foot of the bed once, right after he died, before anyone told her, and my sister thinks my family has some sort of psychic abilities. I had dreams sometimes of my neighborhood, but not my neighborhood, where one specific house existed that wasn't there when I was awake and something with teeth was coming for me.
If the house was real, I would've been able to look right up over my copy of Infinite Jest and there it would be. But it wasn't real, and my ex (who also thought there was something weird about my dreams but that they were alien-related) was being titillated by someone else in some other place that felt about as real as the dream house did, while I was busy fingering Infinite Jest.
I eventually found out what he'd been up to while on a visit to a new national Boy Scout camp, right near the tail end of gendered scouting. I was there with a bunch of nonprofit leaders and legislators and members of the state board of education, and he texted me from the Amazon rain forest to tell me he had done something Unforgivable but also that he would not have service for several days and then he vanished and I was left to act Normal. I kept the library copy of Infinite Jest on my bookshelf for the next three years, pretending I was going to pick up where I left off and finish it, but that didn't happen.
As of right now, Modelland and the French sci-fi novel are tying for first in the poll, so perhaps it never will.
