Considering the lobster

I don’t generally put pictures of my kids on the internet, but since this is mostly an email, I guess it’s ok, for this once. Felt David Foster Wallace-ish, might delete later (but really, I’ll probably delete later so it’s not on the internet version of this thing).

Specifically, it’s from when Leela, for like two weeks, walked around looking kind of like David Foster Wallace all the time, with a big bandana and the same hair.

Who, to be clear, I read one book of essays from, and not the big book that you’re supposed to have read or pretended to read. But also, turns out, maybe he was a piece of shit, so I’m definitely not going to read it now, because also it’s too long.

The book of essays was about considering lobsters, but I can’t remember what I was meant to consider about them. It was well written, from what I recall. But consider them, I beg of you!

I do have a very specific memory of him and his long book that people haven’t read, which is this: I had to go to a home show at Bowen Park for the library once because somebody (not me) thought that that might be a good idea (it wasn’t), so I sat at a table at a home show and nobody much wanted to talk to me. This is because it was a home show. I had brought some books about home stuff and a kobo, which I had loaded with his long book, which defeats the entire point of reading it anyhow, because for the outside observer it just looks like you’re reading a kobo. How will they know that you are grappling with a monstrously long and important book (about tennis, maybe?) or realize just how very clever you are for doing so?

I put it on the kobo to show people what a kobo was, but since nobody was particularly interested in that, or books (again, it was a home show), I just mostly read the long book and occasionally people would enter a draw we had. I’m pretty sure the prize for the draw was secretly a single mug, but also that we did not necessarily disclose this. What’s the prize, they would ask. Oh, something exciting, I would say. It wasn’t. And also, I did not finish the book.

My point is only that I am very smart because I know what a specific author looks like and once my kid looked like him for a bit but I didn’t tell anybody about it because it is an impossible thing to casually shoehorn into a conversation (“That reminds me of this time where my kid looked kind of like David Foster Wallace for a bit”, I could say), and also, anybody that you told would either not know what he looked like, or if they did, might ask some follow up questions where it would be revealed that I only ever read the wrong one about lobster essays and not the correct one about tennis.

But come on, I mean look at this:

That’s all.

Might delete later.

Regards,

N.