Watched David Foster Wallaces’ interview on Charlie Rose yesterday — for you to see here in the latter half of this. So sad, so eerie, but also still fucking awesome. R: You seem really self-conscious— W: I got news for you. Going on TV makes your self-conscious gland go into high gear. Maybe you’re used to it, but still. Awesome, in the old sense of the word “awesome”. Afterwards, I reread “Good Old Neon” from Oblivion, which is more or less his public suicide note, and it too was so very sad, but so very very awesome, simultaneously, with the simultaneity itself the whole point of it.

So I just had to point that out, how awesome that stuff of his is still. Shit always changes. For example SpeakUp, Armin Vit’s long-running bepixeled design blog, just ceased to exist. I wrote about awesomeness on SpeakUp, back in the 2007 Spring, right after my mom died; I was pretty crazy, during that immediate interval. I am a lot less crazy now.

Sometimes I miss Mr. Wallace the same way I miss my mom. I never met him, or even knew what his voice sounded like before I saw that clip online yesterday, but he exerted an enormous influence on me. A similar thing is true in the case of Mr. Kevin McCormick — the storied Frostbyte — with whom my friendship had more parallels than convergent points. Mom, Wallace, and Frostbyte are gone now, they’re everywhere and nowhere… and that’s cool, I mean that’s incredibly sad but I still want to be them, in a lot of ways. No change there. Seeing that simultaneity is one of the perks of being less crazy.

Yeah so yeah, shit always changes — but it’s nice to be reminded that awesomeness is completely outside the continuum of shit, as it were. Yes.