We decided to take Hektor’s plastic Little Bo Peep thing off!

I splurged on these Bowers & Wilkins P5s!

I got my computer back from the Apple Store (which was an efficient cause of my buying those headphones, which I really like by the way. They come with like a little Prada purse thing to hold them, which is a little ridiculous. Maybe they could have cost $10 less? Whatever. B/W audio stuff is awful good), which made me grateful for my computer. The past few days I’d been using an old white MacBook we have in the apartment, and it’s good, it’s fine, it’s serviceable. It’s the computer I was using four years ago. But looking at the screen on my computer (which is new—they replaced it [which was real nice of them]) and it’s clear that the older Macbooks’ screens were just a little better than looking out a waxed paper window. Couldn’t see shit in that. And my trackpad works (they replaced that). They replaced all this stuff for free, which was nice of them.

I’ve been rereading Infinite Jest in case you didn’t know, and last night I found a chapter/page plot outline somewhere. Boy does that thing help. Earlier I got to the part where the cross dressing homosexual Poor Tony goes through withdrawal and seizes on the gray line, but I was pretty sure I’d seen him earlier so I consulted the outline and I just couldn’t believe the shit that happened just a few hundred pages earlier. There is a formidable stretch, which I reread today: In fewer than 50 pages, Wallace manages to exposit, like, so much funny/interesting/problematic shit:

• The aforementioned hotshotting of C.
• An Orin+Hal phone call.
• The origins of Ennet House.
• A thing they did on Myth Busters about a barrel of bricks falling on a guy.
• Hal’s paper on 21 Jump Street versus Hawaii-Five-O.
• Helen Steeply’s (undercover agent) story on Poor Tony’s stealing that lady’s artificial heart/purse.
• Some brief Québécois separatist stuff.
• The mindblowingly prescient passage on videophony.
• How Pemulis sells fake urine in an old Fenway hotdog vendor’s over-the-shoulder thing.
• Hal’s grandfather’s ridiculously expository/pathos-drenched/comedic story of his squandered potential qua wrecked knees.
• Pemulis buying the actual DMZ.
• Hal’s (to me the highlight of the entire novel, really) thing about being a feral tennis prodigy.

Like, in a lot of books this would be the entire book. Here it’s just a mini golden age of like dynamo-like, propulsive exposition, theme laying, and laugh/cringe inducement. The stretch from pp. 128 to 176 is some of the best writing anyone’s ever done.