Newsflash: Jonathan Brandis is dead.

September 17, 2008 at 11:12 pm | Posted in reflections | 1 Comment
Tags: ,

Over dinner tonight my friend Lana and I were discussing David Foster Wallace’s recent suicide, and trying to come up with other writers/artists who had offed themselves in the past several years. She mentioned Brad Renfro – what was ultimatey deemed an accidental heroin overdose at the beginning of 2008. I was surprised; I hadn’t heard about this, though my posse in middle school had considered him one of the teen celebrity heartthrobs worth swooning over.

Then she said Jonathan Brandis was dead. I was absolutely floored. Yes, for anyone who gives a shit, this is old news; he tried to hang himself in 2003 and ended up dying in the hospital from his resulting injuries a day later. But I was completely out of the loop with this one. I was infatuated with him when I was twelve and thirteen; I remember watching episodes of Seaquest that were incomprehensible to me, just to catch glimpses of his lovely face onscreen. One would hardly consider this a significant relationship, anything that would lead me to feel so fucked up over his suicide. Chalk it up to residual adolescent delusion if you like.

Strangely, I think that the suicides of these celebrities I don’t technically know but nevertheless am fond of makes me feel like I have even more in common with them – like their deaths have revealed to me a bond between us that is at once encouraging in its familiarity and terrifying in its black nature. Obviously I haven’t committed suicide, but it’s something I’ve thought about a great deal in my life, something that I feel I might be able to understand and sympathize with better than many others. So I guess in this sense, finding out about people who have killed themselves stirs the part of me that feels tempted by that route, and makes it feel all the more substantial and powerful.

God, he had a beautiful face. So sad.

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

September 14, 2008 at 1:32 pm | Posted in writing | Leave a comment
Tags: , , , ,

Shit like this scares me, as well as makes me sad. He was brilliant, he wrote brilliant stories, he seemed pretty well set up as writers go. And he offed himself.

For those of you unfamiliar with David Foster Wallace’s work, I highly recommend you check out the short piece titled “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR,” which you can read online in the Google Books version of The Girl with Curious Hair.

You can also read his commencement address to Kenyon College from 2005. Gives a little insight to his personality.

I noticed someone on WordPress was searching blogs for “David Foster Wallace” and “astrological chart.” I took a quick look at his birth date according to Wikipedia – he’s an Aquarius/Pisces cusp. I’ve found that those dudes have a tendency to be mentally unstable. Sigh.

I wonder whether writing is bad for one’s mental health, sometimes – whether it perhaps encourages those of us who would be better served resolving our neuroses and moving on with our lives to instead dig around in our misery until it poisons us irreversibly. Makes me think of something I read while reviewing my astrological chart on astro.com yesterday:

Your life will be marked by your shrewd, secretive, obstinate, clever, and reserved disposition. You remain an enigma: with these traits, your life events could be either very tragic or very fortunate. To which category of Scorpio do you belong? There are two types, the extremely emotional, attracted by those pathological aspects of biological relationship, or the highly mystical, concerned with spirituality.

I definitely think that my writing leads me to focus on emotional pathology rather than sublimated versions of same. It’s a switch I’ve made in the past couple of years. Should I reconsider? I’m disinclined to, but I’m becoming increasingly worried that dedicating myself to a life of writing will be the equivalent of taking up a pack-a-day smoking habit.

I am already developing way too many gray hairs as it is…

Blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.