"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" [.]

[fiefoe]

Title track, part 2.

DFW himself touches upon salemanship & showmanship. He uses the F-word well.

• They all seemed to be uniformly stellar at anecdotes and stories and extended-set-up jokes, employing both hands and faces to maximum dramatic effect, knowing when to pause and when to go run-on, how to double-take and how to set up a straight man.
• offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.
• This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad... can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift, i.e. it's never really for the person it's directed at.
• I submit that there's something deeply mind-fucking about the Type- A-personality service and pampering on the Nadir, and that the manic invisible cabin-cleaning provides the clearest example.
• I mean, if pampering and radical kindness don't seem motivated by strong affection and thus don't somehow affirm one or help assure one that one is not, finally, a dork, of what final and significant value is all this indulgence and cleaning?
• the Infantile part of me... its a priori insatiability. 
• I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable - if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.  
• or like: I never just "want" a cigarette, I always "need" a cigarette.
  

In general, I like his inspired observations better than his grander opinions. Goofiness is even better.

• and the hostesses smile slightly and gaze at nothing as all together we ascend, and it's a very close race which of these two hostesses smells better in the enclosed chill.
• A 7NC Luxury Cruise is full of these odd little unexpected romantic nuggets like trying to help each other walk when th ship rolls - you can sort of tell why older couples like to cruise. 
• like the couple seconds between knowing you're going to sneeze and actually sneezing, some kind of marvelous distended moment of transferring control to large automatic forces. 
• luxury lighting...diagnostically acute without being brutal.
• The Atlantic that seethes off the eastern U.S. is glaucous and lightless and looks mean. Around Jamaica, though, it's more like a milky aquamarine, and translucent. Off the Cayman Islands it's an electric blue, and off Cozumel it's almost purple. ... places along the coast of Grand Cayman the sand's texture is more like flour, silicate, its white as dreamy and vaporous as clouds' white. The only real constant to the nautical topography of the m.v. Nadir's Caribbean is something about its unreal and almost retouched-looking prettiness.
• It seems relevant that most of the Nadir's eccentrics are eccentric in stasis: what distinguishes them is their doing the same thing hour after hour and day after day without moving.
• a good 100+ people per boat -it looks prayerful somehow, and sets off the (glass-bottom) boat's driver, a local who stares dully ahead at the same nothing all drivers of all kinds of mass transport stare at.
• withering neutrality
• His tux never wrinkles. His hands are soft and pink, and his thumb-joint's skin is unwrinkled, like the thumb-joint of a small child.
• (at Elegant Tea Time) (g) trying to spit the whole indescribable nauseous glob into a flimsy paper napkin instead of one of the ... with results I'd prefer not to describe in any more detail than as unfortunate; and (h) concurring, ... Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of that particular bit of Managed Fun.
  
• placing third but am told later I would have won the whole thing except for the scowl, swollen and strabismic left eye, and askew swimcap that formed a contextual backdrop too downright goofy to let the full force of my gams' shapeliness come through to the judges. 
• Finally, (7), know that an unshot skeet's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like - i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left - and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.

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