Entry Nine
I've read over 100 pages since the last time I wrote so I'm going to do two posts again.
Fish soup. Marathe and Steeply talk about fish soup forever. They're going on about the whole freedom to / freedom from dichotomy and Steeply says something to the effect of, "Americans are motivated to acquire pleasure for themselves," and Marathe says, "Well, what is to stop you from hurting others to reach that goal? What if your pleasure is only attainable by preventing the pleasure of another?" And then they talk about splitting a can of soupe aux pois for approximately four hours.
"Ah, but yes, let's say it is just you and I, and it is a Single Serving Size of la spoupe."
"We'd split it. That's an American invention, by the way, the S.S.S."
"You are insatiable for this soupe; a half-serving will only infuriate you, teasing your hunger."
"Well then we'd bid on the soup, and the winner would pay the other person the money, and then he'd go to the store and buy more soup."
"This is the only soup. There is no more soup."
It's mostly about how people will choose to watch The Entertainment, even knowing that it may kill them, because the curiosity will eat them up inside.
I was wrong about that Clipperton kid killing himself, by the way. I mean, he does totally kill himself, but it's not because he loses. To the contrary, he wins a ton and becomes a like national phenomenon. He's not ranked #1 in the country, though, because all of his wins are sort of negated on account of the terroristic threats, and being ranked first is all he wanted (probably). But then the person in charge of junior tennis in the USA retires or is fired or whatever and a new guy comes in from left field, unaware that Clipperton is batshit insane and holding his life hostage to win matches. Dude looks at Clipperton's undefeated -- aka "Still Alive" -- record and says, "Well, shit, he's got to be number one," and Clipperton can't take it, the pressure, and drops out of whatever academy he was in and falls off the face of the Earth for a while. He shows up at the ETA and demands -- begs, too -- to talk to Himself about (re?)admission to the Academy and so Mario brings him in and he sits down with him a while and Himself comes in and Clipperton pulls his gun out and blows his own brains out onto the walls. Some junior players just can't handle the pressure.
Gately cleans shit and semen from another halfway house in the mornings as a job. It's pretty gross how these guys have a Jizz Corner where they go and just mercilessly have at their own genitals.
Subsidized Time was put in place by President Gentle to solve a financial crisis. Turns out people want a lot of social programs paired with virtually no taxation. Who knew. Demand their leaders sign pledges not to raise taxes. Truly a nightmare dystopian world.
Whole lotta tennis in this section -- lots of tennis drills, more accurately -- and it was much worse than anything I did on the baseball team in high school. I played baseball in high school -- ladies -- and this conditioning is much worse. (I was also really slow and awful, athletically, so my memories of conditioning are bound to be skewed negative.) Lots of running, hitting balls, sprinting back, running some more, drinking Gatorade out of paper cones, doing insane wind-sprints where you're basically like expected to vomit at the end.
More to the point, I don't know what this part of the book has to do with anything. Is it weird that I'm not entirely sure what this story is about? At work, people will ask me what it's about, what's going on with the story, and my best way to answer is to say, "There are three separate story threads right now -- a tennis academy, a halfway house, and this league of assassins in wheelchairs -- and I'm not sure how they're going to come together. I don't know if they will come together." I'm now seeing that that's actually a decent synopsis of the book that you could put on the back with a big picture of my stupid face but, like, why is there all this tennis stuff? What's advanced, plot-wise, by reading about the Tap-And-Whack drill? Is advancing the plot even the point? I feel like it isn't. Maybe something with Hal's ankle? Maybe he'll smoke way too much marijuana on account of the ankle pain and end up in the Enfield House.
BIG NEWS re: the Entertainment. Apparently there was some sort of study where scientists (it's always the damn scientists) prodded some part of a brain that unleashes insane endorphins and then they hooked the prod up to a lever -- this was through some sort of light electrostimulus -- so the mice/cats/dogs/dolphins could unleash the pleasure (HIYOOO) on themselves and then that's totally all they did. Each animal died because they'd only push the lever. Moved up the food chain, too, and each one killed itself, basically, for the sake of the pleasure. They moved to humans and said, "HEY SERIOUSLY THIS MIGHT KILL YOU," and people showed up in droves. Took off work for this thing. And so back to the "Humans are incapable of resisting things they want, even when those things can kill them."
That's probably what the book is about, actually.
"Hey Ian, what's Infinite Jest about?"
"I dunno; did you see they've got Freaks And Geeks on Netflix now? I watched the whole thing this weekend."
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