Help me find a David Foster Wallace passage?
August 12, 2021 11:46 AM Subscribe
I'm searching like hell for a passage, maybe in Infinite Jest, when DFW riffs about immaculate youth without back acne who look like they're fed on dairy products, ending with some statement about the loneliness at the heart of desire, or something. Can anyone help me out here?
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personal-stereo and designer-fatigues country. Soft-faced boys with backpacks and high
hard hair and seamless foreheads. Totally lineless untroubled foreheads like cream
cheese or ironed sheets. All the storefronts here are for clothes or TP cartridges or
posters. Gately's had lines in his big forehead since he was about twelve. It's here he
especially likes making people throw their packages in the air and dive for the curb. B.U.
girls who look like they've eaten nothing but dairy products their whole lives. Girls who
do step-aerobics. Girls with good combed long clean hair. Nonaddicted girls. The weird
hopelessness at the heart of lust. Gately hasn't had sex in almost two years. At the end
of the Demerol he physically couldn't. Then in Boston AA they tell you not to, not in your
first year clean, if you want to be sure to Hang In. But they like omit to tell you that after
that year's gone by you're going to have forgotten how to even talk to a girl except
about Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in the cage. Gately's
never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody's hand except to say the Our
Father in a big circle. He's gone back to having wet dreams at age twenty-nine.
Found from the full searchable text available here on archive.org
posted by Perplexity at 12:05 PM on August 12, 2021 [8 favorites]