Joey's Clouded Brain

Settle down ladies and gentlemen, I am going to tell you about a novel that rocked my socks off and elevated my standards for fiction ever since I first finished it. A novel about drug and alcohol addiction, dysfunctional families, depression, and dangerous entertainment. I am talking about  Infinite Jest , by David Foster Wallace. Published in 1996, it is a tremendously complex, staggeringly lengthy (it is just above a thousand pages), and mind-bending book that will leave you an emotional wreck yet begging for more. While it is impossible to summarize, the novel centers around a movie called Infinite Jest, which inexplicably renders viewers so addicted to it that they are incapable of doing anything other than restarting the movie, they can’t even get up because of how addicted they are, they just lay there with their minds irretrievably lost, watching the movie over and over again. The book is set primarily in an elite tennis academy, and a rehabilitation facility. We ...

Wonderfully weird and unusual things happened to me this past month. I witnessed a fictional city parasitically implant itself on our reality. I saw a deity wh o feeds on pain. I watched as a group of lovable magic-whackos, dedicated to the absurd and the bizarre, sought to make Dadaism a way of life eradicating the idea of there being a status-quo. A painting ate Paris and I realized that secret societies are operating everywhere; hiding in plain sight. Fortunately, the Doom Patrol is here to keep things from getting too insane.    The Doom Patrol is a team of outcasts and oddballs from DC Comics, originally appearing in the 1960s. While Doom Patrol has been written and drawn by a number of creative teams throughout the years, comic fandom mostly agrees that the definitive run on the title is Grant Morrison’s. You are probably sick of superheroes and superhero teams given their overabundance on both the cinema and TV screens. I am too, even with my love for the genre. Have...

          I was a lonely kid with no friends. I was always left out and ostracized, even though I was not particularly mean or anything, I was just fat but other fat people had friends. I did attempt to talk to my schoolmates and form a connection, but it was like I was marred by something that I could not see but they could. I had no one to hang out with so I just went out with my family. But all of this loneliness and lacking a sense of belonging led to a habit that would prove to be my undoing later on in life. It was daydreaming. Constructing an elaborate and vivid internal life where I felt like I belonged and felt unalienated from people, and where no harm would come to those I held dear. I would jump into bed and delve deep into my mind’s eye. I’d imagine good things happening to my loved ones and I, a universe where nothing could scathe us and we were happy. I’d also make up scenarios surrounding people in school I wished I could be friends with o...