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It's another half an hour to Culpepper, but I can just follow behind
everyone else's cars.

I don't have much of a choice. Sometimes it's best to keep up appear-
ances.

I guess he finished the log cabin, Pam's husband. He built it himself. It's
beautiful. They never had kids. They have a vegetable garden where their
trailer used to be.

We meet in the main room, it's above the garage. There's a winding
wooden staircase up to a deck to the front door, but it looks a little too
vertigo-inducing for me. There are steps leading up to inside the house
through the back of the garage. I am the last one in. I need to sit in the
car for a minute to get a little more Zen. I pretend to be checking my
messages on my cell when people walked by.

I don't want to ask anyone their name. It doesn't matter anyway. By the
way they're looking at me, they know who I am. Or at least what I am.

§

I only signed my first name in the book. I thought people only used
things like that at weddings. I don't know whose idea it was. I thought it

was too morbid, even for me.

I wonder if we're supposed to write something about him, or ourselves.

Ifl wrote my name, it would say everything.

I don't even have his name. I'm not sure that I needed it.

§

Writers are a lonely, selfish breed. We want to spend our time
crafting in workshops and living in the worlds we created for ourselves
on a page. But we expect people to tell us how much they loverit and
hate it and pretend like it doesn't bother them when we're moody and
suspicious and need need needing of Everything.

I don't think anyone was surprised when David Foster Wallace
turned out to be a depressed, headstrong fellow. You'd think he'd be at
least a little bipolar to crank out so many pages, but maybe that's what
happens when you really live as much in your head as possible.

Writing lets you shape Reality to fit nice and tidy into a few
lines and shapes and plots. It feels good.

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