A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read

Like I Blister in the Sun

For You, The Stars
Chapter Nine: Just Like Heaven
Installment 1

I don’t know how I did it back then. Out until all hours of the night and then up at 7 or so bright as a bunny to drag my ass downtown to my meaningless job. I’d walk down Irving, freshly shaved, to grab some breakfast before hopping on the N-Judah with the other working stiffs. If I was running a little early, I’d stop into Art’s Café, almost literally a hole in the wall… just one short hallway shaped short-order diner with a counter and stubby little stools in a row. Inevitably, I’d order the $2.22 breakfast: two eggs, two pancakes, and two bacon or sausage. I always got the bacon and I always had the eggs scrambled. They made crispy bacon without me having to ask them to.

Most days, though, I’d be running a little late so I’d duck into the bagel shop and get one toasted with cream cheese to eat surreptitiously on the streetcar, or to wolf down at the stop while waiting for the next one to round onto Ninth ave. Often, when I opened my mouth for the first bite of the morning, I’d feel this cramp in my jaw. I’d realize I hadn’t said a word to anyone yet, hadn’t even opened my mouth wide. The other gomers in my house were either unemployed or self-employed or grad students and none of them had to be up as early as me, at least not most days.

Every time that jaw thing happened, it suprised me, though. Just like often I’d get to the office and want to wash the grease off my hands before settling down for work. There was a deep utility sink in the little kitchen area near the studio I was attached to. I’d lean over and turn both faucet handles and the moment my hands went into the stream of water I’d feel this strange crackly sensation of dryness in my upper back, along my spine. I had no idea what caused this but all I could guess was that my touching the moisture in one area somehow made my brain aware of the dry skin somewhere else.

Back at my desk, I sat and put on my walkman while futzing around with a spreadsheet or poking around aimlessly in DOS, getting the hang of the PC. I’d never used an IBM machine before this job. When I was in college the first Macs came out. I couldn’t afford one myself but Bo had one and sometimes he let me write my papers on it. Suddenly, all the papers people used to type on IBM selectrics were being “word processed” and then printed out on these crappy dot-matrix printers. People were playing with font size and margins to make their papers seem more substantial, which I think fooled exactly no one. Suddenly you’d see the same three or four typefaces: a Helvetica knockoff called Geneva, a Times Roman knockoff called New York, a strange computer-robot font called Chicago, and a ridiculous punky “ransom note” font that mostly ended up being used on the ubiquitous handbills and flyers posted all over campus.

The best part was just being able to edit a line that had already passed. None of this whiteout or papertape shit. That definitely saved time. I was usually up writing papers late Thursday night when they were due the next day. In fact my pattern had been to leave it till the last minute, try to pull an all-nighter, and then realize around 3 am that I was fooling myself and wasn’t able to think straight. So I’d go to bed and the next day go in and beg my TA for an extension. Usually I’d be allowed another week, which I’d blow off to play pool and get high and sit around my eating club smoking cigarettes and pontification about philosophy and eastern european politics until once again I was trying to write a stupid one- or two-page paper in the middle of the night before it was due.

It only took my three and a half years but when I was a senior I finally figured out the concept of the “all-dayer.” I still left my papers till the last minute, but now I’d get a good night’s sleep on Thursday night, get up early on Friday, go eat breakfast, and then bang out the paper in about three hours or so, usually finishing by around noon. I’d eat lunch, proofread the thing, and hand it in.

What forced me to figure this out was having to write a thesis. Just about everyone at Princeton, except some engineers, had to write a senior thesis. This is what other schools called an honors thesis when it was optional, but there was no honor in it for us. Just an obligation. You’d write one or two shorter research papers, called Junior Papers, to ramp up the year before and then your senior year your thesis would take the place of one class each semester. Some people turned their junior papers into the first chapter of their thesis, but I didn’t. I only wrote one, on Hume. I took his theory of induction and fed it back recursively into itself to show that he was using induction to assert that we all used induction to make assumptions like that the sun was going to come up tomorrow. Philosophy professors love that kind of shit.

My thesis was on a totally different subject, though, so the Hume paper didn’t figure into it. I was writing about philosophy of language under the tutelage of a scary-brilliant visiting professor from Scotland, Tristram Fox. He had these scary bags under his eyes like he never slept and he had that uncanny ability to make the people he was lecturing too smarter, temporarily. While he was talking my mind made these fantastic leaps. I could follow him into the crazy-making thickets of Wittgenstein and Hegel and Quine and come out unscathed, believing I understood it all.

Afterward, though, I’d find I had retained almost none of it. I was like Bones on that Star Trek episode where he has to sew Spock’s brain back on. They put the helmet on him to feed the knowledge into his brain and he starts saying in his broad southern accent, “A chald could do it! A chald could do it!” Then later on it starts wearing off while he’s still got his arms wrist deep in Spock’s opened brainpan. That confused look on his face when he realizes he’s in way over his head is the way I felt when I tried to remember what Tristram had taught me that day about meaning and referents and logic and uncertainty.

Fox was also strangely humorless. In one roundtable conversation about the typical things philosophy classes talk about, thing like imaginary colors called grue or what it’s like to be a bat, or in this case the difference between naming something and the thing itself, I was reminded of an old silly riddle I’d once heard that seemed relevant, so I raised my hand to mention it.

“It’s like that joke,” I said: ‘How many legs does a lamb have if you call a tail a leg?’” The other students just stared at me for a beat. “The answer is four,” I said. “Because ‘calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.’”

Fox cocked his head to one side for a moment, as if puzzled, and said, “That’s a joke?”

Having to write a thesis meant that I couldn’t procrastinate as completely as I was used to. It taught me that to complete a large project meant doing a little bit of it every day. There was just no way to stay up late one night and write a hundred-page paper. So that’s when I invented the all-dayer. I’d party in the evening but get to bed by around midnight. I’d get up early enough to grab some breakfast and then come back to the study carrel in the basement of my dorm, Edwards Hall, named after Jonathan Edwards, the scary sinner-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God suspended like a spider by a thread over the fires of Hell, Scottish preacher who came to Princeton to straighten it out back in the day and promptly died before getting anything done.

I’d work on my thesis, either reading research, typing up notes, or writing drafts of chapters, for three or four hours and then break for lunch. After lunch I’d work for another three or four hours and then go grab dinner. After dinner we’d set up a boom box in the living room of our club and dance to stuff like the Violent Femmes. We had these great uninhibited spontaneous dance parties. Everyone dancing with each other in a mass. People up on couches and tables. This one tall guy doing his robotic tai chi like moves no matter what the beat of the song we were listening too.

After that I was done for the day. I wouldn’t try to work in the evening after dinner and I wouldn’t stay up late to work. Whatever I got done in the daylight hours had to suffice.

That spring I had my other classes down to a minimum: a painting class that met three times a week, a writing class that met once a week, and a Latin class where I was trying to get my language requirement finished. I was in with a bunch of sophomores who were trying to fake their way through the translations. I was past all that. I went to the library, got out a decent translation, worked my way through the assignment, noting the ablative absolutes and the other grammatical hooks that the TA was likely to quiz us on, went to class prepared, and sailed through: an unusual experience for me to say the least, given that I’d spent most of high school and college trying to get by on glib bullshit and half-assed efforts.

The all-dayer felt like a revelation to me. Little did I know that in the post-college world it was called “having a job.”