It’s an ungodly hour, 4 am. Even the heat hasn’t come on yet so it’s just me and the coffee maker, the odd mechanical sounds of the house idling. But I love this time in the dark to sit with a candle and slip into the day like a ghost.

Sure it’s a great song but no one should have to hear “Your Kiss is on My List” for weeks on end playing in their head. Should I see a doctor? It’s happened before, different songs, like The Little River Band’s “Reminiscing.” These aren’t ear worms you’d expect in 2025. I wash it out with the overnight DJ who’s on every Friday 1 – 5 am. There’s a kind of intimacy, just you and a familiar voice in the dark. I could be anywhere now it’s so exotic but the best part is I’m home.

So I’ve gone back to some favorite times this week, like the diner in Spokane where I last heard that Little River Band song (if I was talking to a doctor, that’s where the problem started). I go flittering around like that, Walter Mitty or Ebenezer Scrooge, ogling my life through a film.

You can tell the overnight DJ is gearing up to leave his shift as we get closer to 5. Counting off the songs: Leonard Cohen, Death Cab for Cutie, “Victoria” by The Kinks. Who can stay in bed when there’s music like this?!

Yesterday I was thinking about the torture scene at the end of the book Infinite Jest, how distressing it is, the song he pairs with that scene: one by Wings, and why did he do that? I know the author was a fan of David Lynch—he liked Lynch’s ability to combine the banal with the surreal, to bring out the creepy in the commonplace. I never knew the scene was an homage to the end of A Clockwork Orange either. Not a book or film I need to revisit. But I love when authors give thanks like that.

Last fall I started watching interviews with David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, who died by suicide in 2008. I sometimes hear music or see something on TV (like Severance) and wish he were alive to experience it. I half-imagine talking to him about it, and what he’d think. You spend enough time with the voice of a writer and you feel you know them. It’s an intimate thing. I cried thinking about his pain, watching him on TV. I even started growing my hair out and wearing a bandanna like he did but then realized that was pathetic, and now there’s only one person I can talk to about him, and he lives in Germany. In the early morning at this ungodly hour I can let myself cry by accessing that part of me that feels the author’s pain, I cry for him.

And maybe that’s what artists do, they reach across time and space to make themselves felt.

I don’t get it in most of the books I read but I must not be reading the right ones or I have strange taste. It’s risky tethering yourself to books with torture scenes like that. Or tortured artists whose pain gets in you. But I like to think I can help take some of it away by listening and that’s what we do, that’s humanity.

These songs are in my head because the algorithm wants to know me. I prefer the DJ.

March 21, 2025

Categories: Creative Nonfiction

Tags: art, David Foster Wallace, identity, journal writing