For that sweet spot, sock-hop, MTV part of the population, summer has been culturally dogeared as being the season of escapism. Summer has been sponsored by neon clothing, 900 dB unintelligible music, and drinks bought for you by that dubious looking potential pelvic conspirator at the other table. The urge to be alone, at home in thought, is frowned upon. Thoughtfulness, allied with an articulate tongue, is enough to kick any kid to the proverbial curb as far as social relationships are concerned. One, looking up from his book through the dust-filled air of his study and out past the window that places on display for him a world replete with sunglasses, boomboxes, and scantily clad women, may very well feel as if he is the one who has gotten things wrong. The fact that this erroneous assumption, rooted either in a lack of faith regarding one’s vocation or in a young man’s vaguely adventurous naivety, has like a Siren’s Song plunged many a would be intellectual into the salt waters of mediocrity is lamentable.

The Hedonists are large in numbers and loud in voice. This camp of constant stimulation has pop radio stations and cable television to dull, with sedating noise and subsequent commercials, whatever hint of longing pricks their minds. There shall be, for them, always another EDM concert to attend or another beach house party to drop by or another selfie to take. Where shall we few, we perplexed yet happy few, we of the divergent party run when the winds of dissatisfaction or fear approach? Where is our patron saint then? Well, one clue to you is that, like most saints, he’s dead. And there’s a bittersweet tinge to that fact; since our representative is dead, his helpful hand is felt more urgently, more intensely, through his works, though we may never know him as a man. To quote him on the matter: “Loving somebody who’s absent….Their presence didn’t satisfy but you feel their absence so much more keenly. And how the pain is more exquisite than the pleasure always is, because it’s got that keener edge.” Virgil with a mouthful of tobacco, David Foster Wallace.

Now now, to be fair, I’ll give the incredulous and dissenting reader the opportunity to respond:

[a kerfuffle is heard upstairs. the sound of a door being whipped open and slammed shut, the sound of feet made heavy with rage rumbling down the stairs. a knock at my door is heard, and our hypothetical reader barges in] Well, hey now, what’s the big idea? So what if some people, who have just about every single American iota of a right to pursue happiness as Y-O-U, decide to spend their time doing this or that? What’s that your business? Just because YOU decide it’s empty or whatever, get lost! I mean, Jesus man, who are you, to decide what’s good or what’s not good or how other people live their lives? Does some girl going to a rave force you to put down your book or whatever? You’re just plain-old-no-doubt-about-it-Jesus-in-the-Garden-of-Gethsemane-King-David-composing-Psalm 51 feeling sorry for yourself. And besides, your little intellectual man is just as bad as the fun-lovers; he’s playing the game of escapism too. You oughta wake up and smell the Starbucks Dark Roast, amigo — you’re no better than the rest of us.

Well, be that as it may, the blunt truth, my dear angry non-existent opponent, is that the prevalance of such forms of escapism hurt everybody. While it’s true that, sure, everything we turn to for pleasure is some sort of escape, it’s just as true that some fun is more humanistically nutritious than others. Quoted by David Lipsky in his book-length interview, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, our spectacle-bearing friend Mr. Wallace put it like this:

I think it’s got something to do with, that we’re just — we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there’s some kinds of escape — in a sort of Flannery O’Connerish way — that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more. And then there are other kinds that say, “Give me seven dollars, and in return I will make you forget your name is Dave Wallace, that you have a pimple on your cheek, and that your gas bill is due.”

And that that’s fine, in low doses. But that there’s something about the machinery of our relationship to it that makes low doses — we don’t stop at low doses.

What about that Swedish House Mafia single returns you to yourself in any meaningful way? Be honest with me here — more importantly, with yourself. Yes, alright, I’m not asking the radio to ban all soundbites that extend beyond the realm of Mozart or Mingus. But whatever else this post is about, it is about learning to carefully choose how you’ll have fun, through which exit you’ll escape yourself. For your own benefit, don’t binge on bad culture during the summer because it’s expected of you. You’re better than that.

Wasting time at some social event half-heartedly attended, browsing the one room in the house that contains books as you overhear handsome boys outside on the freshly cut grass act ridiculous for an audience of expectant girls, upon whom various contradictory expectations have been placed, it would not be transgressive for you to wonder: What the hell am I doing here? The solitary individual feels inflicted upon him the summertime obligation to participate in performative sociability. Now, nobody here is arguing that social events themselves are worthy of disdain — if that were the case, next paragraph I’ll be telling Bob Cratchit to work through Christmas. No, that is not it at all. If you do find yourself enthusiastically in the company of like-minded and intriguing individuals, by all means, let the walls of detachment melt. Be sociable. What I’m currently condemning isn’t voluntarily undertaken sociability, but that vile performative kind. And I know that you know exactly what I mean by that — parties that people attend in order to be seen there by others and to eavesdrop in return, parties during which each comment is clothed in either the banal neutrality of small talk or the prickling cold of insincere calculation, parties after which each comment is, on the ride home, anesthetized, dissected, and examined for malicious subtextual meaning. You look around at a party like this and see everybody there and realize that nobody is really there.

While not confined to summer alone, this type of painted-smile exercise is excruciatingly, finger-nails-on-chalkboard painfully, prevalent during this season.

Here again, Wallace has stood before the same coin-operated pair of binoculars that we find ourselves, horrified and stuck, peering through. The novelist had a phrase about New York City that one would be wise to remember whenever in circumstances of substance-less exchange. When considering the Big Apple, Wallace would say “I just think of this enormous hiss of egos at various stages of inflation and deflation.” Egos, not friends, not individuals. Let’s straighten our ties and realize that we’ve become too old for balloon themed parties. One should not be afraid to refrain from engaging in the aforementioned farcical interactions — in this case, being the party of No is the truest affirmation of vivacity, life in all its shades and hues. Wouldn’t you rather be a happy man at home than a schmuck abroad?

Continuing on our tour through the circus of summer archetypes, we find at our next stop the misogynist, the sex-shark. Equipped with the evolutionary tools of hair gel and tank top, barbell and cellphone, his purpose may only be defined in a coital context. Talking to women, he feigns masculinity, self-possession, and confidence so as to manipulate and conjugate. Talking to friends [all of his “real” friends are men], he reduces all romantic involvements to their sexual square root, enthusiastically minimizing women to the point at which only their more protrusive traits are found worthy of discussion. All efforts are spent on earning the credentials needed for sex and all sex is but instrumental to the attainment of temporary social status.

Here again, the culprit is this profoundly wrong-headed emphasis on meaningless social stature. In fact, romance is an exquisitiely anti-social sphere; in the other person, you lose yourself only to find yourself again. That is why secrecy is rightfully treasured in sincerely loving relationships; with her, you feel as though the world has no business with either of you tonight. Juxtapose this line of thought with the scene of sex-sharks vulgarly recording their one-night engagements on video so as to present the result to their friends, like cavemen who drag trophy kills back to the hut, boasting inarticulately about their latest kill. I don’t have to tell you that this behavior isn’t love. It’s honestly not even sex. It’s something vaguely selfish and outside either concept. And, carried to its extreme, this behavior ceases to be about social position.

Though you may obtain medals from overgrown and polo’d circles for acting in imitation of the sex-shark, such commendations fade faster than light from an autumnal sky. That is why this particular personality needs an infinite amount of “conquests”; if the pleasures of love are spoiled by indiscretion, then he seeks not to preserve what he has but to find something new. Anew and anew, he pursues the same old thing. The truly frightening, bone battering, hope eradicating, horrible thing is, is that soon enough it doesn’t even become about social climbing or the feeling of belonging within a group. To use people over and over again in such a short-sighted way works a terrible effect in the human heart; you forge something terrible in your soul’s smithy, the lazy conscience of an apathetic race.

Surely that can’t be true though! Right? Right? It’s a nice little, “put-the-scare-in-them, teach-that-boy-a-lesson-by-George” moral parable, but it certainly cannot bear substantial ethical weight. Right, Mike? Wrong. Sorry, wrong. In fact, in his Infinite Jest, our bandana-wearing warrior approaches this problem himself in the character of Orin. Here follows a depiction of Orin, the tennis prodigy protagonist’s football-punter older brother, as he lurches into the depths of capacious sex (quoted in its entirety because, well, it’s just that good):

They have shifted into a sexual mode. Her lids flutter; his close. There’s a concentrated tactile languor. She is left-handed. It is not about consolation. They start the thing with each other’s buttons. It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject’s fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender, that he is both offense and defense and she neither, nothing but this one second’s love of her, of-her, spinning as it arcs his way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that for one second she loves him too much to stand it, that she must (she feels) have him, must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone: that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets — that there is now inside her a vividness vacummed of all but his name: O., O. That he is the One.

(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, now, special and only, the One would be not he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered and will never again.)

And about contempt, it is about a kind of hatred, too, along with the hope and need. Because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes out disguised as a contempt he disguises in the tender attention with which he does the thing with her buttons, touches the blouse as if it too were part of her, and him. As if it could feel. They have stripped each other neatly. Her mouth is glued to his mouth; she is his breath, his eyes shut against the sight of hers. They are stripped in the mirror and she, in a kind of virtuoso jitterbug that is 100% New World, uses O.’s uneven shoulders as support to leap and circle his neck with her legs, and she arches her back and is supported, her weight, by just one hand at the small of her back as he bears her to bed as would a waiter a tray.

Within this world of instrumental sex, whose effect is transient and draining, being with somebody else turns into something more lonely than solitude. It is no accident that Orin has a moment of comraidery with an inanimate object, the blouse. “As if it could feel” refers not only to the article of clothing but also to Orin himself. Orin has been doing this for years and at a certain point it’s no longer about finding yourself within faux communal parameters; it’s about not being anything because you cannot bear the responsibility of existing among other people. It’s going through the Exit door into an even more repugnant room.