Daniel LaPointe

[Author’s Note: Like “Journal Session With Low Vitamin D: In Which…”, this piece has footnotes that take some time to navigate, especially if one watches all of the linked videos. Though the reader is of course free to do as they choose, my recommendation is to: do a sweep through the main piece; then read the first six footnotes and associated sub-footnotes (i.e., the footnotes for the main piece), watching the videos as they come up; then read the “Note on Influences” in tandem with those footnotes in the usual way (i.e., reading each footnote the moment it is first encountered rather than waiting).]

  • Having finished two summer courses last week, I’ve been given roughly three weeks of downtime until the onset of the fall semester. As I was just approved for on-campus housing, the primary anticipated stressor for this period (hunting for an apartment in Cambridge) has vanished, and I’m left with little to do.

  • So the past few days I’ve been sifting through a Google Drive that contains documents from throughout my life. As I’m something of a hoarder in both the physical and digital sense, this drive contains things like: a scan of “My Writing Journal Book 3” from first grade; a 23-slide PowerPoint titled “Battle Strategies” made in 2009 detailing what I believed to be optimal tactics for winning a protracted fifth-grade snowball war; a 55-page-long (!) screenplay written on my spare time in eighth grade for a movie that never got made titled Night with the Pembletons; 22 scanned pages of journalling from 2014 in which it is made very clear that David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” speech had an impact on 16-year-old me; an abandoned r/circlejerk post from 2021 in which I spoofed a “feels kinda racist” Reddit cliche that heavy metal fans are more well-behaved than rap fans, a cliche parroted all over the place in the wake of the AstroWorld crowd crush; etc..1

  • So there’s a lot of stuff on the Drive – in fact, pretty much everything I can get on there, including old homework assignments.2 The result is a panoply of self-contained universes – works of art that set up and just as quickly take down internally consistent ways of knowing the world. Looking over this chaotic heap, I am reminded of Walt Whitman’s line that we “contain multitudes.”3 That is, I have grown somewhat “postmodern” about the self in that I have little hope I will ever believe a narrative threaded through these disparate elements.

  • Now, are there at least some life narratives I find myself falling back on? Sure. A classic one is “the birth of the cognitively modern self,” in which the grandiose mysticism of 2012 gives way to a grounded Enlightenment rationalism in the spring of 2013, the dividing line being my decision to eat KFC instead of pizza on Good Friday when at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s food court.4 Another narrative treats a trip to Disney World as “the swan song of childhood” – the onset of puberty, the passing of my grandmother, and my first taking the SAT (in seventh grade…5) happening in fairly rapid succession after that. Then you’ve got a more recent narrative that 2022 was a “nuclear winter” following a mess at Harvard – a dismal period that saw a true embracing of personal responsibility on the tail-end, and a newfound suspicion of the field of psychology as a whole.6

  • But I’m starting to become tired of narratives like this. Instead of solipsistic coming-of-age stories, what I really want are stories focused on others. I want something with depth to it, you know? Perhaps this is what marriage and children provide – a flesh-and-blood grounding in the world and an inherent stakes to everything that renders all that comes before mere shadows upon the wall of the cave.

  • This isn’t the first time I’ve come to associate document sorting with the thought of children. In fact, I reckon my future children (should they ever come to exist) are the intended beneficiaries of this act of sorting. How surreal would it be to know, as a child, exactly what your parents were up to when they were your age – to be able to quickly determine what they looked like and what they sounded like and what they thought at the drop of a hat? Though it may sound a smidgen obsessive for a parent to construct such an archive – and though a good many children wouldn’t find such an archive to be particularly interesting – it wouldn’t surprise me if this sort of thing starts to become more common with time. That is, we are reaching a point where the Hyper-Documented are starting to have kids with one another. The result, assuming the records have been meticulously enough maintained, will be sort of like one of those race-against-your-ghost things in Mario Kart. “Hold on. 13 years and 8 months… did Dad have a deeper voice by this point?”

  • So maybe I don’t need to worry about overarching narratives. Just working out the chronology and getting everything on the Drive7 should be good enough.

  • Let the audience pick out the patterns.





Note on Influences: In a prior entry, I called this section the “Influences Disclaimer,” as if to distance myself from what I had written. But that is not the goal here. I’m just genuinely interested in if there’s some sort of connection between diet, sleep, and whatnot and the sort of written work I produce.8 Here we have:

  • Excellent sleep the night before writing the above, 8 hours and 40 minutes per the records (yes, I do sleep tracking, and I have for quite a while now…), this following a string of three nights averaging 8 hours and 35 minutes. So very good sleep on the whole (not a surprise, with the lack of obligations this week).

  • This sleep went from roughly 4:00 AM to roughly 12:40 PM, consistent with a night owl pattern of mine. Very good blackout curtains (complete with a scheme involving duct-taping the curtains to the wall to block ALL light) make this possible.

  • Lunch was a turkey and cheese sandwich with lettuce. Pretzels on the side with chocolate oat milk to drink. Eaten shortly after waking. Took a men’s gummy multivitamin with this.

  • Exercise included a 3-mile walk in the local Pine Bush Preserve starting at around 6:30 PM in overcast weather. Stopped for a half-hour-long chat on the phone with my father partway through the walk.

  • Some degree of pre-occupation with my cousin’s website. The guy is four years older than me, I haven’t interacted with him too much in my life, and I just now learn he’s got: an album on Apple Music, several publications in left-wing media outlets, and an appearance on Sam Seder’s podcast. I listened to his album in a bit of a “holy shit” moment.

  • Dinner was salmon with asparagus and microwaved Uncle Ben’s long grain and wild rice. Regular milk (Lactaid brand for my stomach) to drink. Composition of the above (and below?) last night was punctuated by asparagus-smelling piss breaks.

  • Snacked on Pepperidge Farm Pirouettes9 throughout the day, a source of sugar and a likely source of small amounts of caffeine via the chocolate.

  • Got some feedback from a friend of mine about some video game-style music I had written/performed and shared with him.10

Notes

1. This one’s short enough and of general enough interest to drop here. Enjoy.

2. And this isn’t even considering the Photos and Videos folders, the latter of which contains literal digitized VHS tapesa from forever ago.

a. I will add that professional VHS-to-mp4 conversions are expensive, but completely worth it. Anyone who has such tapes lying around ought to get them converted while the tech to do so is still available.

3. Quoting Whitman is very 10th Grade, as is usage of the phrase “seize the day,”a which makes a sincere appearance in the aforementioned bit of 2014 journalling.

a. Am I the only one who still remembers this commercial? Also from 2014. It’s like there was something in the water back then…i ii

i. In past bouts of journalling (not (yet) posted here), I’ve identified this vibe as the “Late Obama Era Positivity” (LOEP) – a sort of unbridled exuberance exemplified by Ted Talks, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, YouTube Rewind not sucking, Hamilton-mania, and the Obergefell decision.A This video in my head-cannon, marks the end of the LOEP.

A. Other things popping into my head that feel more tenuously connected but still kinda reek of that period include: the Daft Punk album Random Access Memories; this song; the Malcom Butler interception; and the Fitbit IPO and the release of the Apple Watch both being in 2015.

ii. An alternative explanation is that overly serious, aggressively diurnal, “isn’t existence just so fucking awesome”-type commercials have by all means been alive and well, and that I only paid attention to this one in 2014 because we had watched Dead Poets Society in English class that year.

4. For those not in the know, “don’t eat meat on Good Friday” is a Catholic thing. So opting for the KFC instead of the cheese pizza – in a building that serves as a testament to mankind’s ingenuity and his literal foray into the heavens, no less – amounted to a rejection of God.

5. I don’t mean to brag. I just want to note that pushing a kid academically at an age like that can quickly induce adult levels of work obsession.

6. “The field of psychology rests on the assumption that human beings can be effectively modeled as deterministic systems. This assumption is fundamentally unbecoming of human dignity, and the entire discipline is to be held at arm’s length because of this.”

7. Scans of independent mathematical investigations starting in 10th grade feel like a priority. Those are still just an enormous heap of papers.

8. A far cry from my rant about psychology in Footnote 5, but oh well. Curious people are gonna be curious.

9. These things. Rather expensive for junk food, I might add.

Phone image

10. Might as well link it. Here you go. Composed on and off throughout 2020 and performed in 2021.