I know I’m jumping the gun as these things tend to come in threes (whereas I tend to come in banana peels with the fruit scooped out and a couple of dollops of Noxema tossed in), but a couple of awesome people died this weekend and you should know about it.

David Foster Wallace

During that dreadful decade that capped off the last century, David Foster Wallace was the de facto poster boy for Generation X post-modern literature — perhaps because of his grunge beard, gang-banger bandana and hesher locks, or maybe because he turned out the be the only one of his ilk who could actually write (I’m looking at you David Eggers). Sure his work was sardonic, snarky, cynical, gimmicky (hello footnotes!), detachedly ironic and slathered in MySpace-level narcissism. But unlike Eggers et al, DFW was a master of the language and could turn phrases like they were 14-year-old runaways and his name was Iceberg Slim. His pièce de résistance, and the book he’s best known for, was the massive and possibly prophetic tome Infinite Jest – which is probably in my Top 5 as far as non-Kirk/Spock-slashfiction-literature goes.

DFW’s wife found him Saturday swinging from a rope, dead from a self-inflicted “fuck you” to his own success. While he wasn’t cool enough to use a gun like Robert E. Howard, Wallace at least picked a somewhat manly way to off himself. This was no pills n’ booze “cry for help” gone wrong (cough*LEDGER*cough). You do it with a rope because you know what you want and you know how to get there. OR because you’re into auto-erotic asphyxiation. He was 46.

Richard Wright

As anyone who’s ever done hallucinogens can tell you, Pink Floyd was one of the most important rock bands to emerge from the psychedelic 60s. Like DFW, their work was complex, dense, darkly humorous, frustratingly diverse and yet still managed to cull a good deal of mainstream appreciation for reasons that escape fruitful analysis (heh, I just said “fruit” “full” and “anal”). Pink Floyd’s keyboardist and founding member Richard Wright was dispatched to the Great Gig in the Sky today at the age of 65 after a long battle with the Big C.

My prediction for the third peg in this celebrity death triumvirate? Tony Danza. Not because Danza was nearly as awesome or creatively vital to our society as DFW and Richard Wright were, but because fuck Tony Danza.

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