Forrest Richard Betts turns 70 today. “Ramblin’ Man” is one of those songs we have all heard too many times to have any kind of valid opinion on (I have finally come around, but I can see the thinking behind all the other opinions, although in the end what does it matter? Dickey Betts don’t care what you think and we are all gonna wind up in the ground regardless of our postion on “Ramblin’ Man” anyway.) — “No matter how you feel about the song ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ remember that nobody else is interested and someday you will die” is a good approximation of my philosophy of life at this point; if you are interested in following my teachings please drop me a line at our general address — but this here is probably unfamiliar enough to some of you that you can listen to it without a ton of distaste, if that is indeed how you listen to “Ramblin’ Man,” which I should once again point out in no way changes the fact that death lurks around each corner waiting for the perfect moment to pop out and snatch you up into its dark and terminal embrace. Anyway, happy birthday Dickey Betts!

Jason Segel is going to play David Foster Wallace in some biopic that stems from David Lipsky’s road trip biography. (A movie that will be shown on the Sundance channel once in 2016.) Some people are upset! How will we all move on?

Hard to imagine Jason Segel playing someone quite as brilliant as DFW.

— Matthew Gilbert (@MatthewGilbert) December 12, 2013

Jason Segel is playing David Foster Wallace in an upcoming biopic. Seriously? Was Franco not available?

— Charlie Kaufman Bio (@dalexanderchild) December 12, 2013

Look on the bright side: Segel is better than Franco.

— Jason Diamond (@imjasondiamond) December 12, 2013

this dfw doppleganger exists and you’re really going to cast Jason Segel? http://t.co/UBhsK0lmTu

— Elizabeth Lopatto (@mslopatto) December 12, 2013

To be fair, Segel as DFW creates nice tonal consistency for the letter-writing Rainn-Wilson-as-Franzen cameo you know you want

— Nitsuh Abebe ንፁህ አበበ (@ntabebe) December 12, 2013

I love David Foster Wallace and I love Jason Segel but nope nope nope nope nope nope

— Jordan Ellenberg (@JSEllenberg) December 12, 2013

by Hayley Terris

I discovered news of Paul Walker’s passing the way we all discover celebrity deaths these days. My friend Rick had posted a filtered picture of a candlelit vigil with the description, “Here’s a shitty photo of the impromptu Paul Walker memorial service at the house that, apparently, the first Fast & Furious movie was shot at in Echo Park. It was weird.” He added a hashtag: #RIPPaulWalker.

My first thought was, “Aww man, Paul Walker was so hot. He’s dead?” Paul Walker! The apex of high school goy fantasies, the chiseled matinee prince of my 90s adolescence. The non-Dawson in “Varsity Blues.” The only man ever who could get away with wearing frosted tips and still look hot.

My second thought was, “Uh, that’s my block.”

Just then, I heard the tremulous roars of eight be-spoilered cars outside my home as a caravan of souped-up cars pulled up, double parked, and started taking pictures outside my neighbor’s house. This continued for the next 48 hours. Indeed, it was weird.

I now live next door to the unofficial Paul Walker memorial, an impromptu shrine dedicated by a smattering of car enthusiasts and mega Fast and Furious fans looking for a place to mourn the loss of their favorite actor.

Yes. Paul Walker was very hot. Again, he pulled off frosted tips with a suaveness that Guy Fieri could only dream of. And, according to the public outpouring of love from his famous friends on Twitter, he had a reputation of being a chill, sweet, and incredibly generous guy. It may not have been so obvious in life that he had a massive following — not to me at least. But Paul Walker is adored.

“He was like this generation’s Steve McQueen. He was the Wayne Gretzky of cars,” said Jacqueline, a visiting emotional Fast fan with a thick French accent and an effusive passion about the deceased. She’d trekked to this nouveau mecca with her two sons.

To me, Walker’s most memorable role was as a high school doucher who bet on the Pygmalionization-potential of the town dweeb and then tried to date rape her at prom. To be fair, I have not seen most of the films Paul Walker made in the last decade. I got through exactly 43% of the original Fast & Furious before dial-flipping away one lazy summer day. Now this is something I cannot admit near my home.

The location next door provided all the exteriors — and some interiors — for the home of Vin Diesel’s Fast character, and out back it has some kind of badass garage. It’s a sweet craftsman with a killer view of the downtown L.A. skyline. Now its front sidewalk is lined with prayer candles, teddy bears, a balloon, signs, flowers, and even a picture of the last photo Instagrammed of Paul Walker, supposedly just thirty minutes before his death.

Mateo, the 15-year-old who lives in the house, was out front, barefoot, as a group of nine people and a baby ambled up. “Last night, there was like a ton of people,” he told me. “People came and had beers and put out candles. Everybody was here. It was crazy. I was in bed and then I heard all these cars just pulling up.” According to Mateo and his dad, the cars and visitors just kept on coming. Hundreds of them a day.

A fresh group of visitors asked to take a group shot in front of the house. Mateo agreed and collected handfuls of cameras and cell phones as the mourners smiled and posed on the front steps.

Jacqueline, her two sons, and their friend huddled around me as more people filled the sidewalk.

“He’s our idol,” her oldest son Teddy said. “We know that outside of film. He is an enthusiast, a hard core enthusiast of cars, just like we are. So to us, it’s like we’ve lost a best friend, we’ve lost a brother. It’s hard.”

Teddy said the first film is what ignited his passion for cars — “and now, over ten years later, that’s our passion for life. We breathe it and live it every day. It’s like, we live that life. We wrench on our cars every night. We go out and drive. It’s crazy. It’s become our life.”

Jacqueline’s a car exporter, and she cites the Fast movies as the catalyst for the avalanche in interest in the car world over the last decade. “After the movie, it exploded,” she said. “Businesses would triple because every young kid wanted to be Paul Walker.”

“Most of us go to the racetrack over the weekend,” Teddy said. “We’ll go race our cars at the track and it was not uncommon to see him at the racetrack driving, in the pit, changing his tires, checking on his engine. That’s why among us, it’s such a shock because he was really one of us.”

“Do you know all these people?” I asked, and motioned to the small mob on the sidewalk, placing trinkets, lighting candles. It turned out they’re actually all strangers, united in mourning by a Facebook event that Teddy created: they made a caravan from Neptune’s Net, a restaurant at the county line in Malibu and a Fast film location, to here.

“These are people who’d never hang out,” Teddy said. “We’ve been brought together. It’s a really diverse group.”

“We’re from all over,” Jacqueline said. “We’re drifters. We drift. But there are AMC — American Muscle Cars — here. Japanese Domestics. Stancers.” She inflected each group individually so I would know that there’s a difference between “drifting” and “stancing” and that this is all very “Sharks” and “Jets” and I probably don’t get the nuances at all. Which is true.

I do understand the compulsion to collectively mourn after a tragedy and am legitimately moved by Walker’s impact on this community. But what befuddles me is “why here?” Paul Walker died in Valencia, 32 miles from here. Paul Walker’s character didn’t even live in this house; they just shot some scenes here. This is just one of dozens of locations where he shot over the span of his career.

Why here? And how long was this all going to last?

I asked this of Jenny Pachucki, an oral historian and assistant curator at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, as well as Adjunct Professor of history at Wagner College in New York. She’s an expert in this type of public mourning.

“Temporary memorials are interesting because they really are grassroots efforts that are democratic spaces; anyone can come and contribute what they like wherever they feel like leaving it,” she said.

My little street has become a memorial zone as a matter of accessibility and convenience. “After the September 11 attacks, Union Square — located miles from Ground Zero — became a locus for temporary memorials,” she said. “It was a central, public location that was accessible to the public in a way that Ground Zero was not and it had a history of public gathering. As with the case with the Paul Walker crash site, it is probably not an easy place for the public to access (nor particularly safe) and while it is significant in that it is the site he died, the crash site holds very little symbolism to the life that he lived.”

“The notion of media attention,” she said, “especially in a circumstance like this, cannot be discounted either. I think these sorts of sites are also conducive to ‘dark tourism’ and allow the public access and to feel like they are insiders on the life of the person who was killed.”

Jenny also mentioned that the lifelines (no pun intended, but I’ll take it anyway) of these shrines are fleeting: “The items left are not meant to last or withstand the elements and the memorial will naturally have run its course as the things brought to the memorial — flowers, candles, etc. — do too.”

So our Echo Park car enthusiast mecca will soon shrivel up like the wilting carnations on the sidewalk. But not if the uber fans have anything to do with it. To them, Walker’s death has a deeper implication — both for them and the box office. Universal was still in production of the seventh installment of the franchise and it’s unclear if Walker had actually finished his participation in the film. There’s talk from some of the mourners that he was supposed to do pick-up shots in the New Year. There’s talk from others that the entire movie will have to be rewritten to reflect his death — a 90-minute, nitrous-filled, snappy-dialogue-laden “In Memoriam” to the character who served as the linchpin of the franchise. This shit is, like, heavy.

“All the French fans want us to do a thing to put somewhere in his honor,” Teddy said. “It’s, like, an international loss.”

“A permanent memorial?” I asked. “Where would you put it.”

“Here,” he said. Teddy looked over at the homeowner, who gave a thumbs up. Uh oh.

Hayley Terris is a writer and producer who does many things on the interwebs. Some of them are interesting. Most of them are embarrassing.

★★★★★ Dark figures scurried across Broadway down in the brown light of a morning without sunrise, activity in the stillness like the audience unwrapping cough drops and turning off cell phones. The baton and… snow! A swirling vista of it, all at once, a multitude of flakes turning everything pale gray. Heavy and then, in the next movement, heavier — undifferentiable now, the morning turning twilight blue. Flakes stuck to the window, melted, and trickled darkly down. Now the nearest flakes were tiny, like a darting swarm of insects; now they were fluffy, slow-floating shapes like cones or bird’s nests. The banging noises from the construction site below carried on through it all, while the arborwork where the next floor would go was a field of white bars. One movement followed another, the waves of snow gradually diminishing and the spaces between growing clearer and brighter. By midafternoon (by the clock; late afternoon by the allotment of daylight), the storm had passed, with no real accumulation or lasting annoyance. The cold was sharp, but the wet ground wasn’t freezing into slickness. The clouds assumed a gentle and puffy aspect, with blue coming through them. Some teenager, escaping high school, was able to scrape up a snowball’s worth of slush from somewhere, to throw at another teen walking up ahead and miss, the slush smashing to bits by the McDonald’s trashcan. The sun coaxed gorgeousness out of the south-southeastern skyline of Columbus Circle and dabbed pure yellow on three or four yards of the cornice of gloomy apartment building before it made its final descent, flaring out of the clouds and spreading coral light across the Hudson.

New album out on Valentine’s Day!

“We all speak like Valley girls now”

In Rhode Island, a dancing police officer delighted observers.

Meanwhile, a California man caught a large lobster.

And in Colorado, an ice flow rushed down a river.

What did you do today? I bet it was somehow related to “smarm.” 🙁

“University of California- Irvine researchers discovered that six or more daily hours of exposure to media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings in the week afterward was linked to more acute stress than having been at or near the marathon.”

“If a young Oliver Twist lived in Brooklyn in 2013, he would probably go to the Brooklyn Porridge Co., a Park Slope pop-up specializing in ‘whole grain porridges.’”

Dear Polly,

I feel sick just writing this, and I don’t want to lose something good, so here goes:

I’m a 34-year-old single mother of a beautiful, sweet, and healthy three-year-old boy. I never imagined having kids, but accidentally became pregnant three months into a destructive relationship. I kept the child and eventually got rid of the man (with the help of a domestic violence counselor and a restraining order), which was a healthy decision.

You see, healthy decisions are not my forte. With a few exceptions, I usually date the damaged bad boy, the alcoholic who needs rescuing, or the tortured artist. I scrapped all that when I had my son, and haven’t dated since removing baby daddy from my life 2 years ago. Until recently.

Five months ago, I met a man at my sister’s wedding (one of the groomsmen), and we connected. Talked all night, laughing like crazy, connected. We hugged briefly at the end of the evening and we both felt it was worth pursuing. He lives 1400 miles away from me, and we began an email correspondence, sharing our relationship history, likes and dislikes, and getting to know each other. We have a lot in common. We fell in love. We made plans for him to relocate to my city and move in together. We decided all this before spending a great deal of physical time with each other. He’s visited once a month for the past five months, and the trips have gone from elated, nervous excitedness to awkward arguing and annoyance. He is sensitive, kind, attentive, and doting. He is so very patient and loving with my child. Because of these traits, I find myself feeling less attracted to him physically. He seems meek. It is truly something sick. I have a hard time looking at him on occasion, because every little quiver, every timid step, every noise he makes while eating makes my skin crawl. He follows me around and paws at me. He is far less experienced than I am in the bedroom, and yet I do not know how to let him know what I like, because he is not keeping up with me in that department.

I don’t have a lot going on, aside from an unsatisfying job, my son, and my love of animals. I don’t have the financial resources to pursue hobbies or interests, and this man offers stability. I love him, but I’m not sure why I’m so uncontrollably moody around him, and why he has turned me off. He is so gentle — the gentle man I always thought I wanted, because underneath it all I’m gentle, too — but I’m pushing away and I don’t know if I love myself enough to make this work. I have tried talking to him about this and he just apologizes and says he feels out of his element. He picks up on my annoyance which makes him feel uncomfortable, which triggers a neediness, which I find unattractive. I don’t want my son to have a bad boy for a father figure, but I don’t want to resent my lover over petty things. Are these petty things? Is love about being able to be annoyed by someone, and loving them anyway? I tell myself that I have a good man — and I don’t want to lose him — but how can I really snap out of this? I feel terrible, ungrateful, and confused.

Thanks for listening.

Annoyed

Dear Annoyed,

You are accustomed to being ignored, dismissed, and listened to only in the most cursory fashion, so this man who adores you, listens closely, and tries very hard to please seems unlovable. He seems unlovable because he makes you aware of yourself. When you’re chasing a guy who’s distracted, uninterested, dismissive, you are blissfully unaware of yourself, lost in the chase, trying to get him to love you. When someone loves you as you are, you don’t have the same luxury of not showing up completely.

On top of it all, you hate yourself for feeling repulsed by him. You feel rotten and shitty and ungrateful. And there he is, being sweet to your kid! If it weren’t for your boy, or the fact that he might support you, you might’ve given up by now.

You fell in love, which was easy. He is an easy person to love. Now you have to accept that he’s not a dick, he’s not made of magical dickhead fairy dust like the guys who disappear, who can’t listen, who don’t give a fuck about you. If you forced those so-called bad boys to stay, to be present, to help, they would seem lame, too. They would get wilty and weak upon closer inspection — they’d look much, much worse than your boyfriend, in fact. They just don’t slow down enough for you to get a close look at them.

You’re tortured by the notion that this guy will make you crazy forever, with his twitchy, timid, self-conscious shit. You know who else looks exactly like that? You do, when you’re chasing a guy. You may think that you don’t, but you’re wrong. Neediness makes people look deflated and not so sexy.

Right around the time I got engaged to my husband, he started to look like the geekiest man alive to me. We went on a trip to Spain, and day after day we would drink beers together in beautiful places, and I’d think, “I’m going to spend the rest of my life listening to this twerp talk.” He got terrible haircuts back then. He didn’t know how to dress. When he said something he wasn’t sure about, his mouth would do this weird downward-twitch thing on one side. It was the physical signal of him second-guessing himself. It was not cute.

He thought I was awesome, but I knew that I was sick inside, not good enough to be loved by him. I would scare him off and he would find some gorgeous, loving woman who was much, much better for him than me, and I would spend the rest of my life alone. All of my friends would say, “Through some miracle THAT MAN was crazy about you and you fucked it up? You really want to be alone don’t you?” They’d never listen to me complain about love again.

After trying to scare him off and hating myself for it, I finally confessed that I had lots of negative feelings and almost-cold feet. “I love you and I want to be with you, but I feel really guilty because I hate your hair. I hate the pants you wear. You’re handsome and your pants are just awful. It’s criminal, almost, how you cover up your pretty looks. And that thing you do with your mouth. Ugh. I know, I’m an asshole. I feel so shitty about what an asshole I am.”

Instead of getting angry, it made him laugh. “I do wear bad pants,” he said. So we talked about his twitchy mouth after that. I made it very clear that I wanted us to be together, that he didn’t have to change anything but I DID have to talk about this stuff, not because he was bad, but because I didn’t know how to show up and be in a relationship with a mortal human being without ripping them to shreds in my poisonous, unlovable brain.

Luckily, my husband understands the poisonous brain thing. He has an appreciation for complexity, for inner conflict, for the fact that you can say something terrible and admit to feeling things you don’t want to feel and that doesn’t change your love or your values or your commitments.

I don’t know this for sure, but I’m going to bet that if you make your love and your values and your commitments clear, your boyfriend will understand about the other dark feelings that are plaguing you. You need to be clear about what you want, emotionally and sexually. If you don’t want to be pawed, you have to say that. Men love a woman doing the dishes. Why? They can go fuck themselves. I don’t want action when I’m washing shit.

In my opinion, great relationships between smart, complicated people are only possible when total honesty is in the mix. You won’t accept this generous man in your life until you accept your own flaws enough to make them clear to him. You’re judgmental and fault-finding. So am I. But you value generosity and gentleness. And you’ll learn to tolerate neediness, even as it reminds you of yourself in ways that are uncomfortable.

This is a phase. You’re getting serious. People have cold feet when they get serious. There is a difference between FUCK THIS, I HATE THIS RELATIONSHIP cold feet, and “Oh God, he’s humming that song again, he is such a repugnant dork. I want Idris Elba instead!” Just because you have an overactive, brutal head doesn’t mean that your heart wants him gone. I think your heart knows he matches you. The matching might be awkward and uncomfortable for you right now, but it’s real. He is not an escape, like a “bad boy” is. He is right here, right now, human, normal, flawed.

If you can be open about your preferences and turn-offs, and be heard, if you can express yourself and ask him not to stigmatize or pathologize the things you desire, and if you can do the same for him somehow, then your relationship will grow past this. Visits are weird and intense — similar to spending two weeks in Spain with someone, thinking too much about every stupid little thing that they do. I think you have to be as honest as you can in order to get past this. You have to include your self-loathing, which is a huge part of this. You have to include your guilt, and your attraction, and your distaste. You have to say which things you want to go differently.

Maybe his timidity and pawing will always feel wrong. I want to caution you strongly to give yourself and him a chance before you take something small and use it as an excuse to bail. The sex, also, is all jammed up by your lack of acceptance — of him and of yourself. The sex might be amazing once there’s more honesty in the mix. You can’t possibly predict the outcome there without more time, and less poisonous, detached, confused thinking.

The stakes feel high. You aren’t used to being loved. You don’t really like being the one with more power, the one who’s being chased. You’d frankly prefer to be the chaser. I’ll bet your boyfriend prefers to be the chaser, too, and kind of likes that role. Maybe that’s something to talk about together.

Trust me, though, that this phase doesn’t last forever. If you have a career, if you have friends, if you have a full life, you don’t sit around chopping apart your partner’s flaws around the clock. You say that you don’t have a lot going on, except for your son and him. You need to work on yourself, and make your life more complete, so that you don’t make him such an area of extreme focus. Some of your discontent lies there. If you simply allow him to support you without bettering yourself, neither one of you will be happy.

But if you use the stability he’s brought to your life to make your life more full and complete outside of him, then these tiny little things that seem tragic now will just seem like tiny little things down the road. Insecure tics are nothing, when they’re accompanied by generosity and kindness and attraction. Once everything is out in the open? That’s the beginning. It either works or it falls apart from there. You’ll never even get to the starting line if you don’t express what you need.

At the very end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this exact process begins: Two people who love and hate each other enter this crazy space of shoving it all in each other’s faces. I’m sure lots of terrible couples have stayed together a little longer after seeing that movie. But to me, it’s one of the most beautiful scenes, one of the truest and rarest expressions of real love that’s ever been created. Because when you let someone into your life, there is ugliness and shock and fear and repulsion there. No one likes to admit that. You wonder if you’ll be dragged down, dragged into someone else’s flaws and messes. You wonder if their weaknesses will take over, if you’ll spend the rest of your life tortured by their other-ness, their teensy tiny sounds and smells that fill up your space and sometimes seem to fuck with your good life. For a while, you hate the other person and you hate you and you hate the two of you, together. So inadequate, so insecure, so flinty and pushy and messy and wrong.

To me the moment of truth comes when you say it out loud: Look at me, hating you. Look at you, hating me. Look at us, how gorgeously our flaws match. How gorgeously we collide. Sometimes you have the strength to say these things, and the other person says (or, more often, implies): “No, I don’t want you like this. I don’t want the truth. I don’t accept that I’m a mess. And I don’t want to be with someone who is.” And also: “Why are you crying? What did I do to deserve this shit?” And also: “If you loved me more, you wouldn’t mention that I smell bad, or make weird noises, EVER.” I’ve been there. There’s this opportunity for connection, for acceptance, and the other person says FUCK THAT AND FUCK YOU.

Lots of people, LOTS AND LOTS OF FUCKING PEOPLE, really, truly don’t want to connect. They just want to do what they do without being challenged or being forced to show up. They want to talk about the easy stuff, keep it light, ignore the trouble, keep the peace, don’t look too hard at anything, and don’t get too honest. There’s another tier, above that: The people who want intimacy, but only on THEIR terms. They want access to an open person, sure, so they can turn that person on and off, like a faucet. Great when they happen to want you, not so great when you need something from them and they can’t handle being needed.

But there are a few people who can show up. If they see that you want them to show up, they can show up. If you’re present, they will find a way to be present, too. I think that’s what you have in this man, even if you aren’t quite there yet yourself. You’re going to have to work to catch up with him. You should not see him as inferior. You’re the one who needs to open your heart more. Because the moment that you look at another human being, and all of his flaws stand out so clearly, and you feel love, love, love? That’s a moment of transcendence. That’s real love. It’s not chasing. It’s not dickhead-fairy-dust-created magic. It’s not swaggery sureness and photogenic sex. Real love is two flawed people, laughing together at all of their flaws, their gorgeously matched flaws.

Admit your anger and repulsion. These pesky little irritations are nothing. When you tell him the truth about what you’re struggling with, if you do it with love and with the intention of accepting him, chances are good that he’ll understand, and you’ll be released from this shame you’re feeling. Once that shame and guilt stops blocking everything else, you might find it easier to feel love for him again.

This is just where you are right now. It’s ok that you’re here. There are lots of reasons you’re here. It’s not your fault. You aren’t used to this kind of love. This is brand new.

You may be on the verge of experiencing mutual acceptance and real commitment for the first time, and it feels scary. If you’re very open and honest and vulnerable right now, though, you’ll gain so much. Because real mutual acceptance doesn’t mature into compromise or settling. Real acceptance blooms into a kind of mutual celebration of who you each are, separately and together. It’s a celebration of the limitless possibilities of two people who are not afraid to honor each other’s gently used souls. As Mary says in Eternal Sunshine, “Adults are this mess of sadness and phobias.” You are flawed. He is flawed. Together, you are flawed. Together, you are amazing.

Polly

Do you wonder why you fall in love with every woman you see who shows you the least bit of attention? Write to Polly and she either will or will not yell at you!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.