A Book About Seinfeld

I decided to write a book about Seinfeld the summer after I returned from the Dominican Republic where I had studied for a semester.  It was the consequence of half a dozen convergent phenomena: I could not find a job and had no money and, as my final semester of college was to be four months later, I had a lot of free time to myself; my parents had digital cable; all of my old friends had left the area; and I had had a very profound experience concerning the show one night in the second month of my time in the Dominican Republic, the last place one would expect to have such an experience.  The context was described in an email to Brendan.  It was subjected “Non-half-assed commentary” for a variety of reasons; the idea of something being “a commentary” was a long-running joke between us that one could potentially justify any reprehensible action, comment, or state by declaring it “a commentary” on doing that very action, making that very comment, or being in that very state; more specifically it was in reference to the end of a previous email in which he analyzed a photograph I sent him: “I hope this commentary didn't seem half-assed. It’s not that I didn't give it much thought, its that I haven't
given it much after-thought.”  

            The content of this experience was described in a notebook I kept during the semester there.   Though it is not made explicit, perhaps out of intellectual pride, I realized for the first time—while watching “The Pitch,” which I had never seen after Curb Your Enthusiasm began—that it is not in the least bit arbitrary the way in which George stands in for Larry David.   This moment played a role in a much larger phenomenon that I had begun to notice with increasing clarity since my arrival in the Dominican Republic: the entirety of my life was occurring again, though its twenty-odd years were compacted into four months.   This was bizarre enough, but to have a situation comedy reappear as a major catalyst in the process was, simply put, a deranged joke on the part of the cosmos.

            This realization of the further depth of Seinfeld’s layers, with another layer understood and added, initiated the simulation of my adolescence, as a more elementary realization had initiated its becoming ten years earlier.   Both were characterized by disgust at the decadence and consumerism I had inherited through my existence, symbolized in the simulation by the all-inclusive resort to which the program—the symbol of the greater powers that shaped my fate—brought me.   My friend Rachel and I had talked a lot about the idea that in the experience of culture shock one has a luna de miel period—“moon of honey”—with a foreign country, that goes away and leaves one depressed and nostalgic for the time that preceded this union, and that this luna de miel was finally—here in this idyllic Caribbean resort, the very place a couple would envision their honeymoon—over. Childhood was the honeymoon with reality; adolescence, the reality of that reality.  I also realized that realizar only meant the “to make real” sense of “to realize,” and that “to realize” in the sense of “to know something as already real” was darse cuenta, or literally “to give oneself account.”

            After that weekend when I returned to Santiago de los Cabelleros the baseball season was over, I was no longer dependent upon my host mother to explore the world beyond our house, and soon I would even have a girlfriend.