As we prepare to enter what will surely be International David Foster Wallace Month (a day seems paltry, a year is just greedy), here is an old interview from The Believer, which includes the following, one of DFWs many dog references. After reading the book-length interview that is Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, these have almost come to seem metonymic not only for all kinds of DFW’s concerns, but also for the still-pointed sadness of his absence.

If you live by yourself and have dogs, things get strange. I know I’m not the only person who projects skewed parental neuroses onto his pets or companion-animals or whatever. But I have it pretty bad; it’s a source of some amusement to friends. First, I began to get this strong feeling that it was traumatic for them to be left alone more than a couple hours. This is not quite as psycho as it may seem, because most of the dogs I’ve ended up with have had shall we say hard puppyhoods, including one past owner who went to jail… but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that I got reluctant to leave them alone for very long, and then after a while I got so I actually needed one or more dogs around in order to be comfortable enough to feel like working