I finally got through to page 94. I fear this may be buried, but here goes:
Turns out this book is all about drugs! I'm a big Pynchon fan and see some overlaps here, but there was a lovely moment in my early Pynchon days where I realized "oh, this book isn't scary, it's funny! Looney Tunes kind of funny!" I'm coming away from my first hundred pages of IJ with a similar feeling of pleasant surprise. It's very silly and the dryness it occasionally will drag us through is charmingly clinical, esp. w/r/t those moments that read to me like dr. shorthand.
Some thoughts:
1: The acronyms like O.N.A.N. and the subsidized years will eventually be cleared up, right? Have I missed something? At this point I feel like I'm more interested in hearing that "the year of the depend adult undergarment" is something as navigable as "1989" than I am interested in learning what it actually means to have that new nomenclature. There are clearly multiple timelines going on and some footing will be a big help.
1a: Some terrorism plot is a-brewing but I have no idea what's going on. Similar to the above: were there clues I missed or will those details emerge?
2: Fascinated to hear both the big pot-smoker from the beginning and the suicide-watch girl Katherine talking about how their focus is not drugs but stopping drugs. Like, the pressure to put something to rest can bloom into an obsessed overdoing of that thing. Reading this in a ridiculously lengthy 1,000 page book is particularly intriguing on a meta/reflective level: DFW's 1,000 pages is about as confidently essential as Erdedy's 1/5-kilo of weed. I kind of get it: if you're going to write a novel and finish it, why wouldn't you put everything into it?
3: Central line, to me, of these first 100 pages, is buried in a footnote (#34): Georg Cantor's "1905-ish Diagonal Proof", which demonstrates that "there can be an infinite of things between any two things no matter how close together those things are." I mean, wow: I want to connect all these dots -- I think we, as readers, of big system-novels like IJ, expect threads to cross over but this proof kind of says that in order to do so, you'll need to pass through an infinitude of possibilities.
4: Spotted the titular line of "Infinite Jest" in a footnote of James O. Incandenza's film history. What to make of that? Curious he tried to make the picture three times.