David Foster Wallace, in a commencement address years before his suicide, told a parable of two young fish encountering an older fish who asks 'how's the water?' The young fish continue swimming and one later asks the other 'what the hell is water?' Wallace's point: the most obvious, ubiquitous, and important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about. In day-to-day adult existence, these banal platitudes have 'life or death importance.'