Design and journalism by Chris Ayers
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I owe a great debt to the folks who put together the Infinite Jest Wiki, which has indexed, referenced and organized all of the information that I needed to assemble this.

This post is meant to combine all of the disparate elements that I felt didn’t quite justify their own post. I’m happy to finally get around to including feral hamsters in one of these designs. Look at that beady-eyed little bastard. He looks dangerous.

Subsidized Time is concocted by newly-elected president Johnny Gentle as a way to bring America out of a recession. Inspired by the Chinese Zodiac calendar, Subsidized Time is a way to monetize one of the most ubiquitous things around - the date.

Each year, one of the products is installed in the Statue of Liberty’s torch hand. In the very first year of Subsidized Time, The Year of the Whopper, a giant cast iron hamburger falls from its position and kills one of the men working to install it.

Each chapter heading is labeled with the year, and the book’s first scene takes place in The Year of Glad. Being that the reader doesn’t understand the chronological designations of these years, and that the book jumps around in time, it makes the comprehension of the plot that much more difficult.

Eventually, the reader is handed a handy chart that looks like this:

“Chronology of Organization of North American Nations’ Revenue-Enhancing Subsidized Time^TM”:

1. Year of the Whopper
2. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
3. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
4. Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
5. Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
6. Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile [sic]
7. Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
8. Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
9. Year of Glad
   
   

It has been debated which years these might actually correspond with. One very obvious clue is that in the “Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic…….” the 2007 may actually refer to the year. Other astute readers have done some calculations based on other references in the novel and have concluded that The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment is actually 2011, but it is never expressly stated in the novel.

I find the choice of commercial products to be very interesting. All but two of them are real world brands. They all seem to be long standing traditional American brands, but also brands that are very adult oriented. I can’t help thinking that the Year of the Whopper might have something to do with incontinence plaguing the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. 

From the design standpoint, I took some liberties with these brands. The brands might exist in the real world some of these particular products do not.  I created the designs for Yushityu (which, when said out loud is apparently just a lowbrow joke) and Dairy Products of the American Heartland.

It’s also worth noting that there is a reference to Subsidized Time of The Decemberists latest album, The King is Dead. Their “Calamity Song” features the line “…in the year of the Chewable Ambien Tab.” Colin Meloy, their lead singer and songwriter, was a particpant in the Infinite Summer project of 2010.

***(It has been pointed out to me that the Trial Size Dove Bar is actually chocolate-covered ice cream, not a bar of Dove soap as I had originally thought. This is truly embarrassing. I have shamed and dishonored my family and the only recourse is to commit seppuku, the ritual self-disembowelment with a sword. Or just fix the damn graphic, whichever is easier. I hope my mistake did not give too many of you the howling fantods.)