There are many joys of parenting, but ultimately we are robots training our own upgrades to replace us.
Maine is a beautiful place that I paradoxically want to hoard to myself and share with everyone I meet.
Every evening my wife makes us martinis and we talk about our days as I cook dinner and our children ignore us. It is a great pleasure in our lives: this rediscovering of each other as our children age. It is our indulgence.
Even as a grown-up, I love pretending to be a grown-up.
My name is John Hodgman; you live on the planet Earth; and everything is going to be fine.
Everyone is doing what they have to do, and everyone is doing the best they can. And soon you will be going home.
At some point I asked her if she was at peace with the idea of dying. She looked at me like I was stupid and insane. “No,” she said. “I want to live.” You idiot! would have finished the sentence nicely. It was one of the only times she seemed really disappointed in me. I realized I had learned everything I know about death from movies. There is no peace in dying.
There is no peace in dying.
She taught me that the world would continue without me. And eventually I learned that lesson. It took some time... Everything is cliche. Her death taught me that life is short.
I cannot remember whether this was my decision or her command. Maintaining such fogginess about free will is, I think, a secret to a lasting marriage.
The Sky Lounge is not aspirational. It is desperational.
Moxie’s own medicinal cred derived from a bitter slap of gentian root, giving it a flavor profile somewhere between Dr Pepper and witch hazel. It is difficult to enjoy even ironically, and so it has largely stayed within the confines of Massachusetts and Maine, where it is sometimes mixed with coffee brandy, as the people of Maine have a punishing streak of self-hatred that makes Bostonians seem like lighthearted imps.
It takes a long time for white guys to appreciate that they are breakable. They do not live from birth with the daily fear that they might be attacked or detained or killed. Their bodies are not constant targets of power. Their bodies are power, so they throw those bodies up and down mountains and stairs and out of airplanes and into pointless online yelling matches for fun. They just presume they will survive.
Hipsterism is the purposeful cultivation of uncool and esoteric tastes, and sometimes a shortcut to that aesthetic is to embrace the ugly.
When you live in New York or any big city, it is easy to fail at growing up. The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence.
And then he could bring up the sail and let the prevailing winds carry him back to shore, thus making a living entirely on his own, almost without ever having to see or speak to another human ever in his life, which I am convinced is the secret dream of every person in Maine.
This is not to say that there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells that they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.
There’s no peace in dying, but there’s peace when it’s done.
After all, there’s no mansplaining like white mansplaining ’cause white mansplaining don’t stop.
Maine Humor” is a very specific subset of comedy. It consists mostly of men with flinty, Down East accents giving bad directions to people from away.