What I collect? Interesting jobs. Always to my thrill and excitement, but ultimately to my exhaustion, I collect interesting jobs. If an interesting job comes along, I take it; that’s why I do so many things. I’m lucky to be able to.
I would say aside from Moxie soda bottles and Masonic artifacts, there’s nothing I really collect.
Everyone feels like they would love to be a really cool bartender in a really cool bar, but you’re still surrounded by people who want to destroy themselves with alcohol. When you look at it that way, it’s not that much fun.
I would definitely make eggs for the rest of my life if I could.
I have no skills. I mean, I can make jokes, I’m pretty good at talking to people on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. I can figure out what makes a pretty good story, and I can make eggs really well.
I am not beautiful, so I don’t know why I’m making myself ugly. But the mustache stays.
I am someone who values truth – actual truth as opposed to “truthiness.” I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible.
I am a marginally employed person who can escape with my school teacher wife to the waters of Maine for much of the summer.
I’ve only ever been mistaken for myself. People draw a lot of comparisons to all of the round-faced, mustached men of entertainment that make me cringe and sick to my stomach about how the world really sees me and they’re right.
Elwyn Brooks White was a very Maine personality which is, “I hate everyone and everyone stay away from me.”
To want to become the President is, I think, such a bizarre ambition that it is automatically deranging.
Writing for me always requires trickery. Tricking myself into sitting down, letting words tumble out until you find the good ones. t’s sort of a trance. And when a piece is done, I have little memory of how I wrote it, and zero confidence I’d ever be able to do it again.
Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.
How to Win a Fight – Step 1: Always make eye contact. Step 2: Go ahead and use henchmen – these days it’s unnecessary and frowned upon to fight your own battles, especially with so many henchmen out of work. Step 3: Run lots of attack ads – I have run about 500 attack ads this year, and I expect that I will buy even more air time next year, because my enemies are getting stronger.
There are times when all the lies you have told about yourself to yourself just fall away. In your twenties, you tell yourself the lie that you are unusual, unprecedented, and interesting. You do this largely by purchasing things or stealing things. You adorn yourself with songs and clothes and borrowed ideas and poses. In your thirties, you tell yourself the lie that you are still in your twenties.
Maine is not a death cult. I mean, it is, but it’s a slow one. It creeps in like the tide, and without your even noticing, the ground around you is swallowed by water until it’s gone.
We who are white men can’t change who we are. But we could do worse than to follow what I took that summer as his example: to be aware of and curious about the world around you, to give what you have with neither apology nor self-congratulation. When praise comes to see you, get out on the fire escape. When it’s someone else’s time to talk, listen. Don’t turn your house into a museum. When your work is done, get out of the way.
Money cannot buy happiness, but it buys the conditions for happiness: time, occasional freedom from constant worry, a moment of breath to plan for the future, and the ability to be generous.
My cairns were obvious, pretentious, rococo.
What more is there to say than it was traumatic, a moment that breaks your life in half? That you never heal from it, and it blankets your life in sadness and fear forever?