If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
I am angry and curious. These two things propel me forward. I come from the minimum-wage working world. I have no illusions as to where I should have ended up. I have really nothing to lose, and so I go.
In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber–if you can find one–is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
My daughter just turned 16 years old, and you can see it on MTV’s [‘My Super Sweet Sixteen’], where they get cars, and things that depreciate and just don’t mean nothing. I wanted to give my child something that she can grow and build and nurture. So I gave her her own label.
When it’s midnight and it’s raining and you’re on the steepest hill you’ve ever climbed and you’re bleeding from briars and you’re alone and you’ve been alone for hours, it’s only you around to witness yourself quit or continue.
Most people have excellent necks. Now they cover them with curtains, which is kind of ridiculous.
Great read. (via)
I’ve been surprised—and upset—to find that ideas I had then were very similar to the ones I have now.
Also:
This younger I seemed far more engaged than the venal goon I remembered. Why did I want to judge him as lacking? Jealousy? Fear that what was lacking was my own progress?
Once death is invoked, the choice of who must die may seem oddly arbitrary.
The way to success is strategically along the line of least expectation, and tactically along the line of least resistance.
School buses lined his block every morning, like vast tipped orange-juice cartons spilling out the human vitamin of youthful lunacy.
Puberty was a bag of cement lashed to my ankle. At least conversationally. Everything I thought and said now had this burning undercurrent of “How’s this going to get me laid?” And wit can’t have an agenda.
Like adolescents, distance runners have rivalries only with themselves.
All runners are at heart mediocrities, bad even when they are good.
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
I never understand why a company would put pointless music and animation between my credit card and their business.
If you want to understand foreign policy, read history, not the newspaper. When you read history, you get distance. You learn how events looked to people at the time – and how wrong they usually were.
If everyone had good manners we wouldn’t need laws. I think that’s the great hope of civility, that we can control society through cultural means rather than through lawyers.
I have always wanted to give a voice to my subjects. That’s really important for me. It’s their reality, and I’m mediating it for the public. And I understand that.
I used to beat up all the kids on the block. I used to confiscate their marbles, snatch them up!
Mark Larson 