Snippets, July ’21
“There’s all this talk about ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience,’” he said, “and it kind of sounds to me like ‘what’s the least we can do in order to keep the party going?’”
John doesn’t always wear a helmet. He doesn’t wear sunscreen, either. And sometimes he doesn’t wear his seatbelt. It’s an aesthetic, I explained.
I could also have said that it’s a critique—an embodied critique of the middle-class cult of personal safety. It’s a rejection of the belief that every vulnerability should be protected, and that the central project of our lives is to undo our own precarity. It’s a refusal of a way of life devoted to insurance.
[My parents] didn’t embrace religion in their adulthood, but they wanted us to have some sense of ritual in our family, so every [morning] from the time that I can remember until the time that I was about 13 … we would together in unison say, ‘Let’s be bold, let’s be kind, let’s learn something new, let’s be grateful, and let’s be forgiving.’
Esquire: The Water-Park Scandal and Two Americas in the Raw
On the way home, of course, my daughter asked why we couldn’t get Flash Passes. I answered that we couldn’t afford it, but that wasn’t the real reason. The real reason is that I liked the people who were waiting on line better than I liked the people cutting in front of it — that I couldn’t imagine counting myself among those paying for the pleasure of stepping in front of another child who might be as sensitive to slight as my daughter.
A friend, in conversation:
There aren’t good guys and bad guys—life is about shades of grey. Go fishing for whales! Try all the bars! Nearly go up in smoke. Don’t be a dick. Keep your hands on the wheel of something that’s real.