Whenever I feel like crying, I turn on the Zero Dark Thirty trailer:

I want to make something absolutely clear. If you thought there was some working group coming to the rescue, I want you to know that you’re wrong. This is it. There’s nobody else hidden away on some other floor. There is just us. And we are failing. 

You may have spent much of your life unaware that nobody can save you but you. (Feel free to skip ahead to the next section if you were fully aware.) Perhaps you missed the message because Jesus’ promises of salvation drowned out all other voices. More likely, though, “failure” and “saving” were faraway thoughts when everything was going pretty well. And even when you were riding closer to valleys than peaks, minimal responsibility made Just getting through it the more common thought pattern than desperate pleas for a full-blown bailout.

But those innocent times are now gone; it’s probably pretty uncomfortable. One way to know you are in this dreaded place is a longing for tidy external solutions: Maybe this one person will … Maybe the trade will shift to … Maybe if I just get into this program … Go ahead and soothe yourself, sure, but don’t become tranquilized into forgetting that, no, sorry, it’s on you. Oh how you’ll want to forget. Oh how you’ll wish for simpler times. Oh how you’ll bargain that if you could be rescued this time you’ll never, never, never sin again. (more…)

So now everyone’s heard of that once “rare” or “stigmatized” thing you have. Maybe that’s nice. There’s probably more funding invested in solving it. The downside is that when it was unknown and rare, you were seen as an individual and were treated to minimally judgy curiosity. Post-awareness, however, you’re just some generic individual stripped of his personal battle and instead tossed into the nuance-free box constructed via the awareness campaign.

to reject someone’s vulnerability. And anything other than compassionate embrace will feel like rejection.

Instead of finding one reason to dislike someone and ruling him out, find one reason to like someone and rule him in.

You can’t stand CEOs making xxxx more than a janitor because your exposure to excellence it too limited. Do you know any pro athletes? If you did and you experienced “competing” against them, it would be impossible to deny the existence of galaxy-sized gaps between people’s abilities.

Now perhaps you scoff at this sports comparison and claim that business is less objective than vertical leaps and 40-yard dashes. But is it really? Think about how much smarter the smart kid in your school was compared to everyone else. Then consider he/she was only the best in one school within a state of thousands of schools. Consider how smart the state’s smartest kid must then be. Multiply again for the nation’s. The top CEOs are at that level of selectivity. A few dozen people among hundreds of millions. They all truly can mean the difference between success and failure for a business in a similar way to your school project going from a 73 to 99 if that top student joins your team.

That transformative ability, like Lebron’s basketball prowess, is truly worth xxxx more than the worst player’s/student’s contribution (to say nothing of the janitors within the organization).

It’s tough to know if you want to purchase that cool thing because the thing, in and of itself, would bring you joy or because it would deliver you status (and perhaps joy through that gained status). A solution is to surround yourself with such wealth that nobody notices your new Ferrari. No heads turn, no glowing conversations commence. In that scenario, you’ll quickly learn what material goods cleanly deliver happiness (and should be purchased) and which ones were mostly about how others viewed you (and should be avoided).

look for personal bluffs. Call them. Try to understand why you would want to believe something that isn’t true.

But Martin knew Billy to be a generalist, a man in need of the sweetness of miscellany.

I know how it is to live in the inescapable presence of the absence of the father.

Billy went for his ball, kissed it once, massaged it, chalked and toweled his right hand, spat in the spittoon to lighten his burden, bent slightly at the waist, shuffled and slid, a bazoo-bazoo, boys, threw another strike: not just another strike, but a titanic blast this time which sent all pins flying pitward, the cleanest of clean hits, perfection unto tidiness, bespeaking power battening on power, control escalating.

He salted his oatmeal and spiced it with raisins, those wrinkled and puny symbols of his own dark and shriveling years.

She was remote cousin to Charlie’s mother and would want to lend whatever strength she had to the troubled family, a surge of good will that would now be intrusive.

a reporter whose stories were so sugary that you risked diabetic coma if you read them regularly.

Pray to Jesus, but where is Jesus? Jesus, Charlie, sits at my desk in the person of an equivocating Welsh rarebit who doesn’t understand sons because he never had any. But he understand money and news and power and decency and perhaps such things as these will help save the boy we remember. (more…)

Movies

• Past Lives
• Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse
• The Prestige

Books

• Project Hail Mary // Andy Weir
• The Bonfire of the Vanities // Tom Wolfe
• The Overstory // Richard Powers

New Music

• Further Joy // The Regrettes
• Diamonds and Dancefloors // Ava Max
• Wet Tennis // Sofi Tukker
• The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND // Pup
• Past Lives // L.S. Dunes
• So Much (For) Stardust // Fall Out Boy
• Mega Man II // Bit Brigade
• Gag Order // Kesha
• New Ruin // The Flatliners
• Guts // Olivia Rodrigo

Old Music

• The Artist in the Ambulance // Thrice
• Wet from Birth // The Faint
• The Downward Spiral // Nine Inch Nails

(more…)

Just as you are cresting some xxxxxxxxx hill on a pleasant evening in May, the magic of shuffle delivers Rufio’s “Above Me.”  You speed up, notice the warm wind rush through your open windows, and begin screaming along. In this moment, you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

The stale yellow light ahead rips you back to petty existence. Your foot is now off the accelerator as your right hand reaches for the volume knob. In impressive synchronicity, the counter-clockwise spins on the dial reduce both the music and the decibels of your singing. By the time your car settles at the light, the music is barely audible; your singing is altogether nonexistent. You steal a glance at the driver to your right to confirm that, yes, you have properly saved yourself the embarrassment that would have accompanied a witnessing of your previous state.

A week passes. The weather remains nice enough that windows, not AC, are the appropriate choice. You find yourself at the same place on the same road when, again, “Above Me” starts playing. The only obvious difference between the situations is that you aren’t alone: each seat is occupied by a friend. Together your voices rise. “If I were to walk till time saw no end!!!!” Buoyed by this collective energy, the upcoming yellow light changes nothing. Your car slows, but the volume stays constant. Stopped at the light you look to your right. That other driver wishes he had what we have. No shame. No embarrassment. No behavior adjustment to be a little less yourself and a little more what would seem societally palatable.

(more…)