Nonfiction Excerpts
The Opposite of Loneliness
“It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four A.M. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt.”
Against the Grain
“On my deathbed, I will instruct a nurse to bring me the following: a box Oreos, a bag of Goldfish, a McDonalds hamburger, a large pepperoni pizza, an assortment of Dunkin’ Donuts, a chicken pot pie, a Hot Pocket, a large pepperoni pizza, a French crepe, an ice-cold beer. In my final moments, I will consume this food slowly and delicately as I fade into oblivion.”
Why We Care About Whales
"I had woken up that morning to a triage center outside my window. Fifty or so pilot whales were lying along the stretch of beach in front of my house on Cape Cod, surrounded by frenzied neighbors and animal activists. The Coast Guard had arrived while I was still sleeping, and guardsman were already using boats with giant nets in an attempt to pull the massive bodies back into the water. Volunteers hurried about in groups, digging trenches around the whales’ heads to cool them off, placing wet towels on their skin and forming assembly lines to pour buckets of water on them. The energy was nervous, confused, and palpably urgent."
The Art of Observation
“When Luke and I landed in India, we discovered our celebrity before our passports were stamped. Our backpacks rolled through baggage claim and a middle-aged man held out his cell phone and clicked. At first, the attention was surprising, I’d been warned by blogs and travel guides, but I didn’t expect such explicit persistence. “One photo, one photo,” they’d coo from streets and stands: “One photo please miss, one photo.” On our first day in Dehli, the circles in the Jama Masjid mosque forced
us off its hot marble and our trip to the spice bazaar yield three or four photos...Thrust into a city where chaos prevails, we were dissed into frame after frame with beaming locals. We’d agree to be shot and be trapped in five others, avoid followers at lunch only to get them at dinner. By the time we’d traveled west into the desert, Luke was getting fed up. He’d refuse cameras and yell off those who stared, exhausted and appalled by the endless annoyance. I liked it.”
When Marina returned from her seven-week fellowship studying the rise of humanism in India I casually observed that she must now have so much new material to write about. She was silent for a beat and then stated flatly, “Mom I would never presume to understand a culture after spending only seven weeks there.” In "The Art of Observation," Marina examines her personal relationship with India and a world where she was the curiosity. –Tracy, Marina's mom
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Song for the Special
“I’m so jealous. Laughable jealousies, jealousies of everyone who might get a chance to speak from the dead. I’ve zoomed out my timeline to include the apocalypse, and, religionless, I worship the potential for my own tangible trace. How presumptuous! To assume specialness in the first place. As I age, I can see the possibilities fade from the fourth-grade displays: it’s too late to be a doctor, to star in a movie, to run for president. There’s a really good chance I’ll never do anything. It’s selfish and self-centered to consider, but it scares me.”
“Song for the Special” could be the anthem for Generation Y, and I guess millennials too. Maybe even more so millennials. For better or worse, we were all told we’re special, have been from birth, and so think we are. Of course the reality is that we can’t literally all be uniquely special because that is, by definition, impossible. The majority has to be average or “exceptional” has no value. It would be like not having any grading system in college, ditching the bell curve and giving everyone an “A,” just for showing up. Report cards would be meaningless. It’s completely illogical, and yet that is our worldview. I loved her insights on “specialness.” On the one hand, her view that, at twenty-two, she could “see the possibilities fade,” “too late to be a doctor, to star in a movie, to run for president,” could be very depressing. p. 207. But it’s not. It feels familiar. And it feels wonderfully un-lonely to hear someone else articulate it. –Dunce Two
Even Artichokes Have Doubts
"What bothers me is this idea of validation, of rationalization. The notion that some of us (regardless of what we tell ourselves) are doing this because we’re not sure what else to do and it’s easy to apply to and it will pay us decently and it will make us feel like we’re still successful. I just haven’t met that many people who sound genuinely excited about these jobs.That’s super depressing! I don’t understand why no one is talking about it."
Putting the "Fun" Back in Eschatology
"In many ways, I think mortality is more manageable when we consider our eternal components, our genetics and otherwise that cary on after us. Still, soon enough, the books we write and the plants we grow will freeze up and rot in the darkness.
But maybe there's hope."
Stability in Motion
"My car was not gross; it was occupied, cluttered, cramped. It became an extension of my bedroom, and thus and extension of myself. I had two number stickers the back: REPUBLICANS FOR VOLDEMORT and the symbol for the Equal Rights Campaign. On the backside windows were OBAMA ‘08 sign that my parents made me take down because they dangerously blocked my sight lines.” The trunk housed my guitar but was also the library, filled with textbooks and novels, the gains tattered copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and all one hundred chapters of Harry Potter on tape. A few stray cassettes littered the corners, their little brown insides ripped out, tangled and mutilated. They were casualties of the trunk trenches, sprawled out forgotten next to the headband I never gave back to Meghan."
I Kill for Money
"Moving with deliberation, Tommy slowly disinfects the bed by spraying the clear and odorless poison over the frame, edges , and then the center. Peering close enough to the mattress, he can see the tiny black bedbugs writing and shaking in agony for a few seconds before they fall still. “When I see bugs outside I never kill them. There’s no real satisfaction in killing them.” Tommy pauses as he watches a particularly twitchy one, Walking back and forth along the side of the bed, he switches between three red tubes, each staying in a different shape; fanlike, mist, and jet. “All insects and rodents and stuff play a part in Mother Nature’s scheme of things. It’s a balancing act. I mean, I could technically get arrested for this because it’s breaking the law, but when I catch squirrels in people’s houses , I usually sneak them into my truck and let them free int he woods somewhere. The law says your’e supposed to drown them, but I just can’t do it."