Loose Papers

This morning on the way to school, Eliot gifted me with some unfortunately accurate self awareness. All of the car windows were down, the radio was up and we were singing along to the music when suddenly some important papers I forgot were loose in the back seat began flying all over the car dangerously close to the windows. We began frantically grabbing at them so they didn’t get away. He said, ‘This moment is the best description of you’, and then added that he used to think this kind of thing happened to people all the time, but he eventually realized, no, this situation—at the frequency he has experienced it—is very particular to me. I was proud of how clever and astute his observation was, but the truth of it made me grimace.

Parenting Advice

We waste so much of our lives coming to terms with the fact that the gods our parents worshipped have never existed, and accepting how subjective and—ultimately—Freudian their values and world views are. There would be no need to waste so much time in our children’s lives, and create so much neuroses, if we only had the humility to admit how full of shit we are, how damaged we are, and how we have only come to these conclusions as means to personally survive, and to grace our children with our blessings to seek their own world views and coping mechanisms, liberating them from the impulse to reconcile our damage and survival techniques with their own.

Get High

Witnessing a stranger’s moment of joy just because you happened to be in the right place at the right time is one of the best natural highs available on the market.