Anger feels good. Although we may consciously experience it as upsetting, somatically it’s a lot like the initial rush of an opiate, a tingling warmth you feel on the insides of your elbows and wrists, in the back of your knees. Understanding that anger was a physical pleasure explained some of the perverse obstinacy with which my mind kept returning to it despite the fact that, intellectually, I knew it was pointless self-torture.

Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn’t an obtainable goal in itself but only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to—by which I don’t mean ethically correctly but fully, consciously engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomenon familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the real stars, those blinding cataclysms in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.

any attempt to contrive this feeling through some replicable method—with drinking or drugs, sexual seduction, or buying new stuff, listening to the same old songs that reliably give us shivers—never quite recaptures the spontaneous, profligate joy of the real thing. In other words, be advised that Burger King billboards and Van Halen are not a surefire combination, any more than are scotch and cigars. About the closest approximation to happiness that we can consistently achieve by any kind of deliberate effort is the less celebrated condition of absorption.

We mistakenly imagine we want “happiness,” which we tend to picture in vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder-edged quality of intensity.

“I found myself while standing in the shower or doing dishes, scheming nice things to do for them, plotting to advance their interests in the world. I could see now why nepotism, which is so shamelessly unjust, is also so widely shrugged at.”

I wanted to give them hypocritical advice, forbid them to do anything I’d ever enjoyed, shield them from the kinds of people I’d spent decades cultivating friendships with.

Like anyone who’s lived long enough, I’d lost people—to addiction, mental illness, death and defriending, the irrefutable facts of peak oil, or just the attrition of time and distance—so it felt like a minor coup in the losing war against entropy, a temporary hedge against death, to get someone unexpectedly back. And it was exhilarating to discover within me, at this late date, such a bottomless capacity for affection—an affection free, for once, from the complications of desire.

between their precocity and my own retardation, I felt about five years older than they were

I always imagined that people for whom being adopted was a major issue must have had deficient or abusive upbringings, been damaged or deprived in some way. Having common genes seemed to me almost as arbitrary as sharing a home state or zodiac sign, and anyone who fixated on such a flimsy bond must’ve been groping for any connection at all.

I felt as if I’d won some sort of lottery when I was adopted;

I’d always thought of being adopted as being about as interesting and significant a fact about myself as being left-handed or having family in Canada.

Getting irritated at my own irritability did not improve matters.

I’m an impatient person. I take stairs two at a time; I can’t stand getting trapped behind a phalanx of schoolkids or tourists on the sidewalk; a computer taking seven seconds to perform some operation is maddening to me. I hate all the boring in-between parts of life.

Often such invitations are left deliberately ambiguous, but in this case I felt like I ought to err on the side of clarity.

The only people who seem to believe in the phenomenon of men and women just being good friends all seem to have good friends who are pining miserably after them, waiting for them to break up with their significant others. Not to say that friendship between men and women is impossible, but there are few of these friendships in which sex doesn’t at some point become an issue, if only to be acknowledged or dismissed.

Acting any differently toward women than I did around men—even just softening my voice when I talked to them—made me feel faintly calculating and fake

As an adult, I think of myself as a pretty gender-indifferent guy: I have as many close female friends as male, and none of them are what you’d call girly girls—they’re all unabashedly intelligent, funny, and assertive, in flagrant defiance of middle-school norms. None of them reads checkout-aisle fashion magazines, not even as a “guilty pleasure.” They do seem to think about shoes more than I do. My male friends, even the ex-marines, rocket scientists, and hunters who’ve shot six-hundred-pound boars, are all pretty gentle, sensitive guys who don’t need to get blacked-out drunk to talk about their relationship troubles or admit that they enjoy each other’s company. None of them gives a shit about cars. Some of them do get excited about professional football, but this I regard as a regrettable genetic defect, like the predisposition toward sickle-cell anemia among African-Americans. I tend to think that anyone who conforms too closely to his or her assigned gender role must not be all that independent-minded or brave.

People in most desperate need of help are often the most adamantly unhelpable. Not only will you fail to help them, but they will deplete every bit of help you have—your money, time, patience, and kindness—and then move on to the next pushover as unthinkingly as a swarm of locusts devouring a field.

I became acquainted with the stupidity and obstructionism, intractable literal-mindedness, and Uroboric logic of the penal system.

I had never before spoken to any female who unabashedly offered up her gender as an excuse for ignorance or incompetence.

This contrition would sound more credible had my uncle accepted any culpability or expressed any guilt for the man’s death. Instead he was, as always, a victim of circumstance and others’ bad faith:

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices (pursuing a creative career instead of making money; breastfeeding over formula; not having children in an overpopulated world) as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish and wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that it all arises out of insecurity. Hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a desperate. 

It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.

This sounded to me a little like a rich person telling a poor one that money doesn’t buy happiness.

My position on peak oil was never that Ken was wrong; my position was, Please shut up.

“It’s popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people,” as Rebecca Solnit says, “but agents of change are often obsessive, intransigent, unreasonable, and demanding.”

The Walters of the world don’t mind being assholes; what matters to them is being right. Visionaries, prophets, and revolutionaries aren’t concerned with good manners, being nice, fitting in; what they’re concerned with, passionately, singly, often monomaniacally, is the truth.

We think of color blindness as a defect, but it enables those afflicted with it to see through camouflage.

He never seemed to understand that exhausting someone in an argument isn’t the same as convincing them.

Writing him felt like a minefield of misunderstandings. It was increasingly difficult to avoid giving offense.

the elites had abandoned the expendable population to fend for themselves. By the time we’re shooting each other over the last can of corn on the shelf they’ll be living like exiled emperors in fortified villas in Belize.

facts will become secondary and accessing raw emotions will be required for change.”

poring over primary sources and coming to your own conclusions; you listen to people who claim to know what they’re talking about—“experts”—and try to determine which of them is more credible. You do your best to gauge who’s authentically well-informed and unbiased, who has an agenda and what it is—who’s a corporate flack, a partisan hack, or a wacko.

Ken would engage us in (or, sometimes, subject us to) long Socratic dialogues about politics, ethics, and art—I remember one, over venison steak, in which he challenged us to defend the taboo against incest, which left us sputtering in some uneasy state halfway between bemusement and horror, unable to articulate any arguments more compelling than the risk of inbreeding and anecdotal evidence of trauma. We finally fell back on the classic rhetorical fallacy, For fuck’s sake, Ken. Moral philosopher Jonathan Haidt asks similar questions of his students in an exercise he calls “moral dumbfounding,” to palpate the difference between reasoned judgment and visceral reaction. Understanding the distinction between the two is useful in clarifying ethical questions; simply discounting the latter, however, will get you stoned to death in the town square. In retrospect, Ken’s straight-faced inquiry about such a touchy subject seems symptomatic of his overvaluation of pure rationality, a kind of emotional color blindness that would hinder his efforts, later on, to convince us of something just as hard to accept but far less hypothetical.

It was as instant and visceral as the smell of your first girlfriend’s perfume, or the sound of the recess bell.

It’s always a sad revelation when a good friend acquires a girlfriend or a husband and disappears. You realize that, for them, your friendship was always only a matter of convenience, a fallback, and they simply don’t need you anymore.

The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing.

unable to tolerate any perception of himself that diverged from his own.

We didn’t just have similar senses of humor; we had the same one.

I’ve replayed conversations and incidents from my friendship with Felix in my head, cringing at things I said or did that might’ve been stupid or thoughtless or insulting. But all my private theories are pretty obviously projections of my own insecurities, and they still amount to a perverse kind of vanity; whatever happened with him probably had less to do with me than I imagine

It’s always you who’s the reasonable one, and the other who’s being either unfathomably cruel by defriending you or clingy and demanding by not accepting their defriending with dignity.

When I’ve had to end friendships myself, I’ve been just as graceless and craven about it. Listening to the other person’s puzzled phone messages, reading their jokey/plaintive texts (“ARE U ALIVE?”), I feel the same way I do when I smack an insect and it doesn’t quite die but lies there piteously writhing. When it’s you doing the defriending, the defriendee seems needy and obtuse, not getting the obvious message, overstepping the boundaries everyone else understands implicitly.

Losing a friend may not hurt as intensely as a romantic breakup, but it often hurts more deeply, and for longer. I can have friendly and affectionate exchanges with women over whom I was publicly sobbing just a few years ago, but being reminded of Felix, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to for over a decade, still makes me go quiet with puzzlement and sadness. 

Society doesn’t officially recognize friendship as an institution in the way it recognizes sexual relationships, so there’s no real protocol for ending one. If you’ve been going out, dating, or just sleeping with someone for even a month or two and you want to stop seeing him, you’re expected to have a conversation with him letting him know it and giving him some bogus explanation. This conversation is seldom pleasant, and it ranges in tone from brittle adult discussions in coffee shops to armed standoffs in day care centers, but once it’s over, you at least know your status. Because there’s no formal etiquette for ending a friendship, most people do it in the laziest, most passive and painless way possible, by unilaterally dropping any effort to sustain it and letting the other person figure it out for themselves. (I do know some people who’ve explicitly renegotiated the boundaries and conditions of friendships—saying From now on we don’t talk about my personal life, or Listen, I can’t be your confidante anymore—but these people have all been female. I hesitate to draw any broad generalizations along gender lines, but it feels to me as if it’s a taboo, in male friendships, to talk about the friendship itself.)

This nation was founded by wackos who were driven out of their homelands over their subversive politics and lunatic religions, and a nation of wackos we remain. Like absolutely everyone else in America, including people currently in bunkers awaiting the onslaught of the Islamofascist fifth column, I don’t think of myself as an extremist, or even especially political, just as a guy who believes in common sense and human decency trying to live in a country gone bonkers. I, too, am a wacko.
America will never be either Canada or Iran. It’s far too sprawling and motley, barbaric and hilarious. Any generalization you try to make about politics will unavoidably be bullshit in a country that includes Truthers, Birthers, Flat Earthers, Earth Firsters, militant vegans, and Christian swingers, people who believe the government is controlled by the Illuminati, George Soros, or extraterrestrial reptiles.

God agreed to spare Sodom if ten good men could be found within its walls (Abraham had to haggle him down from fifty). He ended up napalming those perverts anyway but the basic principle of sparing the sinner for the sake of the righteous, or the shithead for the sake of the basically okay, remains sound.

My cruelest hope for the Tea Party is that one of their candidates wins the nomination for the presidency and they implode of their own hubristic stupidity.

I know people who’ve been disowned because they’re atheists or bisexual, people who love their parents painfully but can’t even talk to them about the news without getting into a tearful shouting match. To me this seems not just sad but obscene, like a symphony interrupted by a ringtone.

for all its crimes and ineptitude, the Bush administration tripled the amount of money funneled into humanitarian aid and development in Africa, and did more to combat AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa than the previous Democratic administration. The name George Bush still drops out of my friends’ mouths like something that wasn’t supposed to be in their food, but it’s evidently spoken with respect in places like Sudan.

Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who’ve proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.

They watched Bush and then Obama bail out the authors of the financial crisis instead of its casualties. They see economic recovery measured by the Dow Jones and Nasdaq instead of the minimum wage or the price of milk.

I, too, increasingly feel as if paying my taxes is like giving money to a junkie—I know it’s all going straight into the arm of investment banks and anytime you join in a mass movement you’re going to find yourself standing alongside idiots. One reason people go to mass rallies is to become stupider and surer of themselves than they are when they’re alone. I saw plenty of people at antiwar protests I wouldn’t have wanted to talk to at a party:

when Bush was bankrupting the country by starting two wars while cutting taxes? Hadn’t that been the fiscal equivalent of buying a vacation house and a powerboat at the same time you quit your day job?

can imagine what the people at the Tea Party rally must’ve seen when they looked at me: some overdressed, arrogant, East Coast ivory-tower Pellegrino-sipping liberal elitist who probably regards them as too ignorant, misinformed, or just plain stupid to have the right to an opinion, much less a vote, and who’d come here just to judge and make fun of them—all of which is, to be fair, completely accurate.

I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people. It’s never been just political; it’s personal. I’m not convinced anyone in this country except the kinds of weenies who thought student council was important really cares about large versus small government or strict constructionalism versus judicial activism. The ostensible issues are just code words in an ugly snarl of class resentment, anti-intellectualism, old-school snobbery, racism, and who knows what all else—grudges left over from the Civil War, the sixties, gym class.

I’ve always felt that the guys in America chanting U!S!A! and the guys in the Middle East chanting Death to America! had way more in common with each other than either of them did with me.

Inevitably, the crowd began chanting “U!S!A!” which has always seemed to me both scary and pathetic—scary because it feels as if it’s pumping up some violent tension that can only be discharged by a book-burning or the ritual sacrifice of a foreigner—but pathetic because America is, after all, the most powerful military empire in the history of the planet; we spend the equivalent of most countries’ GNP each year maintaining an armada of battleships the size of cities, a fleet of radar-invisible supersonic bombers, and enough nuclear weapons to denude the entire biosphere of the earth, and still we need to root for ourselves?

During my brief career as a fan I learned that the difference between actually believing something and just going along with the crowd is a lot less clear, more of a continuum, when you actually care about the game. And that caring has less to do with any real stake in the outcome than with having picked a side.

It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulse to judge and punish, to get us off on righteous indignation.

Obviously, some part of us loves feeling 1) right and 2) wronged. But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive masturbation.

Once I realized I enjoyed anger, I noticed how much time I spent experiencing it. If you’re anything like me, you spend about 87 percent of your mental life winning imaginary arguments that are never actually going to take place. You make up little stories to explain misunderstandings and conflicts, starring yourself as innocent victim and casting your antagonist as a villain driven by sheer, unilateral, motiveless malice.

I never said so, because I’m too polite (and because I imagine, like most atheists, that believers’ faith is far more fragile than it is), but I always privately thought that religion was like one of Skelly’s stories—an attempt to pretty up a cruddy and lusterless world.

What’s so ironic and sad about this is that the very parts of ourselves that we’re most ashamed of and eager to conceal are not only obvious to everyone but are also, quite often, the parts of us they love best.

Being clearheaded is such a peculiar novelty it feels like some subtle, intriguing new designer drug.

Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see the mirror when you’re hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face.

There is no drinking as enjoyable as daytime drinking, when the sun is out, the bars are empty of dilettantes, and the afternoon stretches ahead of you like summer vacation. The gleeful complicity you and your friends share in the excellent decision to have one more round, knowing full well you’re forfeiting the rest of the day

Drunkenness and youth share in a certain reckless irresponsibility, and the illusion of timelessness. The young and the drunk are both temporarily exempt from that oppressive sense of obligation that ruins so much of our lives, the nagging worry that we really ought to be doing something productive instead. It’s the illicit savor of time stolen, time knowingly and joyfully squandered. There’s more than one reason we call it being “wasted.”

waiting for someone to call who wasn’t going to, that familiar helplessness clutching my gut.

maybe romantic love is an affliction of adolescence, like acne or a passionate ideological investment in pop songs.

temporary sanity that afflicts us for as long as forty-five seconds after orgasm.

making out on the subway is one of those things, like smoking cigars or riding Jet-Skis, that is obnoxious and repulsive when other people do it but incredibly fun when it is you.

But if anyone were to ask me, “Have you ever been in love?” I could at least say, with the same sort of rueful pride as a recovering alcoholic who’s asked whether he’s ever been known to take a drink: “Oh, yes.” I’ve known kisses so narcotic they made my eyes roll back in my head.

the Greeks had several different words for the disparate phenomena that in English we indiscriminately lump together under the label love. Our inability to distinguish between, say, eros (sexual love) and storgé (the love that grows out of friendship) leads to more than semantic confusion.

The trick, I suppose, is to find someone with a touch of the pathology you require, but not so much that it will destroy you. But, as with drinking just enough to feel mellow and well-disposed toward the world, but not so much that you end up vomiting in the street, this can take some trial and error to calibrate.

What the people in these relationships are is not “happy”; it’s something more necessary than happiness, for which we don’t have a word in our language.

(People of the same gender, or impartial sexual orientation, can see more easily through the camouflage of beauty.)

the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day?

she could totally understand—which is not the same as sympathize with—those losers who kill their exes and/or their exes’ new lovers, that black, annihilating If-I-can’t-have-her-then-no-one-else-will impulse, because it’s so painful to know that the person you love is still out there in the world, living their life, going to work and laughing with friends and drinking margaritas. It’s a lesser hurt than grief, but, in a way, crueler—it’s more like being dead yourself, and having to watch life go on without you. I loved her for owning up to this. Not that Lauren or I—or you—would ever do any such thing ourselves

it feels like a glimpse into the secret history of the world. It belies the consensual pretense that the main thing going on in this life is work and the making of money. I love it when passion rips open that dull nine-to-five façade and bares the writhing orgy of need underneath.
Heartbreak is the common term for this condition—a Hallmark euphemism for something that’s about as romantic as pancreatitis.

H. G. Wells, who was an early advocate of free love and contraception and a very sloppy practitioner of both.

It might be a relief to quit maintaining this rigid pose of normalcy and own up to the outlaws and monsters we are.

The truth is, people are ravenous for sex, sociopaths for love. I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might be, after the initial shock of disillusionment, liberating.

I’m as cheered as anyone when some crusader for family values is caught in a cheap motel, a defender of traditional marriage arrested in a men’s room, or some censorious guardian of the children has his laptop confiscated.

There’s a fine line between the bold romantic gesture and stalking. The tricky crux of the matter is that it depends to a great extent on how that gesture is going to be received—which factor, unfortunately, the impetuous suitor/obsessed stalker has lost all ability to gauge.

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.