Those Bastards: 69 essays on life, creativity, & meaning

by Jared Dillian

I just X out the Twitter tab on my browser

Twitter out the X tab?

And remember, the first rule of panicking is to panic before everyone else does.

That is one reason I work as hard as I do, because I don’t want to go inside my head without a shotgun and a flashlight.

How about writhing around on the floor, screaming, with snot coming out of your nose. They don’t show that in the commercials.

Service academies don’t cost anything, except time—you have to serve five years afterwards. I thought it was a pretty good trade. $200,000 for five years. It was a fucking awful trade. Imagine if I started on Wall Street in 1996 instead of 2001.

I think my middling level of success is best explained by my middling level of popularity in school.

New York is full of fucking crazy people. Figuratively and literally.

You work for two years on this thing, you pour your heart out onto the page, in my case on a deeply personal subject matter, then Rando Calrissian gets to take a giant dump on it on Amazon for everyone to see.

The penalty for the sound on in public should be summary execution.

When you’re in that much pain, you don’t want to listen to anyone.

What we do isn’t a science, and it resists all attempts to make it into a science. It is an art.

I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of sending human shit through the postal system pretty funny,

the UPS clerk and I both knew what was in there—

I told her under no uncertain terms that she was to cover my mouth when I woke up,

I was working in a giant caterpillar pillar.