I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

No, what you fear above all is humiliation at the hands of the unfamiliar.

Sure, you don’t want to do the work right now, during the hard part. Nobody does! But the real ‘you’ doesn’t exist in the moment; you exist in the long term. That you, the whole you, will be glad you did this.”

He felt a weight roll off him, the exquisite relief of canceled plans that extroverts will never know.

diseased minds liked to latch onto random numbers,

“This might seem like a personal question,” said Ether, “but do you ever just spiral into an all-day masturbation frenzy?”

On the opposite wall were pinned dozens of whimsical trucker caps bearing slogans like ALL TRASH, NO TRAILER; OLD FART; and, bafflingly, THE BIGGER THE FUPA, THE TASTIER THE CHALUPA.