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

by Jason Pargin

Los Angeles International Airport, a facility Abbott believed had been designed to make every traveler feel like they were doing it wrong.

there was no one else in the vicinity aside from a rail-thin man by the tire air machine having a tense argument via either Bluetooth or psychosis.

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

The speaker was Patrick Diaz, a boxy LEGO figure of a man who had probably looked like an FBI agent in his mother’s ultrasound.

The phone was on his unmade bed, next to his laptop. Well, that only meant Abbott was coming back. He’d sooner leave the house without his balls than his gadgets.

He tossed the shotgun into the Buick and then got low, thinking that if he were about to die, he was going to go out how he’d lived: with absolutely no idea what the hell was going on.

“Now we can just settle in and drive. Just relax.” “I don’t think I’ve relaxed once, in my whole life.” “Well, maybe it’s time to try something new. If you allow yourself to feel the distress of the conflict, you should also allow yourself to feel the release of victory.”

“I don’t think I’ve relaxed once, in my whole life.” “Well, maybe it’s time to try something new. If you allow yourself to feel the distress of the conflict, you should also allow yourself to feel the release of victory.”

population lives to the east of the dead zone. And of course, north of us, you have the Oklahoma Panhandle, that strip of land that used to be part of Texas, but when Texas entered the Union, they wanted to be a slave state, but slavery wasn’t allowed north of that parallel. So they just lopped off that strip, and for decades, it didn’t belong to anybody. For years, they didn’t even have laws there. It was like The Purge.”

Through all of history, wars were a way to burn off your excess young men, like venting heat from an engine.

in isolation, human minds tend to get strange, like a self-portrait painted from memory, in the dark, using a live snake as a brush.

I’ll tell you something else, the only thing I learned from therapy: People who had rough childhoods, guys like you and me, you grow up scared of being happy. It don’t feel right. You find yourself sabotaging it, because you’re so scared that you’re gonna lose it that you’d rather just trash it yourself, so at least you can say it was your choice. So, you go hunting for grievances, to give yourself an excuse.”

“Yes, lots of strangers are saying terrible things about you on here. But look—I just turned it off. Now they’re gone. These people walking around this parking lot, in that store, they don’t care about any of this. Inside, food still tastes good, water is still wet, you’re still alive and in a healthy and strong body. That’s real. And when you focus on real things, you’ll be shocked at how easy it is to make this”—she held up the phone—“not matter at all.”

The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone.”

red,