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

by Jason Pargin

You can decide for yourself whether a homemade radiation sign is scarier than an official one.”

Every father of an embarrassing son feels it as a curse, knowing that none of their own accomplishments mean a thing if their kid is a big enough fuckup.

a pretty white girl isn’t just playing the game on Easy Mode, it’s playing it in God Mode. You’re not even playing the same game as the rest of us.

Did you know that the western border of Texas is closer to California than it is to the eastern border of Texas?”),

A quarter of those 1950s houses didn’t have indoor plumbing,

in the 1960s, most Americans didn’t even finish high school.

this part of the country, lots of the kids would have goiters from iodine deficiency, illiteracy would be rampant, virtually every adult would be missing multiple teeth. Oh, and it was considered weird if parents didn’t beat their children.

Everybody longs for those home-cooked meals like in the Norman Rockwell paintings, but those meals only happened if Mom spent hours cooking them—most women literally spent most of their time in the kitchen.

did the average man even know how to perform oral sex on a woman until, like, twenty years ago?

There are parts of this country that never saw an avocado until the 2000s, when they started bringing them in from Mexico and shipping them all over. I wound up

If you feel like certain bad people in this story got off too easy or that certain innocents had it too hard, that is only because, in this particular fictional universe, karma doesn’t exist.