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

by Jason Pargin

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

Same!

that’s what happens when you build a society that can only be survived if you either have a super-specific type of brain or a prescription to block out the chaos. Do

Giving an animal a good life, that’s sacred. Do you understand that? It’s one of the purest things you can do, to protect them from this, all this.

that’s hard to do when you’ve been raised to believe there’s no such thing as a minor disagreement. If you think that, say, a cashier failing to wish you a Merry Christmas is a sign of impending Christian genocide, you’re probably not the type to hash out differences over brunch.

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.