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

by Jason Pargin

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 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.

So much of a modern life was just sitting back helplessly and watching disaster unfold, in real time and in high definition.

“But the way I see it, America was never really united. In Alabama, the line where the seashore used to be about eighty-five million years ago now marks which counties vote Democrat. That old shoreline created rich soil that was perfect for cotton. That meant slaves; their descendants still live there. That’s America, full of these fault lines, open wounds that never healed. If you head a few miles that direction and cross into West Virginia, the average life expectancy drops five years. The average person born over there dies six years sooner than if they’d been born back in California. Same nation, different worlds.”