One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

by B.J. Novak

shut himself indoors on a self-imposed program to read all the world’s great novels;

It must be hard being Ricardo Montalban in heaven, thought Tim.

Indeed, worldwide totals of food production and of people living in poverty simultaneously hit all-time highs this year (see Regular News).

The pleasures of youth are smothered in the mind’s crib by the much-praised pillow of your own awareness. Activities are to be mastered, friends are to be impressed, and life is to be learned, not lived.

Years of neglect from loved ones about the peculiar challenges of my predicament – particularly with regard to maintaining the delicate and necessary self-restorative cycle of mindfulness and mindlessness that comes much more naturally to those whose inner cerebral acrobatics are not permanently set to emergency-high levels of attention-demand – led to a series of emotional breakdowns over the course of my life that have spangled my generally extraordinary intellect with the welcome-textured scars of impulsive thinking and counterproductive endeavors, as well as flash-bouts of radically unfiltered and unnecessary honesty,