Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

by John Hodgman

And I grew my second mustache for the same reason all your weird dads grew theirs: it is an evolutionary signal that says, “I’m all done.” A mustache sends a visual message to the mating population of Earth that says, “No thank you. I have procreated. My DNA is out in the world, and so I no longer deserve physical affection. Instead, it is time for me to turn away from sex and toward new pursuits, the classic weird dad hobbies such as puns, learning trivia about bridges and wars, and dreaming about societal collapse and global apocalypse.”

I like pills for the same reason that I prefer liquor to wine. Gin and whiskey are chemistry, carefully formulated and distilled to create a single repeatable experiment in intoxication, the same precise flavor and effect across the brand, bottle after bottle, glass after glass. Wine, on the other hand, is like religion: it’s mysterious, sometimes literally opaque, and there are too many kinds of it. You never really know if a particular wine is good or bad; you just have to take it on faith from some judgy wine priest, an initiate to its mysteries.

The ocean takes its garbage to the dump. But lakes are unmoving, fetid pools full of fish poop and frog parts.

As I have written before, I do not have a sweet tooth (I have an alcohol molar).