Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

by John Hodgman

Many people have asked me why I grew it, and most of those people are my wife, and to them and to her I say: I don’t know. I’m sorry.

I think my mustache—thick and dark and unwanted in the middle of my round pale face—served the same function: to be repulsive on purpose. I looked like a bushy nineteenth-century president who also happened to be a baby.

And since your neighbors have now been transformed into the idiot monsters you always believed them to be, the zombie epidemic offers you moral permission to shoot them in the head, finally.

Unlike the zombie apocalypse, global annihilation offered a different, better consolation: not that I could escape death, but that when I died, I got to take everyone else with me.

But leaving the garbage to steep and decay for months on end is my system, and I have a very good reason for it, which is this: there is no garbage collection in rural western Massachusetts; so you have to drive your garbage to the dump; and I do not feel like doing that.

So I didn’t want to break the rules. I loved rules. In any situation I wanted to know what all the rules were so that I could follow them, perfectly, thus assuring not merely approval but also love . . . from every single person on Earth.

It’s not risk I am afraid of. It is ambiguity.

I loved work because it was like travel: a chance to meet different people and inhabit their worlds. So the more tedious and unengaging the work was, the better, because it left more brainspace for observation and inquiry, and also because I’m pretty lazy.

Now, I love filling out forms. I enjoy any opportunity to create order out of disorder while also basking in the impression that someone cares about my address and middle initial (K).

We walked down to the river’s edge. The scene there was exactly as I described (I am good at describing stuff), and we took off our shirts (disgusting) and went swimming.

“Who makes them?” asked Jonathan. “Nobody knows,” I said, meaning at least one person does not know, and that person is me.

Western Massachusetts, like all of Massachusetts, is perceived as a liberal Utopia: good witchin’ country.

Your brains and bodies are working at peak power right now; give them time to do their thing. Don’t undercut them with marijuana now. Wait until they begin to break down and betray you with knee pain and heel spurs and undefinable sadness. Then—YOU MAY GO FOR IT.

Young people are such natural sociopaths. They could have lied and said, “Yes.” Professor Mark would never have noticed their absence when they didn’t show up. But why should they bother? Why lie to spare the non-feelings of this faceless older mannequin who makes mouth noises about Mark Twain to them twice a week? They were asked a question, and so they gave an honest answer: nope!

Now you know my feelings about those words. So I wanted to say, “What? Are you twelve?” But because I am mostly only a monster on the inside, and what’s more a professional, a performer who will not only give a Samuel Clemens Address for which he is unqualified, but also press the flesh at an Old State House wine mingle I never agreed to, I only said, “Nice to meet you.”

That’s a good metaphor. You know exactly what it means. And I should know, as I studied LITERARY THEORY AT YALE.

Because now they knew, and if you didn’t know, now you know: no one has more cred than John Hodgman of Brookline, Massachusetts.

Obviously, I am not the first and far from the best to express these ideas. But I include them here for my children. I want to show them that you don’t have to smoke marijuana to get deep and have sophomoric thoughts about the universe.

That smell is the propane’s way of telling you that you have an emergency, he said. It smells like garbage because you are garbage: garbage people who do not deserve to own a home.

it. Once a raccoon used its little mutant humanlike hands to open our screen door while we were just sitting there, gin-and-Scrabbling. It poked its head into our human house and just looked at us sadly, as if to say, “You guys know I could come in here and kill you at any time, right?” I would soon learn that the raccoon was telling the truth.

This country is founded on some very noble ideals but also some very big lies. One is that everyone has a fair chance at success. Another is that rich people have to be smart and hardworking or else they wouldn’t be rich. Another is that if you’re not rich, don’t worry about it, because rich people aren’t really happy. I am the white male living proof that all of that is garbage.

But in any case, the government was calling around to the states (and commonwealths) asking if anyone had any garbage land they didn’t want, and Massachusetts said, “Oh yes! We absolutely do. We have this whole, massive hump of half-Canada up there that we never use. Take it.”

It may be that Maine is called Vacationland because when Maine was invented, we didn’t really know what a “vacation” was yet.

Their idea of vacation was to go north, to a cold dark place, where they would not speak to their families but instead sit in silence, drinking martinis, looking out over bodies of water that you would never, EVER go into. Because the waters of Maine are made of hate and want to kill you.

That last part is not true, but this is: you will see huge freshwater clams, and you will scream underwater.

But they prove that you can make sugar look like anything; no one is forcing you to make it look like fudge. I don’t need to tell you what fudge looks like. But I will anyway: it looks like a dark, impacted colon blockage that a surgeon has to remove to save your life. Stop eating it.

Perry’s Maine Humor section has many books and CDs with titles like A Moose and a Lobster Walk into a Bar . . . and Suddenly the Cider Didn’t Taste So Good and Bangor? I Hardly Know Her! I had to make that last one up, because I guess the Maine humorists are just not doing their jobs.

Comedy that abdicates its requirement to be funny is objectionable to me on two levels: first, it’s lazy; and second, that’s my thing.

Whatever was happening in my career at that time, first as a writer, then as a performer . . . whatever anxieties I felt about my doubtful qualifications and fortunes, I could always console myself: At least I am not this. At least I am not a middle-aged, Yale-educated phony peddling half-funny stories about the state of Maine. Please put this book down for a moment to appreciate my incredible mastery of literary irony. I’ll just be over here curling into a ball, trying to disappear forever.

Because I was on-camera talent and Elliott was not, he had to go along with my hilarious meta-commentary on bullying as performance art whether he liked it or not. That’s what made it, you know, actual bullying.

I always find it comforting to know that maybe, in that suburb of Boston, that woman also lies awake, because a person from television knows that her children are mean. Then I fall into petty slumber.

After all, there is no mansplaining like white mansplaining, because white mansplaining don’t stop.

I’m sure you have also bought a boat by accident, so at the risk of boring you, here is our story.

thus making a living entirely on his own, almost without ever having to see or speak to another human ever in his life, which I am convinced is the secret dream of every person in Maine.

I don’t know if Jimmy Steele thought that way. But I like to think he did, because that’s how I think a lot of the time, and I want to feel normal.

And it would prove my maxim about favors, which is the exact opposite of what your encouraging parents have always told you: it does, in fact, always hurt to ask.

I realized I had learned everything I know about death from movies. There is no peace in dying.

wish she were alive, but I am grateful for her death. If she were alive, I would likely still be working at the literary agency. For how much longer in my life would I have believed there was time for everything?

I had misunderstood them completely. They weren’t punishing me by not helping, they were respecting my privacy by letting me fuck up on my own.

There are transitions in life whether we want them or not. You get older. You lose jobs and loves and people. The story of your life may change dramatically, tragically, or so quietly you don’t even notice. It’s never any fun, but it can’t be avoided. Sometimes you just have to walk into the cold dark water of the unfamiliar and suffer for a while.

It is not full of vampires like I thought (an original idea that only I have ever had), but it is still dangerous and haunted and empty.