Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches

by John Hodgman

As I have mentioned, I am an only child. This makes me a member the worldwide super-smart-afraid-of-conflict-narcissist club. And let me emphasize: afraid of conflict. Since I had no siblings to routinely challenge/hit me and equally no interest in playing sports, I had grown up without any experience in conflict. I therefore had no reason to imagine that confrontation of any kind, ranging from fighting to kissing, was not probably fatal.

I love my father. It’s not his fault that he made up a fear and, in order to make it feel more real to him, gave it to me. I was obviously built to receive it. As a father now myself, it’s sobering to think about how the smallest comments will ripple through your children’s lives, with some leaving permanent warps.

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. And wine is also like religion because the people who really get into it tend to be fucking unbearable.

The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence. You never need to learn to drive if you don’t want to. And even if you do drive you can go back to that bar you went to when you were twenty-one, and it will still be there, and it will still be called Molly’s, and the older waitress there will still remember you and let you sit where you want. And five years later, when she is no longer there, when there is just a picture of her above the bar in a place of sad honor, and you know what that means and you don’t want to think about it, guess what: you do not have to. Because no one is driving home, and you’re back again, listening to “Fairytale of New York,” which is still on every jukebox, falling into the same conversations you had with the same friends in the ’90s: about how the internet is going to change culture, and what you are going to do when you grow up.

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.

“Do you drink every day?” I had never heard this particular question in the medical rundown before. My inclination was to say no, I just drink socially. But socially means every day. Every evening my wife makes us martinis and we talk about our days as I cook dinner and our children ignore us. It is a great pleasure in our lives: this rediscovering of each other as our children age. It is our indulgence. But how do you explain that to a medical professional who clearly is screening for alcoholism? And then I realized I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to explain anything, because I am a grown-up. “Yes,” I said. “Every day.” And she looked up from her clipboard and said, “Yippee! Me too.”