We're All Damaged

by Matthew Norman

Two hours with my grandpa felt like eternity, but also like not long enough. I should have come sooner. I should have called him more this past year. I should have watched more Cubs games with him, and I should have been better at being his grandson.

Fox News isn’t something you can tune out, like a game show or a cable movie you’ve seen a dozen times. The colors, the moving logos, the giant fonts, the . . . well . . . the things they actually say. It’s like the television equivalent of one of those cymbal-banging monkey toys being duct-taped to your forehead.

Mixed in with all of its silly bullshit, Facebook is the literal manifestation of all our regrets, looping and looping, for free, on our computers and phones.

It’s taken me a long time to realize this, but I’m lucky that all this happened. I’m lucky that she failed at trying to love me and left me at Applebee’s a year ago. If we’d stayed together, Karen and I, we’d have ended up two unhappy people in some big house somewhere, avoiding one another. And by then, it’d have been too late.

“I had this Etch A Sketch when I was a kid,” I say. “I used to love that fucking thing. I’d try to draw something, like a bird or a dog, but I was a really shitty artist, so I’d screw up every time. But it didn’t matter, because I’d just shake it up and start again.”