Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

by John Hodgman

Like all status, if you get into first class, you have to believe you deserve it. And for that reason, once you leave a firstclass cabin, you feel robbed, wronged, and unnatural, and so you spend your life anxiously, always trying to get back in.

Philadelphia is called “The City of Brotherly Love,” which is a lie.

I said that I hoped the Owls would devour the Nittany Lions, and then regurgitate them in a compact little bolus of pelt and bones, and they enjoyed that, proving once again that owl biology jokes cross all class and race divides.

It’s about the stories, these sports nerds would repeat on and on, seeming to forget that books and movies already exist.

“My favorite kind of science fiction is post-apocalyptic dystopia. But I just heard at the bar that genre is going out of style. Frankly, that’s not a future I want to live in.”

But my favorite was the Daredevil car, a 1967 Ford Bronco Roadster with a picture of Daredevil on it that Daredevil would never see, because Daredevil is blind. Of course he has enhanced senses that compensate for his blindness: super-hearing, super-touching and -tasting, a mysterious “radar sense” that might be echolocation, and super-smelling. But I’m still not sure he should be on the road. You can’t echolocate a stop light.

To me, work meant meeting other humans and learning about them. Sometimes it meant getting paid, but not always. The important thing was that I got to pretend I was a grown-up, which is the dream of every only child. (I am still pretending to be a grown-up, by the way. That’s a job that never ends.)

And of course fantasy and science fiction is not reserved only for weird suburban white nerds like me (though they are fighting hard now to keep it for themselves). Fantasy and science fiction is also for grown-up truck drivers who miss their families and dream about the morning they will be reunited with them, however briefly.

Easy jobs are great. And as you ease into them, they get even better. They do not challenge you, and you never want to leave. But be careful about getting stuck in the easy jobs. Days turn to years quickly when you are not challenged, frightened, tested. And then maybe someone will invent Netflix.

I found him when he was about one year old, and even then, when he was young, he would not so much meow as yell, over and over again. Sometimes he was yelling for food. Sometimes he was yelling just for fun. He would slam his body into closed doors that he did not like being closed, and in the morning, he would walk on your face with litterbox paws. I loved him.

There is a reason for the old superstition that a cat will steal a baby’s breath. They want to do it. And they would do it if they had the thumbs and paw strength to haul a Dustbuster up to the crib and turn it on.

They were wildly popular, and like all wildly popular things these days, no one had ever heard of them.

Whatever you may have thought about Hillary Clinton, my daughter watched as a highly experienced and qualified woman lost a job to a neophyte dilettante cartoon character of a white man who openly bragged of molesting women. My daughter isn’t dumb. She got the message.

While writing this, I went back to look at that 2016 photo of Trump eating a taco bowl and loving “Hispanics,” and I was struck by how happy—genuinely, even almost appealingly happy, even to me—he seemed back then, in his tower with his trash and trophies. Especially compared to how he seems now: a seething, addled minotaur at the center of a labyrinth he made and despises. We are trapped in there with him, and we are all trying to find our way out. We will.

That island is named Crotch Island, because there are a very large number of islands off the coast of Maine, and so I guess every other word in the world was taken.