Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

by John Hodgman

Art can be challenging or moving or unsettling. It can offer an awakening and it can offer solace. But I think art’s best value is that it is distracting.

Honestly, if I got hit in the eyes with a mystery gas that blinded me but gave me super senses, I don’t think I would fight crime. I would probably mostly feel confused and need some therapy.

It is better to say yes than no. Unless saying yes will hurt you or someone else, say yes. Don’t say no if the invitation is scary. That’s when you should definitely say yes.

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.

First Harry hired me to help scrape some windows and taught me that there are no stupid questions, only fuck-ups. And I’m sorry to swear, but he taught me there is decency in crudeness when it is blunt and honest.

you can be friends with addicts, and even love them, but you have to know they cannot completely love you back.

most of these submissions were terrible. I realized from reading them that it takes the same amount of effort to write a good novel as a bad one, and you really don’t know which kind you’ve written until you’re done.

the worst jobs are not the hardest jobs. The worst job is the job you know is wrong for you, but you stay in it anyway.

We all feel like impostors sometimes. Because we are. We don’t get anywhere without a little overreach, without faking it a little. This is especially true if your job is to literally pretend to be another person. But even if it’s not, it’s good to be in over your head sometimes, as life is enriched by terror and surviving it.

we do not live in a society of laws, but a society of power

Single people who don’t get pets in their twenties have to do other things to pretend they are grown-ups, like get married. This is usually a terrible idea—about as bad as getting a reticulated python. Yes, it’s fun to walk around on a spring day through the park holding hands with your new spouse, your grown-up love draped magnificently over your shoulders like an exotic snake. You get a lot of attention and feel cool. But you are also taking a huge, powerful thing into your life that requires an extraordinary amount of care and work and ugly sacrifice. You don’t need to feed your marriage rodents. You don’t have to kill a rat and then watch as your marriage slowly chokes it down. But marriage offers its own David Cronenbergian body horrors. It’s not all fun hugging and kissing. You are sleeping and farting and snorting and flaking and puking in close proximity, and there is no way to hide all of these sounds and smells from your beloved. You see your partner unhinge their jaw to say the worst things, or shed their disgusting skin to become something new, and you have to accept and forgive these things. A marriage, like a python, is expensive. It gets bigger and bigger and if you don’t care for it, and if it dies, you have a big fucking problem on your hands. Quick: Do you know what to do when you come home to find that you have a dead twenty-foot python stuck behind the radiator of your grown-up married apartment? Or decaying in the walls? I don’t. But I bet whatever you...

the brass family is better than the reedy blow tubes that make up the woodwinds because they are made of real metal. You can melt trombones down and make them into swords when society collapses.

It’s usually the wealthy summer people (like me) who yell for special treatment because they suspect that in life they are unspecial, and they are correct, and this knowledge hurts them.

Stories are a survival technique: they are how we put our lives and universe into some consoling order. That’s why I can’t not write, and even if you don’t actually write on paper, you can’t not write either. Your brain is always writing, cataloguing and shaping the narrative of your life, because it wants to survive too. And if it’s a matter of life or death or a deadline, it won’t let you fuck up. With a push, your brain will show you the stories you’ve been telling yourself all along, both the terrible lies and the surprising truths.