Duplex

by Mike Nagel

What’s the point of knowing things? I just walk around all the time nodding and smiling like, “Uh huh, uh huh, yep, this all makes sense, sure, why not.”

I'm not going to lie it's a little scary being all alone in the big empty universe. Sometimes I get a stomachache just thinking about it. It’s almost like anything can happen at any moment and there might not even be some sort of takeaway.

Lesson being: a good book can make up for a lot of bad things, especially if the book is about those bad things,

It might be human nature to want to be someone you're not but it is also human nature to eventually just sort of accidentally end up being someone you are.

The least I could do was the most I could manage.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard says in her book The Writing Life. To which I say: “Uh oh.”