Sublime

On September 12, 2013, I reported Avomeen’s results in an article titled “How Chris McCandless Died,” which was published on The New Yorker website.

I, too, had been unkinked in this easier, we're-all-fucked-together-so-let's-make-the-best-of-it environment, self-lulled into thinking I was as rich and potential a human gold mine as I always believed-as all of us in my camp want to believe-when the dirty American word "failure" winged its way across the water and hit me where it hurts.

I think it must be more difficult for children I know now, children whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed steps, each of which must be successfully negotiated in order to avoid just such a letter as mine from one or another of the Rixford K. Snyders of the world.

Trout’s story reminds me of the time my late great-aunt Emma Vonnegut said she hated the Chinese. Her late son-in-law Kerfuit Stewart, who used to own Stewart’s Book Store in Louisville, Kentucky, admonished her that it was wicked to hate that many people all at once.

lugubrious