Vacationland

{
  "author": "John Hodgman",
  "title": "Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches",
  "highlightCount": 28,
  "noteCount": 0,
  "annotations": [
    {
      "location": 3,
      "annotation": "A few very good-looking people I know turn mean when they drink, mocking and abusing the people who care about them. They make themselves ugly to see if people will still love them that way."
    },
    {
      "location": 6,
      "annotation": "Maintaining such fogginess about free will is, I think, a secret to a lasting marriage."
    },
    {
      "location": 6,
      "annotation": "There are many joys of parenting, but ultimately we are robots training our own upgrades to replace us. But my son doesn't know this yet. He doesn't know that his job is to grow and thrive apart from us and conspire with time in our destruction. He still holds our hands and does not treat us like we are hopelessly stupid and, so I wish to protect him."
    },
    {
      "location": 7,
      "annotation": "All dads dream about the end of the world. It is a comfort to them."
    },
    {
      "location": 8,
      "annotation": "Guns and power are the weird masculine redemption fantasy of white dudes getting back to running things has never meant as much to me as abundant, well-organized food."
    },
    {
      "location": 9,
      "annotation": " Everything ends. Nothing lasts. Not even John Hodgman. This is a truth so obvious that we build whole world religions, grandly spangled with art and rituals and distracting hypocrisies."
    },
    {
      "location": 13,
      "annotation": "So yeah,  why not grow a beard? When yo don't know what to do in your life, there is always the mystery of what happens if you do nothing."
    },
    {
      "location": 24,
      "annotation": "It was their weekend home. They would drive two hours from Brookline on a Friday afternoon. My father would watch  movies and make spaghetti and my mom would smoke cigarettes and read mystery novels and eat Stouffer's creamed chipped beef. If they went outside they'd maybe look at some old junk for sale in barns, or go to that one falling-down hotel on the Mohawk Trail that served day drinks to snowmobilers and had those sausages we liked. And then they'd head home. My mom knew how to live."
    },
    {
      "location": 39,
      "annotation": "I would probably not die: no Hyundai or streetlight can fight a city bus, the blunt, slow, armored whales of the streets. But I could end up at some destination I did not choose, which to me feels almost worse."
    },
    {
      "location": 46,
      "annotation": "Yale was founded before the advent of the fraternity system, so the white men of generations past had to make up their own structures for sub-erotic bonding and pointless tribalism."
    },
    {
      "location": 61,
      "annotation": "I am from Massachusetts and he is from Connecticut, and New Englanders do not say things like that. \"Yankee ingenuity\" means the canny improvised fixes, repairs, and craftwork our predecessors employed to keep their barns and brains intact through long winters without ever having to break down and ask anyone for help."
    },
    {
      "location": 61,
      "annotation": "Shame, embarrassment, and crippling emotional reticence is what this part of our nation was founded on, at least the white part, and Jonathan and I adhere to this legacy."
    },
    {
      "location": 65,
      "annotation": "But if you're going to take the time to put a crystal ball in your bird-bath, you probably also will stack stones in the river at night, probably while nude."
    },
    {
      "location": 67,
      "annotation": "My cairns were obvious, pretentious, rococo. They looked like the tacky resin lawn fountains you used to be able to buy in the garden section of the late/lamented SkyMall catalog. (I miss you, SkyMall. See you in heaven or hell soon.)"
    },
    {
      "location": 67,
      "annotation": "But Jonathan. Jonathan is a musician, but he also has the soul of an engineer, and you could see it in his cairning."
    },
    {
      "location": 67,
      "annotation": "He was over there making Yes album covers, and here I was, with my gaudy Trump Towers of rock junk."
    },
    {
      "location": 70,
      "annotation": "And so the region is flooded with young people. You see them in Northampton and Amherst, glowing and gliding around on the belief that their feelings are unique and that they will never regret their full arm and neck tattoos because their skin will never age and their tastes will never change."
    },
    {
      "location": 77,
      "annotation": "Obviously Jonathan Coulton was not taken by wtiches and replaced with a duplicate Jonathan Coulton, a beareded, pop-folky golem made of cursed wax and twine. He is just fine."
    },
    {
      "location": 80,
      "annotation": "I prefer liquor to wine. Gin and whiskey are chemistry, carefully formulated and distilled to create a single repeatable experiment in intoxication..."
    },
    {
      "location": 80,
      "annotation": "Wines, on the other hand, is like religion: it's mysterious, sometimes literally opaque, and there are too many kinds of it. You never really know if a particular wine is good or bad; you just have to take it on faith from some judgy wine priest, an initiate to its mysteries. And wine is also like religion because the people who really get into it tend to be fucking unbearable."
    },
    {
      "location": 100,
      "annotation": "I appreciated how sad [the song \"Rocky Top\"] is. It is a song of lament for a lost place, a lost life. Even the song knows that the wish expressed in the very first line, to be back on Rocky Top, will never come true."
    },
    {
      "location": 102,
      "annotation": "All I know is it's a pity // Life can't be simple again. I cannot fault the poetry of this line."
    },
    {
      "location": 102,
      "annotation": "Now normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn't) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can't) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox News. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory -- in Appalachia in particular -- of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again."
    },
    {
      "location": 113,
      "annotation": "When you live in New York or any big city, it is easy to fail at growing up. The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence.  114|But it turns out all of Brooklyn is suddenly alive with not-growing-up renaissance."
    },
    {
      "location": 116,
      "annotation": "The house came with a garbage disposal, which was exotic technology to us at the time. We had both had them as kids, but when we moved to New York they exited our lives. You were not allowed to have a garbage disposal in Manhattan then; the sewer pipes were too delicate."
    },
    {
      "location": 129,
      "annotation": " This country is founded on some very noble ideals but also some very big lies. One is that everyone has a fair chance at success. Another is that rich people have to be smart and hardworking or else they wouldn't be rich. Another is that if you're not rich, don't worry about it, because rich people aren't really happy. I am the white male living proof that all of that is garbage."
    },
    {
      "location": 165,
      "annotation": "The preppier kids would go away and come back with life tickets still pinned to their parkas like little merit badges of assholism."
    },
    {
      "location": 178,
      "annotation": "'Ladies and gentlemen, the white privilege comedy of John Hodgman.'"
    }
  ]
}