Welcome to Braggsville

He blew time like he had it to spare, like it grew on clocks instead of died there.

The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.

Micro-aggression—The plastic gun of racism; you can sneak this one through security most of the time because it is comprised of nonracist ways of being racist, nonsexist ways of being sexist, and the like. E.g., You’re not like other BLANK people, or, You speak English very well.

A relationship is like a road trip: You get bugs splattered on the windshield. By the time you see them, it’s too late, but you still keep going.

They were like an overconstructed novel, each representative of some cul-de-sac of idiolect and stereotype, missing only a handicapped person – No! At Berkeley we say handi capable person – and a Jew and a Hispanic, and an Asian not of the subcontinent, Louis always said. He had once placed a personals ad on Craigslist to recruit for those positions: Diverse social club seeking to make quota requires the services of East Asian, Jew, Hispanic, and handicapable individuals to round out Multicultural Brady Bunch Troupe. All applicants must be visibly identifiable as members of said group. Reformed Jews and ADHDers need not apply.

Oppression porn—(1) The depiction of poverty, oppression, and/or despair with the intent of provoking moral arousal. Frequently appears as digital media, literature, and pseudo-immersive favela tours. The most common side effect is a dangerously inflated sense of national and/or cultural superiority.

Cancer isn’t contagious, but it is mighty bad luck, and that is highly contagious.

College makes you smart. It doesn’t make other people stupid. I’m not so sure it makes you so smart, to have a second say.

(He blew time like he had it to spare, like it grew on clocks instead of died there.)

Meet the New World, same as the Old World.

Maybe she felt caught between two worlds, too. Maybe she knew how often she was denied direct experience because she looked like someone who had to be protected.

Once more Mary Jo, Bobby, Kevin, Dennis, Raymond, Lucille, Frankie, Coddles, Lyle, John, Andy, Miss Ursula, Jim, Lonnie, Postmaster Jones, William, Travis, Todd, Tony, Dennis M. . . . On the ride home from Sheriff’s office, everyone was again on porches or at windows. Daron didn’t call out their names this time, and this time no one waved. Where do the black people live? In the front yards! It was funny. (I guess that’s better than the back of the bus, Louis had later added. Daron had thought that funny, too.) Louis’s absence was always noticeable. Though skinny, he’d filled space like a fat man on a crowded elevator, except a welcome addition, not someone who provoked strangers to regard each other with situational solidarity. He had, in fact, induced people to regard each other with suspicion, to question the known.

The whole town is a Confederate museum, replied Louis, holding his hands up palm out. I’m not saying your whole town is housist or anything! Housist! Housist was Louis-speak for racist, invoked after Daron tried explaining that just because someone preferred a mansion didn’t mean they’d torch a ranch. Housist, Loose?

It was nearly midnight when Daron sat down next to his friends again. They looked pleasantly tired. He was about to ask them if they were enjoying themselves when his father opened the back door and whistled for him. His parents were alone in the kitchen. His father studied his face, his mother was straightening the canisters, her back to them, but her posture belied where her attention lay. Call it off, son. How do you mean? D’aron, I don’t want to keep you from your friends or have a big discussion about this. Whatever you was planning, call it off.

Let’s start at the beginning, D’aron. Is it Daron or Daron or Daron? Daron, ma’am. What about this apostrophe? The name’s . . . Irish, he started to say before catching himself . . . The name’s misspelled. I never figured why it’s like that or how to git ’em to change it.

He had thought it through, even though following his own logic was a bit like tracking a shadow through a tunnel, he was never sure the idea he was tailing at the exit was the same idea he had been following at the entrance.

nothing was as it seemed. Words were different, definitions ramifying until a profusion of meanings rendered them meaningless. Review

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because you’re daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Dong-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of ‘WALL-E,’ Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called ‘What’s Happening!!’, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college.

It was precisely the perverse type of academic thinking that caused the mess in the first place. It was as though academics thought the entire world was some kind of ant farm constructed for their pleasure and enjoyment and strained observations. He had no place in an institution that suggested personal loss be re-wrought, re-vised, re-fashioned as intellectual palaver, as a paper. Not even for honors.

everyone advertises for the mind but expects you to bring the soul.

All the jobs he wants are *POOF*, and it’s his fault. Killed, , he knows, by him and his generation, and all their online shopping and file sharing. What remains are a paltry assortment that rouses indignation, a long dozen of those very occupations that he’s always feared most.

The record stores, video stores, bookstores, those temples of wisdom whose employees he’d so envied were extinct, themselves now tells. Those clerks who could name the third track on Nevermind or tell you that Breed was originally titled Imodium—without quite sneering—are gone the way of the dodo bird or sliced bread in Berzerkeley.

Be a word herder. The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.

To be bullied into suicide. I think of it now as a lynching from a distance.

Fire isn’t flavor, but the Big Green Egg, that ingenious ceramic capsule of goodness, that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of cookout equipment, both grill and smoker—God bless!—was

turning to his when he pulled back.

It felt like a reunion after an embarrassing absence. The affection and appreciation were earnest, but things had changed so much no one knew what to say.

On the right was a collection of mailboxes, maybe twenty, several of which Daron had met in a previous life with an aluminum Louisville slugger, as well as several blue boxes labeled COUNTY EXAMINER, a few of which had not recovered from their own interrogations, that local version of the great American pastime. D’aron, much to his credit, he’d once thought, was only blowing off steam, and never once—not even one time—cracked lip when the others asked, Who writes Gulls anyway, and when they get a letter, who reads it to them? He now wondered how much of his fear about coming back here was actually guilt, and how much of the guilt was fear—nothing was as it seemed.

Everybody knew their place, and felt not shackled but swaddled.