I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son Read Online Free PDF

about your wide-ass gyre. Though I take heart from the fact that, like all your small, skittering, chitinous creatures, he is hard to kill. Always have. Have, in fact, watched the man: walk through a sliding-glass door; unwittingly barehand a copperhead; set his commemorative Donkey Kong shirt on fire while stirring a pot of Hoppin’ John in the bright a.m. I was in the vehicle when he got T-boned by a cerulean F-150. I was not when he did likewise, loaded, to a cocaine cowboy’s yellow Lamborghini. I have seen him close a door on his own face.
    After every injury, physical or otherwise, he yelps a “
Shit!
” and is fazed, but he does not accept help or consolation. There
is no
help or consolation. Suffering itself is the point. Shame is medicine, and to drink enough will cure you of anything.
    It’s the kind of worldview a mental-health professional could dine out on, a lot, at expensive brasseries. But he will never go to a mental-health professional. Mental-health professionals are the black helicopters of the self, dangerous interlopers to take cover from and bust back at. Suggestions that he “talk to someone” come across like grenades rolled into the officer’s tent.
    No, in this family we shit on the talking cure. We considerpsychology to be the hero’s grave. We rub dirt into what pains us, and then we walk it off.
    As a result, I have come to fetishize opaque brutes. Adventurers, gunfighters, all the dumb rollicking killers. Dudes for whom torment and doubt are inconceivable (or at least incommunicable). Homer’s sublime dolts, gloved in blood and not wanting to talk about it.
    “Nostalgia” is a dirty word, I know. Sentimental, retrograde. It’s the sound ignoramuses make when mewling after what was false in the first place. A blank check issued to weak minds, the cashing of which ends up bankrolling bad history. Total duh.
    But fuck, man. Consider any guy who captured your attention, who gave you the (metaphoric) dick tingles. Likely, there was something in him that was unhinged to his advantage. Likely, he was in some way opposed to the kind of man we’re supposed to be now: the kind who understands himself, explains himself, acquits himself—the kind who, ultimately, never makes memorable gesture numero uno.
    Doesn’t that guy sound like a dildo? Aren’t legends forged (
forged,
not recorded) by the kind of man who lives in the world in such a manner that, unbeknownst to him—and, really, he couldn’t give a good goddamn either way—his days become his credentials?
    Because me, personally—I have had it with all these stories about anemic ephebes and their disquiet. I do not want to make a reasonable being my object of adoration.
    Which is why I polished off yet another Daniel Boone biography prior to whipping out my laptop on this red-eye flight. (Dad having suggested the seat, 36F, after doing his research on Seatreviews.com. “You get a lot of legroom, but you gotta be the guy who opens the emergency door. You’re strong enough to do that?”)
    In his lifetime, which spanned from 1734 to 1820, DanielBoone blazed the first trail into the West through the Cumberland Gap, explored the territories of Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, defended frontier towns during the Revolution, hunted game on the level of an extinction event, and spurred hundreds of thousands of Americans to settle in Kentucky and, later, Missouri. At one point, 358 monuments to the man existed in this country. The number of us who have claimed his descendancy—staggering.
    Whatever instinct it is that attracts you to what encourages you—an instinct that comes from feeling at home in the world—Boone didn’t have it. Short and powerful, pony-built, he ran away from home after killing one of his father’s horses in a jumping accident. His father had beaten him then, in the Quaker fashion, beaten him until Boone asked forgiveness.
Canst thou beg?
his father huffed between strokes. Boone was silent, leaving his father free