George Saunders

End of objections from El Kiddo.

Your choice, Jacques.

Dying in the back of a horse cart stuck in the mud or zinging toward help, air con blasting.

Anyone with a lick of sense would choose the latter.

We had.

The world had.

That was what was so damn stupid about it.

People forgot the empty larder, forgot drought, forgot famine, forgot what it was like to be at the mercy of the world.

Forgot what it was like to be at the mercy of the world.

Well, there was a time when I was in my 20s that my dad had a restaurant and it burned down.

So things were rough.

And we were living in Texas.

And I just got that first sense that in our country, if things got tough below a certain level,

nobody was coming, you know, except your friends and family.

And that landed on me.

I mean, I was kind of a upbeat, optimistic, at that time Ayn Rand kind of guy, but still it landed.

And then many years later, when we had our family, you know, we didn't have any money saved.

We were just kind of going paycheck to paycheck.

That feeling kind of came back almost like a flashback.

Oh God, you know, for all of the kind of surface glitter of the culture,