flâneur

On Being a Bug: Why You Feel like the Main Character and like Nothing You Do Matters

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The same machine made you the center of the world and convinced you nothing you do matters. From a Sierra porch to a propeller plane over Everest to a mushroom-lit desert, a search for the right size of a self.

There was a stretch of my twenties when I biked twenty miles a day in New York City. I was in grad school, so broke it was a point of pride, paying for bodega coffee in quarters, stitching together three and sometimes four jobs across the city and budgeting down to the subway fare I refused to spend because there was nothing to spend. So I rode. My legs were always pumping and, I must say, my thighs at the time were as impressive as old tree trunks. I had wired headphones in (pre-AirPod era) irresponsibly, both ears, more often than not blasting Taking Back Sunday loud enough to drown out…

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