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[...] My ability to take a little jog to my polling place and cast my ballot required so many before me to fight without fear - or to fight with the fear that neglecting to do so would lead to things staying the same. How easy human beings can forget the people who came before us, and the debts w…

Once, I and a friend of ours blindfolded BJ and drove him somewhere deep in Fairfax County, the end of some generic cul-de-sac inside a nest of twisting cul-de-sacs. We set him in a car, madde him wait a few minutes for us to drive off, and then let him find his way back to a bar in Hendon. If he m…

Let's be Beage. Age forty. White. Brown hair. Six feet tall, maybe two-hundred pounds. Married twelve years to the girl we got set up with after college, who teaches history to middle school kids. Let's live in a townhome in a suburb of Washington, population 71,000, with our two sons, Oscar, nine,…

[...] Music had been his major in college. Why wasn't he trying to make it his job?

"A job is a job," he said. "It's what I do to pay my bills. Music is my life. If I made my life my job, if I relied on it for money, I think I'd come to hate my life."

It was pitch black out, the dashboard's g…

[...] As mirrors of each other, we were a success, and for a boy hung up on what shared Converse might reveal, this felt like dying. [...]

And I saw my future stretch before me like a flat, snowy expanse. I would not get to reinvent myself in college. I would not get the new life I'd been dreami…