Photo credit: Flickr user hfiguiere, used and modified under cc license
Author Archives: David Larson
The New Rules of Adulthood
The new rules of adulthood
Role Models
Anthony Shadid is my role model
I don’t have too many heroes, and in fact most of the ones I do have either died of drug overdoses, self inflicted gunshots or, in one case, assassination by the CIA.
Anthony Shadid may have been the only wholesome hero I ever had. He died last week in Syria, covering the ongoing unrest under the oppressive Bashar al-Assad regime. He is survived by his wife and two children. He was just 43.
I'm living my life wrong 
Summer before last I realized I hadn’t skateboarded in almost 10 years, so I went to a shop and got a deck. It took a minute to regain bearings but by the end of the day I could hop over curbs again, and it was the most fun I’d had in a long time. I found that it kept me soberish, too, at least at first, because I actually preferred skating to drinking.
Am I too old or too irresponsible to skateboard?
Summer before last I realized I hadn’t skateboarded in almost 10 years, so I went to a shop and got a deck. It took a minute to regain bearings but by the end of the day I could hop over curbs again, and it was the most fun I’d had in a long time. I found that it kept me soberish, too, at least at first, because I actually preferred skating to drinking.Until the novelty wore off and I just thought I’d combine them, which was a bad idea.
personal journals
The source of my cheap-beer elitism
When I was 15, I drank micro brews. Sure, if the only other beer around was Pabst or Milwaukee’s Best, I’d drink it, but not without a bit of pretentious grumblings.
I suppose it made me feel sophisticated to like well-crafted products. I had an Esquire subscription that Henry Goldman got me for my birthday, and I actually read it. I was far from wearing English-cut three-piece suits at that point. I wore jeans and a t-shirt, or sometimes my girlfriend’s pajamas. I wasn’t fashionable and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between a California Sauvignon Blanc and one from the Marlborough region of New Zealand . . . But I was a beer snob.