It's a clichรฉ to state that one should think like a child, but it's clear that kids know something that the world tries to make you unlearn later in life.
John DarnielleThere's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.
John DarnielleBack in the 90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.
John DarnielleMy family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism.
John Darnielle