One of the reasons I like to hang out with scholarly types is they can do a broad reach conceptualization of things that is astonishing to me. I'm really good at the particulars but I have to do an immense amount of critical thinking to make something larger of it.

It's a matter of resisting what something made you feel before. And resisting that as a consumer is not easy. I know it isn't for me, and not just when I consume pop culture. When I go into a book and it feels too familiar, I don't have the energy to do it. My whole reason for reading it is to be in a fictive space that is unfamiliar to me.

I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.

I think we are living in an era of being hyper-concerned about, Is it us? Because we have this historical awareness. People really want to know: will it be us or our kids or our grandkids to live through this? We don't want it to happen, we don't want to be the ones with the poisoned water, but at the same time, I think there is this curiosity, like, Am I one of the "lucky" ones who gets to be here at the end? That's the tension I'm interested in.

If you think it's worth writing a book about then that means you suspect that you're not the only one. You suspect that it has something to do with the larger patterns of your culture.

Writing a book is about me doing the work to get from the obsessive particular to something that reaches out of that in some meaningful way. It doesn't come easy to me. I really admire people who do it with acuity, but I don't, and for me it takes the process of working on a book for years to do any thinking that I feel accomplishes anything. I don't do it off the cuff well.

Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.