Greg Bales

The Cooler Me

She looked from me to Kyle again, as if imagining him with overpriced glasses and a hairline in sudden retreat. “You can be anything you want to be, I think.”

I nodded, though this seemed to me patently false. It assumed, for example, that you didn’t want conflicting things at the same time. Case in point: I love my family dearly, and yet I’d boarded a plane to San Francisco that afternoon with a breezelike feeling of escape.

Man, burdened by the responsibilities of family and career, pitches a magazine story about feelings of conflict over leaving his family behind to go in search of his bearded artistic self. Open road trumped with cute children.

Is there a greater myth of our age than this? See also: Jonathan Franzen, Judd Apatow.

“The Cooler Me” by Eric Puchner for GQ