Newsletter 145: Every Generation Thinks It’s the End of the World

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one’s from January 2019, about everything feeling so goddamned perilous, all the time. This certainly feels like a week where it’s relevant.

When did you have that first moment when you saw your parents as humans, as flawed, scared, plain old human beings like everybody else? Families are all different, I suppose. My parents were very much of the “all you need to know about me is that I am right” school when I was growing up, and I will confess, this is not far from my strategy as well. Every generation of Leitches is a little bit more open than the last. My dad says my grandfather used to come from work, go into his office, shut the door and no one saw him again until morning. (This might have also been because he had eight children.) My father was a little more open than that, but he still left no doubt about his absolute authority and studied remove: The first time I had a beer with my dad, which when I had that first “oh, he has a personality and life other than just ‘Dad’” moment, ,which wasn’t until I was about to graduate from college, he kept saying, “I can’t imagine what Bill Leitch (his dad) would have thought about a dad having a beer with his son,” which made me sad…