Casey Anthony epitomized something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on as I sat on my couch, eating Captain Crunch and smoking weed, watching the coverage of her trial during a tranquil evening in the Summer of 2011.

There was something missing from my life at the time… I wasn’t conscious of it but felt its weight all the same. It wasn’t that I was unhappy- I was definitely comfortable; I had a career made possible through the the empty achievement of multiple college degrees, I had a fat girlfriend who was a crazy bitch but I loved her anyway, and I spent my free time feeling good… after all, life was about maximizing consumption while sleep-walking through minimal responsibility. The idea of ambition beyond this baseline was something foreign and laughable. Isn’t that the American dream? 

Yet still… alternating between video games, television, pornography, processed food, oxytocin and marijuana left a fuzzy feeling on my brain that something wasn’t quite right, but I wasn’t quite ready to see it just yet…

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