CORY DOCTOROW · 236
We switched to ARGing pretty soon afterwards. It was more fun in some ways, and it was a lot less weird. Every now and again, though, I missed my cape and those weekends in the hotel. The opposite of esprit d’escalier is the way that life’s embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they’re long past. I could remember every stupid thing I’d ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I’d naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit-parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind. As I tried to concentrate on Masha and my impending doom, the Old People incident kept coming back to haunt me. There’d been a similar, sick, sinking doomed feeling then, as more and more press outlets picked up the story, as the likelihood increased of someone figuring out that it had been me who’d sprung the story on the stupid Italian editor in the designer jeans with crooked seams, the starched collarless shirt, and the oversized metal-rimmed glasses. There’s an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. You can learn from them. It’s a good theory, anyway. Maybe the reason your subconscious dredges up all these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure before they can rest peacefully in humiliation afterlife. My subconscious kept visiting me with ghosts in the hopes that I would do something to let them rest in peace. All the way home, I turned over this memory and the thought of what I would do about “Masha,” in case she was playing me. I needed some insurance. And by the time I reached my house — to be swept up into melancholy hugs from Mom and Dad — I had it. The trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the DHS couldn’t prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the Xnet would have time to turn out in force. The trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to arrest us all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and the grownups, so the DHS wouldn’t just gas us again. The trick was to come up with something with the media friendliness of the levitation of the Pentagon. The trick was to stage something that we could rally around, like 3,000 Berkeley students refusing to let one of their number be taken away in a police van.