Tower of Sleep

No sign of anything I loved in childhood. No Tinkertoys, no basic Lego blocks, no Tonka trucks or Mouse Trap Game or cartoonish stuffed animals, cartoonish in the sense of being simple, largely undefined, like Charlie Brown, and therefore susceptible to the personality of their owner coming to inhabit them and so bringing them to life.

Deeply disturbed at capital’s alternately hyperspecialized and cargo-cult approach to cultivating young minds, I walked out onto Broadway, down a side alley, and cried. Grieving, I suppose, for the PBS-Upper West Side approach of my childhood, the Sesame Street-Harriet The Spy-Owl Magazine approach of treating young minds as sophisticated, pliant, and culturally valuable, and therefore supplying, or trying to supply, complexity and quality, even in the context of a basic economic transaction.

—A sensitive man that I know and admire experiences a dark night of the soul in a Toys R’ Us.