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Culture

The Stacks: Pete Dexter on What It’s Like to Lose the Knack of Having Fun

Get Happy

Somewhere, somehow, the author Pete Dexter forgot how to have fun. If you find yourself in that fix, all you have to do is read this story.

Pete Dexter

Updated Feb. 27, 2020 4:59PM ET / Published Sep. 20, 2014 6:45AM ET 
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Max Bailen/Getty,Cultura RM/Max Bailen

In this week’s episode, our hero Pete Dexter tries to figure out how he forgot to have fun. Originally published in the Philadelphia Daily News on July 17, 1986, it is reprinted here with the author’s permission, please enjoy “Having Fun: One Thing You Know It Isn’t Is Waking Up Near A Big Dog.”

I was afraid of this.

You got to bed one night in the desert, in a room where the ceiling is a mirror, filled with remorse and a normal dread of that unnamed, inevitable thing out there waiting for you somewhere in the blackness of the mountains—waiting for us all in the blackness of the mountains—the thing that tells you that you are going to be messing with real estate agents the rest of your life, and the next thing you know, it’s eight o’clock the next morning and you aren’t having any fun.

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