by Vinson Cunningham

In 2015, for almost definitely the first time in my life, and for reasons I still don’t really understand, I surprised myself by finishing many more pieces of writing than I abandoned. Still, I let a few things slip between my fingers. The one that bothers me most was supposed to be a diary of a trip I took to Greenville County, South Carolina, over Independence Day weekend, right on the heels of the church shooting in Charleston, and the ensuing debate over the visibility and meaning of the Confederate battle flag. At first, I thought it could be an entry for my McSweeney’s column, “Field Notes from Gentrified Places.” Then, after a few months, maybe an entry on my Tumblr. Finally, at some point, it simply passed away.

So I never got to write about the minor league baseball game we went to on the afternoon of the Fourth, about the battle flag T-shirts I saw, or the Dixie Chicks’ perfectly harmonized version of the national anthem. I never got to write about the time we sat out on the balcony of a cantina, watching the final game of the Women’s World Cup, drinking too much, listening to the locals sing, “America: Fuck Yeah!” every time the Americans scored a goal. I think I had more to say about Henry James?

I wanted to end on a scene that would somehow collapse every element of the story so far — the flags, the books, the people — and make some sort of point, maybe about inseparability of setting and attitude, or about our inability — mine, at least — to leave the experience of a new place unaffected by the news.

Thursday, July 2 (Questions about Jidenna)

We booked an early flight to Charlotte, where C, a friend of Renée’s, would pick us up and drive us the extra hour and a half to his home in a town called Traveler’s Rest. An Uber SUV ferried us from our apartment in Flatbush, across the Belt Parkway, and we watched a big surreal red sun hang over Jamaica Bay, its color seeping out into the water in a series of bright crescents. Renée tried to take an iPhone picture. I think I fell asleep at some point, and when I woke up the sun was already higher in the sky and somewhat less vivid.

Our favorite radio show, The Breakfast Club, streamed through the dashboard — an interview with Janelle Monae and a singer-rapper named Jidenna, of whom I’d never heard until this moment. I have a bad habit, especially too early in the morning, of asking the same question twice or three times — some comic delay in comprehension; I’m never really awake until noon. So, wait, who is this guy with Janelle Monae again? I asked, too many times, managing to simultaneously to annoy Renée and learn exactly nothing about Jidenna, who was talking about how his conked hair had something to do with the fashion of the Civil Rights era, which era, in his opinion, we are to some extent reliving today.

“So,” I said to Renée, “seriously, who is this person?”

Jet Blue’s usually just fine; it was a little turbulent.

In Charlotte, with a few empty hours to spare, we took the bus to a mall called the EpiCentre, all but deserted in the late morning and early afternoon. Eventually we found a bar, and our waiter was a friendly, talkative college kid named Joshua, maybe, and we watched tennis and ate nachos topped with guac, queso, pulled pork, jalapenos, and barbecue sauce. We drank beer, and before we left I had a shot of whiskey, free, courtesy of maybe Josh.

Back at the airport we waited for C downstairs, near baggage claim. I asked Renée if she wanted to hear a few lines from Linda Rosenkrantz’s oddly addictive “novel” Talk. I use scare quotes because the book is composed of actual conversations among three arty friends in the Hamptons, recorded by Rosenkrantz in the summer of 1965 and formatted as almost a screenplay. Here’s part of what I read aloud to Renee, a conversation about somebody’s therapist:

MARSHA: Well, he looks just as tan now. He looks racially disturbed.

EMILY: I’m serious.

MARSHA: I am too. He looks like some kind of mixture.

EMILY: He looks like a mulatto, you mean. He looks like something beautiful, but he doesn’t necessarily look like a Negro?

MARSHA: What’s beautiful about him?

EMILY: He’s very attractive.

MARSHA: He doesn’t look beautiful — I mean he doesn’t look Negro. He does, but you don’t think of him say if you want to invite a Negro to a party. It’s more conceptual than anything else.

EMILY: Do you want some more ice water with your fudge brownie?

Midway through my recitation, a round man with a tie-dye T-shirt and white whiskers started to listen in from his table nearby. He chuckled at the good bits of dialogue and tried hard not to stare. When I was done, he spoke up and asked what book this was and where could he get it. I told him; in return, he told me his name, Dave. Dave was waiting for his daughter and her kid, visiting from Vancouver. His wife was at the table too, but she stayed silent. Eventually Dave’s daughter arrived — she told her mom how much she didn’t like her new haircut — and Renee and I waved goodbye.

C arrived, we stopped at the mall, ate at Cheesecake Factory, collapsed into a heap in the guest bedroom in Traveler’s Rest.

Friday, July 3 (The First Flags)

First thing we went with C on a hike in Caesars Head State Park. We drove up and onto the shoulders of the Blue Ridge mountains in a caravan of SUVs and minivans, first stopping to step out onto a glacier-scraped, graffitied floor of rock. It rained, stopped, rained in little blurts. From where we stood, we could see the Carolinas spread before us like a lawn, little houses and antennas poking out from behind the green. Near the foot of the trail, I talked to C’s uncle, a sort of Afro-ruralist lover of fishing, hunting, guns.

My wife’s German. And the Germans can’t stand guns, they hate ’em. So, you know, I compromise. I keep the guns locked up and put away. Couldn’t even use ’em on an intruder if something like that happened. That’s what I do to keep the peace in my home. Some intruder comes in, all I got is my knife, so now we’re in a kind of hand-to-hand situation. Now I’m fighting for my life. Same thing outside: she doesn’t like it concealed. So again, I told her — somebody decides to come and step up to me, I got no recourse. It’s a wrestling match now.

But it’s really not that big a deal with me anyway. I know some real gun nuts or whatever, but that’s not me. I just like to shoot ’em every once in a while. Have fun. You can ask my wife about that — I’m not a nut with it. And as for the street, most homeless people and thugs and things like that, even they live by some level of respect. Honor. Something. I always say — you ask me for money, help, anything like that, I’m nine times out of ten gonna help you out. But you disrespect me, especially in front of my family — you know, you pull that man card? — and I’ll give you the money, but you better not turn your head, ’cause I’m coming for you then. You can’t just disrespect a person like that.

The hike was two-and-a-half miles each way. We’d been promised a view of a waterfall at the top. It still drizzled in fits, and a pure white fog clung to the tops of the trees. The sky was a kind of paisley through the leaves above our heads; the scene looked prehistoric. We stepped over tree roots that stretched outward and sloped upward like spiral staircases. Somebody showed me a rhododendron — there were hundreds — and taught me how to identify one for myself: the long, thin, cursive branches; the white flowers floating over dark waxen leaves. At the top of the mountain there was mostly more fog. Every minute or so the falls — a way off — revealed themselves.

Did you hear, somebody said as we sat, about that Klan rally over the flag? I’ve got a friend who’s planning to go, just to watch. Just to get it on camera or whatever.

That night we went out to dinner in Greenville proper, on Main Street. City kids had descended on the place. Waiting outside of the restaurant, we saw the first flags. One stuck out from the cab of a pickup truck. One sort of zinged around, attached to the flexible antenna of a black sedan. Another truck, another flag. Three in a row, each sailing effortlessly in folds and curves on the air.

Saturday, July 4

After waking up, I lay in bed reading Henry James’s Washington Square. The book is a kind of play-in-prose, each major scene almost all dialogue: a cruel father and his lovestruck daughter; the daughter and her deceitful lover; the father and the lover’s sister; a meddling aunt and whoever’ll stop to listen. It doesn’t do the unnerving psychological work of Portrait of a Lady, or the zeitgeist-painting of The Bostonians, but what redeems it for me — more than redeems, really: I’m still wondering if it’s my favorite of James’s novels despite its difference from the rest — is its little interludes on, of all things, New York City real estate. From almost nowhere come passages like this one:

I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York [Washington Square] appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare — the look of having had something of a social history.

Or this one:

Mrs. Almond lived much farther uptown, in an embryonic street, with a high number — a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them.

Against the stage-bound stasis of the book’s human drama, these digressions serve as reminders, maybe, that the truest marker of time and of change can sometimes be setting — place — not character or plot. They betray, too, that New Yorkers are always at our weirdest and most unwittingly provincial when going on, mid-story, about housing stock.

That’s as far as I got.

Photo by Jason A G

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

I don’t have any regrets from before November of 2007, because I set them all on fire at the end of the world.

When I was twenty-two, I walked the Way of Saint James, a five-hundred-mile pilgrimage through northwestern Spain. I had graduated from college, finished a summer job, and had vague plans to move to New York to work in magazines. My walking companion Victoria and I took thirty-four days to reach Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, where according to medieval legend, a bright star marked the burial site of the remains of the apostle James.

The Camino is full of traditions, and we observed as many of them as we could. We got our pilgrims’ passports stamped in each place we stayed, tied scallop shells to our backpacks, and drank wine from a fountain at Bodegas Irache at ten in the morning. We also made our own traditions — selfies before they were called that, which we called “long-arm shots,” and reporting in to friends and family in a weekly email. Most pilgrim rituals are concentrated upon arrival in Santiago, before and after Mass at the Romanesque cathedral. Some rituals we performed only symbolically — much of the stonework in the Portico of Glory is now eroded from centuries of wear. We stretched our hands in the direction of the tree of Jesse instead of fitting our fingers in its grooves, and we bowed toward a statue of Master Mateo instead of knocking our foreheads against it. Six priests hoisted up a giant incense burner, called a botafumeiro, to waft it up and down the aisle, the better to cover the stench of dirty pilgrims. Victoria took a Communion wafer while I waited in the pews, because she had been baptized and I had not. We stood in a long, slow-moving line that wound around behind the altar, where we each hugged the enormous metal-and-gold statue of Saint James.

But my favorite tradition from the Camino was the coda. Four days’ walk (or an hour-and-a-half bus ride, if you have a flight to catch) beyond Santiago is Cape Finisterre, the westernmost point in Spain. The Romans believed this rocky crag was the edge of the world — finis terrae is Latin for “the end of the land.” In very modern history, it became customary for pilgrims to burn some items of clothing, especially their boots, that they wore on their long journey. Part molting, part effigy, it’s an unburdening of a former self, who used to carry a heavy load. Leave it all behind, and return home with only your memories! Victoria and I didn’t have a second pair of shoes, not counting shower flip flops, and we had no layers of clothing to spare. (We’d chosen to walk the Camino in the fall rather than the high season of summer; halfway through the trip, I had to buy a wool sweater.) Instead, we brought pen and paper and a Bic lighter, and wrote out a list of our regrets as we watched the sun set over a believably endless horizon.

To this day, I can’t remember what was on that list besides some kind of vague, reaching statements about my first love, about whom I had recurring dreams for the first and only time in my life. Victoria took a picture of me, gazing into the flame, smiling — I look happy and relaxed. I don’t think I really knew what a regret was then. And ever since, I’ve tried not to learn.

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

by Matt Siegel

I used to roll my eyes and semi-hate an acquaintance of mine who would regularly brag on Facebook about quitting the apps — those apps, the mostly-sex apps: Grindr, Scruff, and whatever other horribly named services (“Boy Ahoy,” anyone?) exist for gay men to meet for mostly sex. This past July, though, still sad about a break-up, and in bed scanning the grid of forty percent faces and sixty percent torsos, I realized they were no longer titillating and, more alarmingly, inciting emotional distress.

I know that the apps are not necessarily just for fucking: While some people are straightforwardly there for NSA (not the government organization, but “no strings attached”) sex, some small fraction of people state that they are only seeking dates (“no hookups!”), and others say that they are there for “networking,” which might be construed as filler for those who are open to any possibility. Still, whatever our intentions, conscious or otherwise, many are inclined toward an instantaneous sexual encounter — and although lust is what often drives the hunt, the vast majority of us are open to, if not actively seeking, emotional connection with another person, in whatever form that may take. Regardless, the entire process, from app sign-in to each person deleting any trace of the other, is laborious, even for an only mildly discerning person.

First, you must pass the pic test. That is, you both must sign off on each other’s photos. And these days, people are savvy; you need to send a bevy of pics from all angles. Shirtless. Cock. Ass. Without sunglasses. Candid photo. Selfie. Eyes closed. Eyes Open. One eye winking. Tongue out. (Why does like every gay man have a pic of themselves with their tongues out? I don’t want to see your thrushy white tongue.)

Once you’re onto the next round, expect questions regarding every physical aspect of yourself, especially anything that is not addressed in your pics or profile. Besides the height, weight, and age basics, there’s the body hair question, the dick-size question, the what-are-you-into question, the can-you-host question, and everything that comes in between. “You’re vers but do you prefer top or bottom?” (Fair question, really.) And unless both people are staring at this one conversation and pouncing on every response, the courting and arranging process alone can easily take hours, if not days. And lest we forget, for all the time and thought expended, there’s no guarantee that the encounter will come to fruition.

I find at-home sex with a stranger to be more anxiety-provoking than, say, sex with a stranger at a club because the stakes are higher; you can’t simply communicate via eyes and scurry off to the next man, dissipating into the sex club ether. We all know that heart and stomach tremor as we make approach:

Is that it? Check our phone. He wrote 341 but is it south or north? How weird would it be to knock on a stranger’s door without knowing a name to ask for? What is his name? Better come up with a fake name in case we knock on the wrong door so that we don’t look totally bizarre fumbling for names when some old lady answers. We’ll settle on…hmmm…Eric. Could he be watching from a window already sizing us up? Oh, that’s the house, yes, the one with the gray truck in the driveway — he had said there’d be a gray truck in the driveway. Approach the door. Knock on it. Hear presumably ugly, annoying dogs yipping as they crowd the doorway. Emotionally prepare ourselves for the possibility of hearing, “Sorry, not a match.” Emotionally prepare ourselves for the possibility of saying, “Sorry, not a match.”

I am relieved to be free of the all-too-often-consuming desire for sex with another person, and, as a result, free of the micro-rejections that are frequently experienced on the apps. The simple non-response to a message sent, which might ultimately translate to you as, “Something about me is off-putting, unattractive, or, just… not enough.” I obviously don’t have a thick skin; I envy those do. Oh, and how about the particularly stinging rejection when the person you’ve spent a half hour chatting with either stops responding or blocks you in response to more pics of yourself? How about that? Never experienced it? I envy you, too. (Perhaps the handsome Mark Joseph Stern would argue that my inability to endure what I interpret to be rejection indicates that I am not yet an adult, in which case, dress me in a bonnet and hand me a rattle.)

This is not to say that I have not been the rejecter. But I am very cognizant of the potential effects of rejection. I usually say something complimentary (“Cute!”), casually move on to another subject, and let the conversation gently smother itself to death. Or I might find another reason to kill it quickly: “Oh, we’re both tops☹.” That is an instant and painless conversation decimator that leaves no trace of one’s disinterest. The goal for me has always been to keep the other person’s self-esteem intact, honesty being less noble than preserving a fellow human’s dignity.

So what is the alternative? The time-saver. The face-saver. Masturbation, of course.

Boom, and you move on to your next chore.I don’t want sex — or the quest for it — to be the main event of my day. Additionally, you risk neither STIs nor the psychological consequences of rejection. Porn don’t care. It’s free. You don’t have to get in your car or on the subway or bus to get to it. Even without computer access, you can use that 3G, 4G, or LTE on your phone — though, have you ever tried to jerk off to porn while holding an iPhone? You need something to prop it on and it’s hard to find the right angle and distance from your eyes. (Attention Shark Tank investors: I think I’m onto something.)

What I miss most about the apps is the sense of possibility that maybe I’d meet someone substantial, someone I’d connect with. It’s not a ridiculous notion. It happened to me once before, but in a more commonly-perceived-as debauched virtual setting than the apps. I wonder where and how I’ll meet men without them. It seems that statistically my chances are lower because I’ve got less eyes on me; I’m not “out there.” But then again, are you ever really “out there” on these apps? Or is that thumbnail on the grid just some empty, confused facsimile of yourself until the other person shows up anxious at your door?

Photo by OrganicXO

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

by Josephine Livingstone

I don’t know if you know the story of Beowulf. It is long and most of it bears no relation to the matter at hand.

Beowulf was a great hero who came to a land in great trouble, a land suffering from attacks made at night by a monster. The monster could hear the people having fun inside the hall; he was alone outside, so he went in and ripped their arms and legs off. But then Beowulf ripped his arm off, and nailed it to a wall. Ha! How’d you like that. The monster’s mother then came to take revenge for her armless (but not harmless) son who was by now dead of armlessness. She killed everybody sleeping in the hall. In retaliation, Beowulf then went to the lake she lived in, swimming for an impossibly long time down to the bottom of it. There, he knifed her with a sword whose blade melted as soon as it has done its work. (The hilt of the sword was very ancient and bore an engraving telling of the creation of the world.) Beowulf lived for a long time in happiness after that. He had got rid of the weird haunters and everybody loved him. But as in life, so in stories: the monsters never run out.

One day, a robber decided to break into a nearby cavern full of treasure and steal from it. Unfortunately, the treasure was enchanted — guarded by a dragon! The dragon, contractually obliged to wreak havoc on the local area, did so. Beowulf put on his clangy old armour and lumbered back out. But he was too old. Just as he managed to slay the poor dragon, the dragon got his fangs in Beowulf. Pain boiled and bubbled in Beowulf’s chest until he died. The end.

I told you this interesting story because I can’t explain being closeted with reference to an actual closet. I’m not even sure what an actual closet is. Is it those clothes cupboards in which victims hide from murderers in films, the light landing in stripes on their faces? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because the closet is a feeling, not a place. More specifically, a feeling or sensation you get when you get near the edge of the closet, close enough to be collared and yanked out or forced by the nature of your own enchanted monstrosity to flip out and then get murdered by the townsfolk. The closet is being the dragon.

The second fact is that the closet is porous, it has no visible edges, and you don’t just go in and out. Like a very, very old story in a very, very old book, every old edition of you still exists. They’re just as alive as you are, and you can’t kill them. You always leave yourself inside the closet, even if an exact mirror-image is outside of it. Your memory contains every iteration of you. The hidden edition can feel all the realer in contrast to your present-self, in fact. (Who would guess, that coward was you! Who would guess, that coward you remain.) The more of yourself you don’t or won’t understand, the more stays in the closet. I don’t even know what parts of me are in or out, these days. The closet is the mouth of a cave.

Contemporary English contains within it many mutilated gobbets of the English spoken by Beowulf’s author. Modern children still dream about dragons and people still have their arms and legs ripped off and die of limblessness. Vengeful mothers and loping thieves. Nothing changes. Hack at every monster that comes along but they’ll never run out. Why try to leave the cave? The closet is the inhuman.

Like a dragon snoozing in its cave, I only emerge in increments and then only to hurt somebody; raging against those who would wrong me or my people or steal my awful private treasures, I lash a measly old claw about at my opponent and then — look! — the villagers see me a bit. It isn’t my fault, it’s a contract I’m under. One day, maybe some chivalrous creature in clangy old armour will come along and manifest us both into oblivion. But until that time comes I’m going to stay here and gently tread near the mouth of the cave, hoping nobody breaks the charm.

And that’s it, that’s the closet. You can’t see it from the outside. Nobody sees the whole of the beast, nor will you — unless you happen to catch the fatal battle, which may never come at all.

Grendel illustration via Wikimedia

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

by Jason Parham

Four weeks ago, as the sky darkened to a deep blue-black just above East Houston Street and Bowery, I stood in the middle of the New Museum’s lobby and watched the copper in a friend’s face dim completely. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and he was in town on vacation. “I’m in New York City,” he said into the phone. On the other end of the call was his aunt. She was calling from California to tell him that his younger brother, his only brother, had been found dead in his room.

After the call ended, he stood for a minute, looking empty, alone, afraid.

“Everything ok?” I asked, even though I knew it wasn’t.

“My brother died,” he said.

What I remember happening next is a little hazy: We walked outside, and he tried to hold back tears as yellow cabs sailed by on Bowery; we walked west on Prince in search of shelter and food; V said his family thought the cause of death might be a drug overdose; he suggested his brother’s death was partially his fault, “I could have done more to help him,” he said; temporarily, we found sanctuary at Grey Dog where he ordered apple cider and I ordered a chicken sandwich; he asked me to fill the silence. So I did.

Nine days later, I run into a friend on the train. I am headed to Williamsburg. It is the middle of the day, and the C train is mostly uninhabited save for a few old people and bouncy teenagers. I am headed to Williamsburg in the middle of the day on the C train that is mostly uninhabited save for a few old people and bouncy teenagers because I have just been laid off from my job and there is a coworking space just beyond McCarren Park that was offered to me free of charge for the month. I make small talk about the weather and holiday plans.

“You see this?” my friend says. She points to the subway ad directly across from us. It is a picture of a black boy, no older than seven or eight, who looks as if he is encircled by gloom. Four large words — stacked atop one another — are written to the left of his head. “PAIN. FEVER. CHILLS. MISERY.” It’s an ad for the flu shot, a campaign launched by the city’s Health Department to raise awareness around the seasonal illness. According to Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett, “The flu, combined with pneumonia — a common complication of influenza — is the third leading cause of preventable death in New York City.” In 2014, more than sixteen hundred New Yorkers died from influenza and pneumonia.

For most of this year, I have considered, again and again, what it means to be in pain — its origins, its ability to cripple the body, the process by which it destroys our capacity to withstand it — and how pain is not a destination, a point at which we arrive, but a road on which we sojourn. Looking at the picture of the unsmiling black boy I was reminded that to be black in America is, essentially, to be in a constant state of pain — physically, psychologically, emotionally.

The pain is everywhere, too. We carry it with us. Tamir was just a kid, we shout. Kalief deserved better, we say. What happened to Bettie Jones can’t happen again, we tweet. And yet history rebroadcasts our deepest horrors with new, all-black cast members each week. “Massacre in South Carolina Church Leaves Nine Dead,” a news report proclaims. The plot is predictably similar every time: Few survive. We wear our wounds in public because we know no other way to live. As Kai M. Green put it in Kiese Laymon’s 2013 collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others In America: “What do we do with the scars, those of us who did not die, but still aren’t free?”

In Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, Stokely Carmichael considers the complex relationship between America’s black citizenry — men and women whose shackled kinfolk labored to build the streets they walk, protest, and die on — and the nation. “Black people in the United States have a colonial relationship to the larger society,” he wrote, “a relationship characterized by institutional racism. That colonial status operates in three areas — political, economic, social.” But what if there is a fourth area in which this status operates?

If, historically, racism has operated via the theft of political, economic and social power of black Americans, wouldn’t this unceasing theft, this attack to weaken our core and spirit, have a direct effect on our collective psychological state? If pain arrives when one is powerless to time and circumstance — which, for blacks living under American custom, is the state in which we perpetually exist — then wouldn’t our relationship to the larger society also, in part, be defined by our pain?

Before I exit the train at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, I ask my friend where she’s headed.

“To see my therapist,” she says.

Early December. Various names of esteemed men are etched in gold lettering in the ceiling of the theater at the 92nd Street Y. Emerson. Dante. Einstein. Beethoven. Spinoza. Washington. Shakespeare.

I’m in the second row and in front of me is Claudia Rankine, the award-winning poet and author. She is sitting on stage with Cleonie White and Sarah Stemp, both of whom hold PhDs and work at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. In the last year, Rankine has offered several public meditations on pain, grief, racism, the black body, and the ways in which they overlap. Tonight she wants to talk about trauma and its relationship to our identities — its significance, its potency. “We go through life kind of doing the next thing,” Rankine says, speaking of experiences we encounter — sometimes small, sometimes not so small — and how trauma, like interest on a student loan, accrues over time and often becomes too much to bear. “We put them away until later.”

I gaze up at the names and think how little these men knew of black pain. I begin to understand that our pain does not exist here, on the Upper East Side, where the racial makeup of the neighborhood is roughly ninety percent white and the average household income is $117,000. According to a 2013 rendering by artist Nickolay Lamm, the Upper East Side is home to the greatest concentration of individual wealth in the city. The average median net worth is around $288,000. Up here, there is no pain to put away until later.

Questions I wrote in my notepad this year: What if, at its root, suffering is ultimately a process of becoming? Is exposure a form of healing? How is it that we are still standing?

A crowded A train careens toward Brooklyn. My stop is Nostrand Avenue, a rapidly gentrifying thoroughfare in Bed-Stuy my friend once jokingly described as “the new Disneyland.”

Without notice, a gravelly voice fissures the racket of our subway car. I look up and see a black man direct his anger — what I presume to be a symptom of his pain, a pain, not unlike my own, he has carried with him for some time and does not know how to accept or properly discard — toward two men, both with turbans, brown skin, and long beards. “Damn y’all stink,” he says. His eyes are red and patches of gray scruff color his face. He clutches an open beer can in one hand. “You know we in America now? Deodorant only costs like two dollars. And they call us niggas.”

A sudden stillness falls upon the subway car. The two men do not respond. The man takes a swig of beer. My first instinct is to look away, to try and avoid the hurt, so I turn to my left; a woman lets out a heavy sigh and shakes her head, as if to say “No, no, no.” I offer a sad, uneven smile in return but it feels incomplete. Others seem to avoid eye contact. A blanket of uneasiness smothers the subway car. We are two stops from Nostrand but it feels like a lifetime away. I just want to get home, I think to myself. I feel ashamed, but in the moment I don’t exactly know why. I feel small. Maybe smaller than I’ve ever felt. I don’t know what to do but feel something must be done or said. I feel powerless. I recognize the pain. I recognize that this man does not want to suffer alone. So I sit, quietly bearing the weight of it all, hoping the silence doesn’t suffocate me.

Most of what I’ve said about black people’s relationship to pain being a constant is conjecture. It may or may not be true. (I like to believe it is.) What I am certain of, however, is this: It was a very tough year for me, and while the last twelve months were not solely defined by traumatic experiences, I’ve never before been in such close proximity to pain than I was in 2015. My pain — sometimes brought on by the realization that my mother has been unable to find a job in the last six months and is struggling financially, or the fact that I hadn’t had a real, honest conversation with my brother in four years — often took the form of deep sadness, full weekends alone without a text or phone call to family or friends. I would often welcome the company of complete strangers to a familiar face, because it was there that I could be who I wanted; it was in those interactions that I could mask the pain more easily.

“It’s okay to be sad,” Maura says to her son Josh in an episode of Transparent’s second season. Josh’s longtime girlfriend, Raquel, has just left him and he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He’s trying to bottle his pain, but Maura, as parents often do, sees right through it. The brief exchange came to me as a revelation: It’s okay to be sad; it’s okay to let the pain wash over you; it’s okay to be afraid, it’s okay to not know what to do. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.

Photo by Dark Dwarf

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

by Johannah King-Slutzky

Khaled is a thirty-nine-year-old radio personality who lives in Kuwait. He describes himself as a moderate Muslim with a large family. Although he’s not an American citizen and can’t vote in the U.S., he graduated from a university in Tucson and follows elections closely. He’s not drawn to partisan agendas, but instead follows a great man theory of politics, numbering Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and John Kennedy among his personal heroes. Until recently, he vocally supported Donald Trump’s run for president and stumped for him on his radio show. Now he regrets his support for the candidate. I interviewed Khaled via email to ask him about why he supported Trump and how it feels to have defected from the entrepreneur’s political camp.

How would you describe your political beliefs?

I’m liberal in many ways. I believe in freedom of speech, choice of religion, political opinion, and women’s rights. All people are equal in rights and obligation toward their community and country. I’m conservative regarding… anything that would affect the honor or dignity of any human. The major perception of the Arabic or Islamic community is that women are degraded and less respected than men. I’d like to say that this is the wrong idea.

What drew you to Donald Trump’s campaign initially?

I supported Trump when he first started because I thought he would improve the American economy and lift the nation to a better state and better way of living, which would affect sour economy and way of living. It was his financial experience and determination that drew me to his side in the beginning. Maybe his media appearances before the race made an impact on me. He portrayed himself as the savior of the American economy, the one who would help any American build his life to reach the American dream.

Why don’t you support Donald Trump anymore?

The way he discusses international matters, which is what’s important in my opinion. He attacked Kuwait in one of his speeches and I thought we were allies. His reasoning for the attack was… he claimed Kuwait did not pay the cost of Desert Storm or liberation. And that was a big lie.

He attacks Islam as a religion on many occasions with the excuse that he is fighting terrorism. That rang a bell in my head. Why? What he’s saying is against everything that America represents!

Was there a particular moment when you realized you could no longer support Trump?

When he attacked my country in his speeches and what he said about Islam made me realize he doesn’t know anything about what’s happening in the real world. He doesn’t know who the real enemy is! He claims that ISIS is Islam, but then why is it fighting Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other Arabic countries? If he can’t tell which side the US and its allies are fighting, that’s a big issue…We aren’t living in the nineteen fifties, the world is connected. Whatever happens in Kuwait or America will affect all the countries around it. I thought the US and Kuwait were Allies.

How do you feel about having supported Trump in the past?

I felt so so naïve having thought that Trump would be a better choice. I regret every minute I spoke positively about him on him on my radio show. I saw him as a man who would return America and the world to its lost glory. I thought he would fix international problems — he always had that image. And above all I thought he was righteous…I feel betrayed.

Do you feel you have a responsibility to make amends for having supported Trump?

Yes. I started couple of weeks ago. I used to shout out remarks about how Trump will fix America and the world. But after his stupid comments, I started talking about the difference between him and Mr. Clinton or JFK or Mr. Reagan. The way they ruled the country, the world even. People still talk about what they did, but no one is talking about G.W. Bush or Obama anymore. I said it loud and clear: “Trump will ruin the world,” because he wants his businesses to expand. He doesn’t have the political knowledge to perform as a U.S. president. Not every businessman is good in politics.

Do you see any positive qualities in Trump even though you regret supporting his run for president?

The only thing is the economical approach. Trump is still a good businessman. He might fix the economy but he’ll destroy everything else.

Did you feel like you belonged to a community when you supported Trump? Do you feel like you belong to a different crowd now that you no longer support him?

When he started the campaign, I talked about him all the time whenever elections came up. Some people looked at me in a weird way because even though I’m not American, I follow all the news about the election. I explain to them that the world is connected and what happens in the West will change everything here.

Now I feel like I belong to the Democratic Party even when I know they’re not very efficient regarding heavy international issues, other than Obama who is a Democrat but acts like a Republican, especially in his international affairs. Hillary Clinton would be a better choice for the future. Bill Clinton worked with Republicans and Democrats, plus she knows the in’s and out’s of the world.

What are the other people in Kuwait saying about this election? Do their views on this election parallel your own? How are people responding to Trump’s anti-Muslim remarks?

Everybody’s holding their breath. A lot of people are discussing the election, especially after Trump’s comments regarding Kuwait and Islam…We have a different way of looking at the election than Americans. We look very far in the future and think of every scenario that might happen in the region and how the White House will react. The difference between our nation and America is we don’t believe TV and media until we check multiple sources. Obama shocked the region with his response to the Arab revolutions; Bush was hated because of his unnecessary comments and acts of war; and now Trump is still in the race. People hate him before he even reaches the White House.

Kuwaitis own a lot of real estate in the U.S. and some home owners decided to sell their homes and buy houses in Europe or South East Asia. Some people are thinking twice about sending their kids to study in the U.S. It’s even affecting vacations. Some people who used to spend $20,000 for a three-week trip to the States are thinking of spending this year’s summer vacation in Europe instead. Who is the loser in these matters? Kuwaiti-US relations.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length, clarity, and style.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

by Leah Reich

Some years ago I had a roommate, a woman I knew through mutual friends. I’m not sure I was much of a good roommate at the time — I had my quirks, but then so did she. Anyway, one day we got into it, a terrible fight with both of us yelling cruel things and slamming doors on opposite ends of the hallway. Once things had quieted down, I apologized to her for my anger, for the things I’d said, for losing my cool entirely, for making her feel awful.

In return she said to me, “I’m sorry mean things came out of my mouth.”

I think about this sentence a lot, mostly to laugh. Sometimes I think about it more seriously, or at least I did this year when I got an apology of a similar sort — a bunch of words arranged very carefully to look at first blush like a terribly sincere apology, but which are the verbal equivalent of a mealy apple when subjected to even the slightest bit of pressure.

Look, it’s not like you don’t know this: An apology is an arrangement of words into a statement meant to evoke a very particular meaning. That meaning is, “I’m going to take responsibility for this thing, a thing I can name specifically because I’ve given it some thought like an adult with the ability to see things in a perspective other than my own. Yes, I’ve fucked up, as evinced by how shitty you feel right now. Yes, I want to say sorry. And yes, I want to make it better.” But it’s so hard to remember all this, especially when you’re receiving an apology, because the second you hear, “sorry,” your brain has a choice to make: Either stay very mad at this person, or forgive them immediately because the whole thing is so uncomfortable.

So of course, when you get a bad apology, all full of excuses and the passive voice and sleight of hand, it’s tempting to take it in that moment and then, later on when you’re done being relieved and can think straight again, to get very irritated. I should know: I still think sometimes about that apology up there, which I received something like a decade ago. But this year I learned a thing, or perhaps I didn’t learn it so much as finally accept it as an important officer in my emotional army.

In the first half of 2015, I had one of those heartbreaks that come mixed with a healthy dose of humiliation. The details are unnecessary, except to say that I was upset and mortified and really, really angry. I felt I’d been duped, used, and treated very shabbily. I wanted my rightful apology. I wanted words that would somehow make it all feel better. Of course there’s no such thing, but at the time I sincerely thought if I could only get this person to take responsibility, I’d be able to let it go.

Eventually I got an apology of sorts, but not the one I was looking for. Instead, I got an apology that contained a striking contradiction: It evaded responsibility and therefore didn’t tell the truth, but at the same time it did tell the truth. It made clear how incapable this person was of ever giving me what I wanted.

When someone obscures the truth in an apology, when they refuse to take responsibility, the irony is that it forces you to recognize the truth they’re trying to hide. The funny thing about the apology I got? The sender ducked responsibility because he was afraid of seeming like a bad guy who lets people down, but the very act of ducking responsibility made him precisely that. And it was up to me to see it.

So I did. A good apology wouldn’t have saved me, but a bad apology let me save myself.

When someone gives you a hot pile of garbage wrapped in a satiny “sorry” bow, take it as the gift it is. Right, I know, I’ve just told you to warmly accept a knotted up bag of dog shit after someone’s hurt you, but I’m serious. Save yourself the trouble of trying to get something better out of that person: This is the best they can give. They’re speaking the language they know, a language that doesn’t have much meaning if you think about the way that it’s been arranged for more than five seconds. It’s a lukewarm language, the taupe of tongues, the sad way people speak when they can’t bring themselves to be honest.

But what do you do, really, when someone is honest? Be fair now. Do you listen when someone tells you the truth? What if they tell you the truth you’re not ready to hear? The truth — which still often comes pre-packed in squishy words — often means having to do something we don’t want to do or are scared of. Like, say, let someone go. Not be with them. Allow them to be broken and flawed all on their own, without trying to fix them or the situation or, most stupidly, get them to live up to the potential we see in them and in us.

When I got the bad apology, I didn’t handle it exactly as I might have wished. I didn’t ignore it. Nor did I eviscerate it cleanly and cleverly. I fumbled it, a little, but in the fumbling I did see it for what it was: The truth I hadn’t wanted to hear. The truth that it was going to be up to me to stop wanting something, anything, from this person. To expect nothing and receive less. To stop trying to rearrange all the words into whatever it was I wanted to hear and instead hear exactly what was being said. Which, truly, was not much at all.

As an adult, I have definitely saved one person’s life, and maybe more. But in 2015, I saved myself an awful lot of trouble and time. My only regret is that it took me this long to get here.

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

by Brian Feldman

Kings Theatre, Brooklyn, 06/16/2015

One thing I heard a lot about in 2015 was dogs. I mean, I did a lot of talking about dogs because I love all dogs, but I also heard about them from other people. One thing you should get in the habit of doing is taking pictures of dogs you see and texting them to your friends. There are a lot of beautiful dogs out there.

Multiple people, on multiple occasions, have asked me, “Brian, when are you getting a dog?” I would like to address this question head on:

Maybe 2016 will be the year! It’s very possible that I could get a dog in 2016. I’d like to! In a perfect world, I’d already have a dog, but we don’t live in a perfect world. There are a few thing preventing me from getting a dog in 2016. My main worry is that I will be a bad dog parent. I often forget to eat lunch and I haven’t had a physical in over six years, if I recall correctly. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that most people like eating and staying healthy and I would never want to inflict my lax standards of living onto a dog, the one pure animal.

The other thing is space. If I get a dog, I’m gonna need a yard for the dog to play in. This is non-negotiable. I’m not getting a dog and leaving in my apartment all day. I worked from home for most of the year and I almost went nuts. New York is a pretty good place to live, but it is kind of expensive when it comes to living space. Dogs deserve to run free. I would like to get a medium-sized dog, and they’re too big for New York apartments unless you are a bazillionaire???

I have this one specific image in my mind when it comes to owning a dog. Me, driving my pickup truck out to some sort of wide open space — the plains, or maybe a hill overlooking a valley. I park, facing east as dusk rolls around, climb into the pickup bed, and me and my dog watch the sunset while rock music plays from an old radio or something. That would be great. That’s my dog-owning fantasy and one day I will achieve it.

Maybe the song playing on the radio in my dog sunset fantasy will be Spoon. Anything is possible.

House of Blues, Boston, 06/18/2015

A few of the low-key best things I did in 2015 involved small bodies of water, so I pledge to visit more lakes and ponds in 2016.

The Spoon concert in Boston was on a Thursday night, so the following Friday, while my friends were at work, I drove out to Walden Pond and did nothing. It was an impromptu decision, so I didn’t have a bathing suit or anything. I couldn’t go swimming, so I just rolled my jeans up and waded out as far as I could go. And then I just stood there for three hours. It was great. I didn’t really unplug — I consistently checked my phone and snapped some pictures and whatnot — but mostly I just stood there.

In August, I went up to New Hampshire with my family for five days. I didn’t take any time off of work though, because I’m an idiot who is afraid of a real vacation, but I didn’t exactly tell anyone that I was going either. My daily work schedule was organized in such a way that I would file a first draft at 8 a.m., and then I had another couple of hours before I updated it, so between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., I would scan headlines and do research. The secret is that you can read the web from anywhere on a smartphone, which is why, one day, I skipped out of work and went waterskiing during work hours. If you ever have the chance to secretly dip out of work and go waterskiing, I highly recommend it.

On that same New Hampshire trip, I grabbed a kayak and headed out to the middle of the lake at dusk. Like at Walden Pond, I just sat there, bobbing in the water, listening to The Mountain Goats’s All Hail West Texas. This has, I guess, become some sort of tradition for me, in that I’ll go outside alone and listen to that album.

I don’t recall listening to Spoon while being gently rocked by the ebb and flow of the currents, but maybe that’ll change in 2016. I hope it does. I did, however, lay on the floor and listen to Kill The Moonlight at some point over the summer.

The Wick, Brooklyn, 06/17/2015

According to my records, I read sixteen books, attended sixteen concerts, completed eighteen video games, saw fifty-four films, and finished ninety-four seasons of television.

Of all of these things, the one that sticks out the most is a book I read called In The Kingdom of Ice, which chronicles a disastrous expedition to the North Pole in the midst of the Gilded Age. It’s so good because (almost) every person in it is an idiot. The richest men in America were still, in retrospect, astoundingly stupid. Nobody knew what was going on at the North Pole, and a bunch of dumbasses were like, “Um maybe it’s warm and there is a hole leading to the center of the earth, where mole people live?” I’m not making this shit up. Edison had already developed the light bulb at this point.

Here is how arctic expeditions worked back then:

1. Get an irresponsibly wealthy backer.

2. Get a big boat.

3. Put about three years worth of food on the boat.

4. Sail north and get locked into the ice and see what happens.

That’s it. The smartest, richest guys in the world decided that this was the best plan. In the latter half of this year, thinking about this brought me a lot of calm. If I ever ran into a confidence issue, or got discouraged, or decided I wasn’t good enough, I would remind myself: hey, at least I didn’t get a bunch of guys killed in Siberia by sending them to the tropical beach I thought existed at the North Pole.

In a way, it’s heartening to think that, collectively, humanity will never ever be that stupid ever again.

If I ever planned on getting trapped in the ice for two years, I would bring Spoon’s discography with me for sure.

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

by Bex Schwartz

Do you remember the first time you heard “Closer to Fine”??? Maybe you didn’t even know who the Indigo Girls were yet. Maybe the seniors who were soooo cool performed it as a duet at the national high school show choir competition at a convention hall somewhere deep in Annapolis. Could anything be cooler? There they were — Marti, the best actress in high school, and Nicole, the star of the musicals — harmonizing on this song as if they really meant it. Could you ever be so impossibly cool? And would you ever grok what that song was all about?

Then at camp, “Closer to Fine” was the biggest campfire singalong. And everyone knew every word. It was the first thing you ever learned how to play on your guitar. There is a power in massive-group-two-part harmony and that is the “Closer to Fine” schism: Are you an Emily or an Amy? Choose your part — high or low. Choose carefully because that decision will influence and inform you for the rest of your life.

Twenty years later, you’re still going to be either an Amy or an Emily.

This has nothing to do with personality or appearance or any other differences between Amy and Emily. This is all about: Which part do you do? There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line.

But enough Indigo Girls digressions. Indigressions.

So, this song, “Closer to Fine.” This song — these lyrics that infused every moment of your tweendom — when did they start to make sense? Did you forget about them for a long time? Were they triggered by that recent episode (the end of episode 8, let’s say, theoretically) of Transparent? Or did you maybe have a moment as an adult(ish) when you were with your friends who also felt similarly about that particular song and could you maybe call it a Moment with a capital M? It’s only life, after all.

Well, darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable
And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear
I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it, I’m crawling on your shores.

I get that now.

(My mom heard this song on one of my camp mix tapes and demanded to know if they were singing “I’m crawling up your shorts.” I’ve never heard it any other way.)

In terms of wrapping your fear around you like a blanket — look, I get it. It is comfortable and safe if you wrap your fears around you like a snuggie. Once I was on the receiving end of a sad-tervention (that’s an intervention, but it’s because you’re very, very sad) and the ambushers said that depression was comfortable. This is true. They were right. It’s easy to sink into the snuggie-fear-fleece-blanket that lives on your couch. But it is better if you can sail your ship of safety ’til you sink it.

Maybe your fear is fire. Perhaps you are with your women friends and you are enjoying the Great Outdoors. Perhaps it gets cold. Perhaps you are actually REALLY GOOD at building a fire because a) you spent many winters with a wood stove and b) there is no way you’re ever going to survive the zombiepocalypse without knowing how to make fire and c) have you ever seen those Tribal Councils on Survivor where two contestants have to get a spark going and they just can’t? Those people will die when the zombies come. Don’t be like them. Learn how to make a fire.

Maybe fire is scary because you had a friend in nursery school who fled the flames consuming her home with her stuffed animal named Didi. Maybe that friend’s family rebuilt their house several blocks away and named it “The Phoenix.” Maybe you once went to see Batteries Not Included and on the way home from the Hawthorne movie theater, you heard sirens. And it turned out that your front lawn was completely scorched, all the way to the edge of your house. You, like all of your neighbors, had zoysia grass and it colonized most of northern NJ and it turned into hay as soon as the temperature dropped. Someone maybe flicked a match or a butt and your lawn went up in flames. Your whole house smelled like smoke. You started sleeping in your bedroom doorway so you could make a run for it if you had to, if it ever happened again.

But then you dated someone who had a wood-burning stove and you learned how to build a fire. And you learned that you, a mere human being, could control fire. And that it was nothing to be scared of.

“It’s getting cold!” you said. “I’m going to build a campfire!”

Your friends all called their loved ones just to alert them to the fact that a campfire was going to happen. You thought they might be worried. But you sail that ship of safety, lady! YOU SAIL IT.

I built the campfire. It was fucking awesome: It was warm; it was pretty to watch; and it definitely kept the zombies away. I taught my friends that they could also control the fire and how easy it was to place the logs in the right place. I was not afraid.

I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper
And I was free.

It wasn’t until we listened to “Closer to Fine” on repeat around that very same campfire that I actually grokked the song though. I took the Amy part, of course — I can’t really sing but I can slightly figure out the low harmony. I dated a guy once who never did see a B movie, and I want to say: fuck that shit. If you don’t know Spaceballs and What About Bob and Three Amigos because you are watching high art, just fuck that shit and see a B movie. You, who have never seen The Goonies or The Monster Squad — you will never see through me.

I loved college, but one of my fellow campfire friends did not enjoy it very much. She very much felt like she “got my paper and I was free.” It was only then that I realized they were singing “prostrate to the higher mind” and not “prostate” and that definitely changed a lot of things.

I stopped by the bar at 3 a.m.
To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
I woke up with a headache like my head against a board
Twice as cloudy as I’d been the night before
I went in seeking clarity.

We don’t have to talk about this verse. We all had our early-to-mid twenties.

We go to the bible, we go through the workout
We read up on revival and we stand up for the lookout
There’s more than one answer to these questions
pointing me in a crooked line

I had a journal, a floral-covered notebook that my stepmom gave me. We passed it around the fire. I can’t share any of it with you because it won’t make sense but just know that we fully embraced being ground gremlins and all was right in the world.

The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine
The closer I am to fine
The closer I am to fine

I wasn’t just close to fine — at that Moment, I was for-real fine. I was happy. I was not worried. Everything felt like it was going to be a-okay, my buddy. And then we came home and eventually I started to become afraid again and I was sad and I was further and further away from fine.

My job-company asked me to make a movie for the holidays about joy. I was not feeling a lot of joy because the world is too much with us and everything is horrible and it’s really easy to be afraid. But I thought about what it was like around that campfire when I was close to fine: I wasn’t scared and everything was going to be okay.

I realized I hadn’t felt that way since I was a little kid who was obsessed with outer space when I wasn’t worried about the ice caps or global famine or disease or what the future was going to be, because there was just so MUCH TO LEARN. Remember when you were a kid and there was always something you didn’t know? That is something that brings me joy — the notion of wonder. So I tried to channel wonder into hope for the future.

So I made this:

Because I remember joy. I was happy when we were closer to fine — I was happy when I felt like I was almost maybe approaching fine. And I regret that I forget how to feel that way, most of the time. I regret being far away from fine. I want to get as close as I can, even if I never get to Mars. (METAPHORICALLY. IT’S ALL A METAPHOR.)

A short anecdote: I have a recurring nightmare in which there is a monster alien from the X-Files on my fire escape. It’s just a thing that I dream every so often. This morning, I dreamt there was an alien monster from the X-files on my fire escape. I shook it off and got up to feed the cat and start working. The super came by a few hours to later to ask if I’d heard anything on the fire escape because there was a burglary in the building. Which means: IT WASN’T A DREAM.

I was really scared that maybe a bad person could still be lurking around the fire escape. But that is a crazy thing to think! Facts and figures and television shows and our dad being rational teach us that a burglar would not hit the same building twice! We’ve all seen SVU!

The point is: It doesn’t do us any good to be scared of invisible aliens on our fire escapes, so we might as well stop feeling bad about feeling bad. We should just try to be closer to fine.

Photo by Martin Cathrae

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.

by Dayna Evans

If you slice holes in the knees of your jeans, you increase their coolness percentage by twenty percent.

Whatever you look like when crossing the path of a “skinny mirror” is how the rest of the world generally sees you. You’re not actually as disgusting as you think you are.

Buying expensive shampoo seems stupid but it isn’t.

You don’t have to enjoy everything that everyone else likes but being a hater for sport is fucking irritating.

On that note, IPAs taste bad.

There are luxury movie theaters in New York City with reserved assigned seating. [Note: Please don’t forget you learned this next year.]

You don’t owe anyone anything except your goddamn mother.

The arrow on the fuel gauge on your car’s dashboard indicates which side your gas tank is on. I learned this from Kelly Conaboy by way of Joe Mande.

Always split the dinner tab with your friends. It all comes out in the wash. That one friend who doesn’t agree with this is worth cutting loose in 2016.

Coffee that I bought always tastes better than coffee that I made.

You can usually take six ibuprofen. [Note: I’m not a doctor.]

Every woman should have a list of Male Enemies that they keep handy at all times, to be consulted and added to frequently.

There are Instagram accounts dedicated to skateboarding bruises.

Every woman hits an age where they decide to “get into running.” About half actually start doing it regularly, usually accompanied by a decrease in heavy partying. It’s admirable, sort of…

…I said sort of.

A fun way to throw money away is to buy useless domain names. This year I purchased yourmomswebsite.com.

GoPros cost way more money than I thought. Feels like they should probably be — I dunno — $50 bucks tops? No. They’re more like $200 and up.

There is such a thing as “rich girl hair.”

Which reminds me: haircuts are not worth it.

Friending people on Facebook is cool again.

Smoking cigarettes is cool again.

Art is cool again.

Wearing clothes that are ill-fitting just to be trendy is no longer cool. Wearing clothes that feel good is cool.

No one is personally gunning for you to succeed except maybe your mom so you better go try succeeding by your damn self.

The Instagram Explore tab is better than TV.

When you press and hold on a photo in Google image search on your phone, you’ll be given the option to either save the image or copy it. No more screenshots taken from my Google image search page.

There is no god.

The Moscow Mule is a superior drink.

Photo by EagleCam

Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.