by Awl Sponsors

The following is an excerpt from Ben Dolnick’s At the Bottom of Everything, now available through Pantheon Books.

Chapter 1

I’ve noticed that whenever I tell the story of going to look for Thomas (all it takes is a couple of beers, like quarters into a jukebox), at some point whoever I’m talking to will say two things:

(1) You’re such a good friend!

and

(2) How could you just pick up and leave like that?

I was nothing like a good friend, and I could only pick up and leave like that because the thing I was picking up and leaving was no longer, in any recognizable sense, a life. But I don’t say this. My conversation self, the one I send out to bars and parties and weddings, is a half-truth-spouting machine. Here I’ll try to do better.

I’d spent the last couple of years (really the years since I was fifteen) ignoring the fact that Thomas needed me, as if his life were a flashing Check Engine light in the corner of my dashboard. I’d let emails from his mom pile up so long that it would have been worse, I convinced myself, to respond that late than just not to respond at all. I’d become an expert at changing the subject whenever his name came up (did you ever think he’d drop out of school? did you hear he was in the hospital? what’s he doing in India?). I’d even, one especially unproud morning, turned and speed-walked out of Safeway because I’d seen Thomas’s dad, or someone who looked like Thomas’s dad, rooting around in the bin of red peppers.

But of course shame was going to catch up with me sooner or later. Shame or Thomas’s mom, who startled me outside the CVS on Wisconsin Avenue one day when I’d just bought a box of condoms.

“You’re just hell to get ahold of,” she said, smiling. I held my bag behind my back. “Do you have time to come back to our place? Richard would love to see you.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m actually . . .” and pointed off vaguely behind me.

She nodded. “You know Thomas talks about you as much as anybody,” she said. My heart was racing, reasonably enough. “I know he’d love to hear from you.”

“I’ll write to him,” I said, and I did my best to sound as if the thing that had been stopping me until then was just that it had never occurred to me.

We hugged (this took some ginger CVS-bag maneuvering on my part) and promised to see each other soon. “Send your mother our love,” she called out as she got into her car (a new Volvo, this one blue). I was fake smiling and murmuring for a block and a half.

Thomas had been the smartest kid at Dupont Prep, the last person anyone would have pegged for disaster. And I, semireasonable soccer player and wearer of striped polo shirts, had been his best friend. We were, for a few years, one of those pairs, like Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, that no one could quite believe in or understand.

Anyway, childhood friends, given a decade or two, turn into strangers. Their parents don’t. I could more or less convince myself that the Thomas I’d been doing my best not to think about was someone else entirely, but his mom (who looked so pale and defeated, who was probably even then asking Richard to guess who she’d run into) was unmistakably the same woman who’d driven me home when I’d forgotten my retainer, who’d bought me calamine lotion when I came back from field day with poison ivy. But I didn’t turn around.

I won’t try to defend myself except to say that my own life still seemed to me complicated and demanding enough that I didn’t think I had room in it for Thomas. And that I turned out to be as wrong, in imagining the course of those next few months, as I’d ever been about anything.

But just then I only knew that I’d barely escaped a visit to the Pells, and that Anna was waiting for me. I hurried back to my car like a fish released, just in time, from a barbed and rusting hook.

“Managers, hosts, waiters, sommeliers, chefs and cooks care about their place when they have no immediate plans to bolt…. But today, eatery employees seem not to respect even their bosses. Many start a new gig with an exit strategy already in mind. One unmentionable reason: The legal crackdown on ‘management’ employees (which can mean just about anything) misappropriating tips from lowlier staffers makes it harder to make the bucks that some once took as their due. In the new climate, all it takes is the hint of a better deal elsewhere to lure them out the door.”
 — Service at city bistros is worse now that higher-ups don’t have as many opportunities to exploit fellow restaurant workers with less power, apparently.

This is ABSOLUTELY the way they once sold soda here in America. Maybe you should be a little nicer to everyone you know who grew up in the ’80s, okay? Look at this! They never had a chance! Anyway, happy birthday to Glenn Lewis Frey. He’s the one with the mustache.

Photographer and longtime Carnegie Hall resident Editta Sherman died on Friday. Just after turning 100 she chatted with Sean Manning about such topics as nearly trysting with Tyrone Power, selling old clothes to Tilda Swinton, and dancing ballet for Andy Warhol. Sherman was 101.

Have you ever gone home with a fellow a little too briskly? Oh sure you have. But did you sign a contract to be together for four years? Of course not! Oh well! Congratulations, now you have a new mayor in your life! What will he be like? Who knows! It’s the thrill of the chase and the tumble.

Anyway, shouts to the 4,741 people total in New York City who voted Green Party.

I am prepared to offer an extremely valuable free service. Why would I do this crazy thing? Just to make the world better. And, more selfishly, to save myself from being bombarded by nightmarish tabs.

For free and for nothing, I will speed-read your Medium draft and warn you of any dangers it might present. Yes! I will be like “HEY THIS PART IS RACIST” and “NO ‘MISANDRY’ ISN’T A REAL THING” and also maybe “LOL you have no idea what you’re talking about here.” And then you will be happier, I will be happier, and the Internet will be happier. (Yeah. Mostly these tips are for men. Most of you ladies can just carry on.)

So try me. Bring it on. Choire [at] theawl.com. Someone has to keep this place from going down the tubes. Let’s do it together.

But you can also help yourself! Here’s some things to avoid.

• What X Taught Me About Y
No one believes that O Brother, Where Art Thou? taught you five valuable lessons about engineering.

• Transparent Startup Boosting Designed Basically To Get Ev Williams’ Attention
Spoiler: he isn’t reading.

• Open Letters
Don’t do them. They’re not reading.

• Open Letters that were on your Facebook
No, Joyce Maynard. Don’t shame people on your Facebook and then put it on Medium. (Best of all, the response from the person she was concern-trolling was SILENCE.)

• Sophomore Year Libertarian Rantings
Yeah. Bring your A game, Libertarians. But don’t bunt.

• CrossFit
IDK what is the deal with this but CrossFit does monster traffic on Medium and everyone thinks it’s hilarious.

• Developer Incoherence
Buddy, what? Words are like code. You have to put them in the right order for things to work. Maybe the great thing about Medium is that it’s going to teach developers that writing is actually sometimes hard.

• Proposing Totally Sensible-Sounding Solutions To Common Problems But Actually When You Look At It The Solution Is Totally Insane And Not Ever Going To Happen
I see you.

• Livejournalling
Meep.

• Thought Cataloging
Baby, sugar, lamb, take it to Thought Catalog. They’ll actually pay you. Maybe they’ll even save you from your busted thesis. (Probably not though!)

• Malcolm Gladwell Light
Or something???

• Unfinished Stubs Of Ideas
This was going somewhere. Would have been nice.

• Calling The World Is Flat Your “Game-Changer.”
Oh pussycat, no.

Together we can make the Internet better. The Internet is like the environment. I learned that from watching Cocoon. No wait. Maybe it was Ghost? Anyway, it can be polluted irreparably. Let’s preserve the Internet for our children and our children’s children, so that they have something also to blog upon. Thank you.

★★ Foliage threw a yellow glow down into the sunken driveway on the building’s west side. It was time for the wool coat over the hooded jacket over a sweater. The wind chopped the dark Hudson into irregular whitecaps. Even the two-year-old, after weeks of fighting off warm layers, confessed that he was cold. Downtown, on the sunny side of the street, leaves twinkled on the branches and sailed away on the gusts. Enough prettiness, and enough of the wind. The rest of the day could stay outside the windows till the heavy, early dark came down.

“Health nuts are guzzling coconut water faster than aging palm trees can produce it”

Remember that weird period about a decade back when it seemed like all the good music was coming from Canada? God, that was embarrassing. Now that things have shaken out and it seems as if all the good music comes from nowhere I guess I am glad at least that these guys are still plugging along. [Via]

“The force of the report comes simply from assembling all the data in one place; the summary reads like a laundry list of the apocalypse — flood, drought, disease, starvation. Climate change, the group noted, will reduce yields of major crops by up to two per cent each decade for the remainder of this century. (One of the reasons for this is that heat waves, which will become more common as the world warms, depress the yields of staple crops like corn.) Since the global population is projected to grow throughout the century — to eight billion by 2025, nine billion by 2050, and almost eleven billion by 2100 — this is obviously rather bad news. At the same time, the incidence of flooding, drought, and general weather-related mayhem will increase, and already-vulnerable populations will be pushed closer to the edge, or, quite possibly, over it. Conflict is bound to ensue.”
 — It must be nice to have been born at the beginning of the baby boom, winning a chronological lottery that put you in position for an opening up of personal, political and economic opportunities unprecedented in the whole of human history and allowing you to reap the benefits of all the suffering and struggle that preceded you while giving you the means to establish a domination of popular culture so pervasive and long-lasting that even your children’s children are unable to escape it, plus you get to die before all the real problems actually make themselves more than an inconvenient thought experiment. I suppose the rest of us will just sit here while the bill comes due. (Although who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky too.) Anyway, I guess what I’m wondering is if it’s too late to prepare for climate change do we still need to recycle? Because if it’s not going to make much of a difference I’ve got better things to do with my time.