The Wrong Way to Save Your Life Essays

But clearly bars were just where I did have to do research, not just for Let’s Go, but so I would understand the human condition. The longer I lived, the more evident it became that going out and getting drunk were the things people cared the most about. They thought you were putting on an act if you said you were more interested in anything else. Even Let's Go, which was written by people who supposedly cared about human achievement, was always implying that museums were somewhere you went to seem high-minded, and that the thing that was actually important and desirable was knowing which were the right bars and clubs.

Nothing happened, of course. He was my roommate. He was my friend. He didn’t like me like that. It would have gotten weird. I’d been hurt before. Everything ends badly. Breakups are awful. Divorce requires paperwork. Juliet dies in the end. The iguana smelled. I hated metal. What if he didn’t feel the same and I had to stop imagining us together, the video on demand as I fell asleep at night? “Uncertainty is better,” wrote Chekhov. “At least then there’s hope.” What if we did get together and I hurt him? I didn’t want to hurt him. I loved him. So much so that I’d bug him about the cigarettes and he’d tell me to back off and I’d quote statistics about lung-related death and he’d say we could all go any time, wiped out by a bus, a train, an explosion like lightning, a heart attack on a mountain, a tumor in the brain, the skin, the breast, by your own hand when it’s all too much or an AR-15 in a school or park or street so who gives a shit about a cigarette, what’s healthy or right or fair? There are so many reasons not to try. They all start with I’m scared.