ANDY
April dying was the best thing that could have happened to my career.
Was it the worst thing that ever happened to me? Yes. Was it the thing in my life that I regretted more than anything else? Also yes.
But!
I also got to be massively respected, well paid, and powerful, and, yes, I liked it. It was also annoying. I felt boxed in by my own brand, and I hated watching people who were more reactionary or radical getting traction with ideas that would totally get me in trouble. And, yeah, I worked a lot. But also I didn’t want to take breaks. I wanted to feel good, and having the world listen to me felt good.
I did everything I could to say useful things without getting myself in hot water. It resulted in tweets like these:
Andy Skampt
@AndySkampt
If you can do it in one human lifetime, it’s not a big enough goal.
293 replies 3.4K retweets 9.3K likes
@AndySkampt
Nothing has ever been done alone, or, if it was, it was immediately forgotten. We’re only here for each other.
104 replies 6.9K retweets 14.8K likes
@AndySkampt
Watching “Pose” on Netflix and it’s amazing. I’m done with antiheroes, I love watching families love each other.
1.3K replies 1.4K retweets 4.7K likes
I was getting comfortable with this persona. But I was also noticing that it worked less and less as time went on. I knew what was getting the most attention on Twitter, and it was angry stuff. But I couldn’t do angry stuff because my audience expected me to make them feel better, not worse.
At the same time, there was plenty to be angry about. The Carls hadn’t ended the housing crisis, or student loans, or medical debt. America still had mass shootings. In fact, with people losing a clear path and the economy losing steam, all of these things seemed worse than ever. I wanted to make things better, and sometimes that meant I wanted to shout hot takes into the void. But I also had no idea if that would actually help.
If I was at the top of my game, I probably would have resented The Book of Good Times coming in to take over my life, but I wasn’t.
My new mass was nothing compared to the gravitational pull of that book. I think I knew that, once I opened it, I was going to lose my agency. There was a part of me that wanted nothing more than that—the simplicity of tumbling down April’s gravity well again, not the complexity of real, important decisions, constant uncertainty, and existential dread.
Down I tumbled! Why not buy $100,000 in a stock I had never heard of?! If you get tens of billions of views, you make tens of millions of dollars. So a hundred grand was a lot, but bizarrely enough, it was no longer a lot.
I did what any self-respecting twenty-something would do. I called my dad, and he told me that I absolutely should not invest in strange unknown stocks. He was appalled at the entire idea. I think he felt a little like he’d failed as a father if I thought that buying stock in a random tiny company was a good idea. I hadn’t even told him the tip was delivered by a book I found in the trash.
But then, like any self-respecting twenty-something, I ignored him.
IGRI itself didn’t look suspicious. It was a company that had once been big enough to be publicly traded but that had gotten smaller and smaller until it fell off the major exchanges, but no one was interested in coming in and buying the whole thing. The company, in this case, was a cobalt-mining company that had mines in Canada. At one point it had been massively productive and valuable. But as IGRI mined what it had, the stock price dropped.
Why would someone want me to buy this stock?
The obvious answer was that someone was trying to manipulate the price of a penny stock. Like, convince a bunch of people that a book could read their future, get them to go on a date with a nice girl, and then tell them to buy the stock and sell it four days later. Except the fraudster sells it three days later and walks away with ten times more cash than they went in with.
None of this actually mattered, though, because this wasn’t about money or stocks or magic books; it was about April being alive. I wanted so badly for the mystery to end. I wanted my friend back. I wanted the piece of me that I’d lost put back so desperately that I would happily throw $100,000 into the hole of that hope.
Afterward, to distract myself from constantly checking the stock and researching cobalt, I watched video essays from a few of my favorite YouTubers and stressed out about when and what to text Bex. I was and am a firm believer that you shouldn’t wait to text someone after a first date. I will always be who I am, and I am not a person who thinks strategically about relationships. So I texted to tell her that I had a really great time. And then immediately after that I sent the best joke I could think of.
They swept that stage so much, but I feel like it never got any cleaner.
Her reply came in a half hour later.
Honestly, Andy, I sweep at work every day and I am not ashamed to admit that today it was a bit of a dance for me. Thanks for a great night.
I tried to not respond immediately, but I failed.
I’m headed out of town tomorrow, but would it be OK for me to call you when I get back?
Yup. ttys.
She
