I shuffled back to the disgusting pink carpet, lifted it up again, and carefully picked up the book.

“The Book of Good Times,” said the cover.

I took it back to the truck and started reading.

Do not tell anyone about this. Do not post an Instagram story of this or tweet it or call a friend and share it. This is a magic book, but its magic only works for you, and it only works if no one else knows. It won’t always make sense, but it knows more than you. So unless I tell you differently, clam up, buttercup. Let’s get straight to what you want to know.

You’re safe, for now. I’ve made sure of that. Sorry about the nonsense at Cowtown, you don’t have to worry about Fish for a little while.

Whenever I thought about the Cowtown nonsense for too long, it got too weird too fast. Someone who was running this RG must have known where I was and that I had gotten a bunch of money out of an ATM. Either that or they had been watching me. And then they mobilized a bunch of players to come for me? I only thought it was possible because it had happened. But this! This book was even more unsettling. I felt like stopping reading right there, but my eyes caught the next line, and it pulled me in like a fishing net.

You’re on the right track. You got this far on your own, but now you need to do the hardest thing yet. You need to wait. You need to go back to your Airbnb and look after your potato. You need to have Derek and his family over for dinner. You need to stop looking at the ground and start looking at the sky.

I know that stepping back from this search will be hard, and why would you take my word for it? I’m just a book that was under a soggy carpet. But that’s where I needed to be for you to find me right now. Maybe I could tell you a story that would make you listen to me. I don’t know that you’ll like hearing it, but I don’t know how else to make you listen.

How about this:

When you were a kid, you were afraid of wooden furniture. Not, like, furniture that had wood in it, but the ornate carved stuff that your parents had in just one room in your home. The rest of the house was modern, with stone countertops and metal-edged corners, one of which is how you got that scar above your lip. Weird then that the furniture that scared you was the rounded, curving, hand-carved hardwoods of that one fancy room. Was it because you knew that room was only for adults? Or because that room was where you found out your grandmother was dying? I don’t know.

But when you were eleven or twelve, too old, really, for this, you found something out. You were at school and admitted to a friend that you never liked sitting in the school’s wood chairs, and she told you that was silly because wood is just trees.

That’s when you found out that the wood from trees was what wood furniture was made out of. You knew that trees were made of wood and furniture was made of wood, but you thought they were just named after each other, not the same thing. And that’s when you stopped being afraid of wood.

I knew what was coming next. Tears were building up. I had spent months pretending that hope and knowledge were the same thing, but they weren’t. I kept reading, despite my tears, pressing the book into my lap to keep my hands from shaking.

You told that story to your girlfriend one night because she was scared. Do you even remember what it was that she was afraid of? The first day of an internship? An upcoming meeting with a professor? You probably don’t remember. But I bet you remember telling the story, because it was funny, and you laughed together, and there wasn’t any lesson. There was just the vulnerability of sharing something from your past. The story helped, like you knew it would.

You used to be afraid of wooden furniture until you found out it was made of trees. I don’t know how many people know that, but I do know that only April knew about that conversation you had, and that even she wouldn’t share it unless she had to.

I know that this is going to feel wrong to you, but you got here too soon. You need to go home, make some tea, leave the cable guy alone, and then, in three weeks, you need to come back here—back to the service area of the Wolton Motor Inn—and then the story will start up again.

The rest of the book was blank. I was physically shaking. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t do anything. I just sat in the truck for an hour and cried. And then I drove back to my Airbnb and found, lifting a clump of dirt from out of the pot, the tiny sprout of a potato plant. I flicked the dirt off of it and touched the leaf with my finger, like I was afraid I might break it.

Global Recession Looms

Associated Press

Economists have been left guessing at the root causes of the continued economic slump. Consumer spending, labor participation, and wages have all either decreased or stagnated over the past six months. “What the data are showing is that people are just less interested in spending money now. You could say it’s an economic phenomenon, but I think it is broader than that,” said David Sanderson, senior analyst at UBS. “There’s no way to stimulate an economy that people simply don’t seem interested in participating in.”

ANDY

Every day, I read news stories about people whose retirement accounts were dropping just as they needed the money the most. Meanwhile, the book had me dodging every drop and snagging every gain.

I had a massive soapbox to speak from, sudden and dramatically increasing wealth, and apparently a girlfriend. But no matter what, our minds find reasons to be frustrated. My mind was no exception. Here’s what I couldn’t stop focusing on.

Radicalization follows fear and insecurity, and as dissatisfaction grew, fewer and fewer people were interested in my nuanced, chill takes. I had to live up to my brand and to April’s legacy, but more and more I felt like I was just being told all of the things I couldn’t do or say.

At the same time, I had to watch as people with more radical views got a bigger and bigger slice of the conversation. One day I watched two videos back-to-back, one about how wealthy societies inevitably fall to outsiders who have had to live through difficulty and thus value human lives less that was barely veiled xenophobia and the next about how wealth inequality only ever ended with violent revolution and that we needed to be ready for that revolution. Both videos had over ten million views and they were both only days old.

Even with a magical book telling me how to get rich, I felt like I was on a fast path to irrelevancy.

I was watching The Thread videos every day, which was something, considering that he only published one every week or two. All I could think was that I could never say half of what he was saying without needing to completely restructure my brand and let a ton of people down. I was supposed to be a voice of reason, but being reasonable was quickly going out of style.

And so, one day, I just sent a tweet.

@TheThread, I’d love to talk. [email protected].

About twenty minutes later I received an email from [email protected] that said only “confirmation that this is me coming on Twitter in five minutes” and then, five minutes after that, The Thread’s Twitter account tweeted “hastily sanctioned foul.”

After the tweet, I emailed The Thread.

Subject: I Like Your Content

Hi, I’ve been following your channel since launch, and I’ve loved watching it grow and succeed. Your ideas are excellent, your additions to this conversation are deeply necessary. I think this is only the beginning of your influence, and I am somewhat envious of your ability to reach an audience without tying your face or name to the content.