I Might Regret This Read online

  Credits for Original Album Art:

  Anthology: Through the Years, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: photographic copyright–MCA Records; art direction and design–Christine Cano; photography–Dennis Callahan. Fake Sugar, Beth Ditto: art direction–Nicole Frantz; art direction and design–Katie Moore; photography–Mary McCartney. Give the People What They Want, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings: art direction–Ann Coombs; illustration–Fritz Aragon; photography–Kyle Dean Reinford. Marquee Moon, Television: art direction–Tony Lane; photography–Robert Mapplethorpe. Billy Breathes, Phish: cover photography by Mike Gordon, art direction by Phish. Purple Rain, Prince: photographic copyright–Warner Bros. Records Inc. and WGA International Inc.; art direction–Prince; photography–Ed Thrasher & Associates. Damn, Kendrick Lamar: photographic copyright–Aftermath Records, Interscope Records, and Top Dawg Entertainment; photography–Dave “miyatola” Free, Roberto “ret0ne” Reyes. Mental Illness, Aimee Mann: photographic copyright–Aimee Mann and Superego Records; art direction–Gail Marowitz; illustration–Andrea Dezső; photography–Sheryl Nields. My Woman, Angel Olsen: cover photo by Amanda Marsalis, design by Miles Johnson. Skeleton Tree, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: design–Hingston Studio. Let’s Dance, David Bowie: photographic copyright–David Bowie; design–Mick Haggerty; painting–Derek Boshier; photography–Greg Gorman. Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, Courtney Barnett: cover design and illustration–Courtney Barnett. Little Creatures, Talking Heads: painting–Rev. Howard Finster; design–M&Co. Breathe Me, Sia: photographic copyright–Systematic Limited; art direction, design–Blue Source; photography–Martin Gerlach.

  ________

  Copyright © 2018 by Ten Seventy Eight Productions, LLC

  Jacket illustration © Andrew Brischler

  Jacket copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: October 2018

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943209

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-1329-7 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-1328-0 (ebook)

  E3-20181024-PC-DA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  A Note on the Illustrations

  WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN?

  A LOVE LETTER

  Illustration: 1944 Love Letter

  HEARTBREAK CITY

  Illustration: Lists to Make

  RULES OF CONDUCT

  Illustration: Tom Petty Album

  Illustration: Savage Lovecast Podcast

  ASHEVILLE BED & BREAKFAST

  Illustration: B&B Breakfast Tabletop

  Illustration: Figs Before Hire

  Illustration: Asheville Kombucha

  THE BIG QUESTIONS

  Illustration: Books I Brought

  Illustration: West Wing on iPad

  MEMPHIS SLEEP STUDY

  Illustration: Beth Ditto Album

  HOW TO DRIVE FOR TEN HOURS

  Illustration: The Daily Podcast

  Illustration: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings Album

  Illustration: Television Album

  AUSTIN SHIRT TUCK

  Illustration: Topo Chico

  ON SNACKS

  Illustration: Phish Album

  Illustration: Whittington’s Turkey Jerky

  Illustration: Prince Album

  Illustration: Marfa Moon

  MARFA SLEEP STUDY

  Illustration: Friendship Bracelets

  Illustration: Word of the Day

  Illustration: Kendrick Lamar Album

  MINOR REGRETS

  Illustration: How I Built This Podcast

  Illustration: Sign for Carlsbad Bat Caves

  Illustration: Aimee Mann Album

  SANTA FE BACKLOT

  Illustration: Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

  Illustration: Angel Olsen Album

  WORKING WOMAN

  Illustration: Where Should We Begin? Podcast

  ADULT CONCERNS

  Illustration: Snacks

  Illustration: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Album

  Illustration: DIY Avocado Toast Ingredients

  UTAH

  Illustration: My Best Friend's Wedding

  Illustration: Utah Cabin Key

  Illustration: David Bowie Album

  Illustration: iPhone Map to Sedona

  SEDONA SPIRIT

  Illustration: Sedona Crystals

  Illustration: Prickly Pear Margarita

  SEDONA SLEEP STUDY

  Illustration: A Piece of Work Podcast

  BEST BAGELS

  JEROME, ARIZONA

  Illustration: Courtney Barnett Album

  WHEN AND WHERE

  Illustration: Sia Album

  PALM SPRINGS

  Illustration: Talking Heads Album

  ALL THE INCREDIBLE THINGS I DID NOT DO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCOVER MORE ABBI JACOBSON

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ABBI JACOBSON

  A Note on the Illustrations

  As I drove across the country, so much of my time alone was spent listening to music and podcasts, and I wanted to include them here in the journey. Each album or podcast encompasses part of the country, and part of my experience. Visually, I wanted to express my love for the variety of incredible album art in my own illustration style, and take the time to appreciate the full impact and thought behind the covers as well as the music. I listened to more records and podcasts than those included, but these are some of my favorites. Maybe you’ll be inclined to seek these out yourself.

  WHAT’S THE WORST THAT

  COULD HAPPEN?

  Before I make a decision, I tend to think about all the possible outcomes. I like to be prepared. This tendency unfortunately mainly includes obsessing over the ways in which things could go terribly off course, but it’s better to be informed. So, before embarking on a solo cross-country drive that I would then write about in a book, I made a list of possible worst-case scenarios. The road trip alone was terrifying, but writing about it afterward? A lot could go wrong. So, what’s the worst that could happen?

  Heinous scenarios where I’m badly hurt or die that I won’t go into.

  I adapt to eating only fast food while on the road and become someone who advocates for this new lifestyle. My politics change. I attend rallies for meat farms and even faster food. I go around encouraging people to stop caring, we’re all going to die anyways!

  I become a car fanatic. I learn the lingo, up my horsepower, and create an Instagram account just for my cars. I become the young Jay Leno.

  After having not spoken to anyone for three week
s, I lose my voice completely. I have to find a voice double to dub in my voice on every acting project, and one day, while on the subway home from work, I break down because I realize I’ll never become the singer I always dreamed.

  I don’t make it to Los Angeles. I take a wrong turn and end up in a small town somewhere in the middle of New Mexico. My car runs out of gas, so I have to stay the night in the local motel. While wandering around town the next day, I stumble upon a little shack and see a “For Sale” sign out front. I buy it and decide that this is my new life. I meet a lady bartender when I go to her bar alone and play The The on the jukebox. She likes that band too and we spend the night together. She moves in almost immediately. Typical. I start to carve wood after seeing a local artisan carving wood in his garage and I become his apprentice. I’ve always wanted to try carving wood. We start the New Mexican chapter of the Competitive Dual Wood Carving Association (CDWCA for short) and beat anyone within a hundred-mile radius in the Annual Southwestern Carvers Competition (ASCC). Also, is dual wood carving a thing? Shouldn’t it be? I die next to my bartender, content, in our bed that I carved myself.

  I get picked apart because driving across the country isn’t the best thing for the environment. Or because my almond consumption is exhausting water supplies, or anything else I’ve done or written about in this collection that is bad for the earth. I know. I know, I know. I’m a shit and I’m sorry. But what about the fact that half the country eats a fucking cheeseburger two times a week? What about that undeniable imprint and impact on the climate? We’re all monsters, including me and my almonds.

  Everyone will be like, learn to draw hands already!

  People read the book and think, “What is this crap? A privileged white woman writes about how she’s sad on her three-week vacation? Not for me.” I am those things, and I did exactly that. I’m in no way denying how completely insane it is that I get to take off work for three weeks and drive around the country and then write about it…as more work. My life is bizarre and confusing to me as well.

  Even though the book will be copyedited and proofread, my terrible grammar and lack of sophisticated vocabulary will shine through.

  No one buys the book! If no one buys the book, the publisher could make me buy all the copies and I’ll have to fill my apartment with books. I guess I could create furniture out of the books, piling them up like a sofa. I could throw pillows on top. I’ve had some time to think about this, and I could really make it work. Maybe my home, with its furniture completely built from my failed, unbought books, would make it into Architectural Digest? They’d come and take pictures and run a whole article about it. Who knows what could happen then!?

  I’ll get called out for not listening to the right albums, for playing the wrong podcasts, for not queuing up the most perfect playlist for the entire trip…I did my best.

  All the pages somehow get numbered incorrectly!

  I write about what it was like for me to fall in love with a woman and how I was clobbered when it ended and then I get banished from Hollywood! I’ll never be the starlet I’ve always dreamed of, falling in love with Prince Charming on screen. FUCK THAT BULLSHIT. I can fall in love with Prince Charming or Princess Charming because Hollywood is changing. Anyone who only wants to watch the standard narrative better start collecting VHS tapes, because we’re changing things. I want to be a part of telling real, more diverse love stories, ones I haven’t seen on screen before.

  That ultimately I’m admitting that I’m scared of being alone. But aren’t we all? Isn’t that…the main thing? Aren’t we all secretly terrified that we’re not understood, not seen, not loved, not wanted? Okay, great, cleared that up.

  A LOVE LETTER

  In February of 2013, I received a love letter from 1944.

  I had been out in Los Angeles for a few weeks, compiling the writers’ room for Broad City and gearing up to start Season 1. I sublet my apartment in Greenwich Village to a friend of a friend while I was away, a sweet guy who watered my plant (hard T) and collected my mail. When I returned, I trudged up the stairs of my third-story walk-up with my luggage to find a large, neatly stacked pile on the kitchen counter. I’d never seen a few weeks’ worth of mail at once, and immediately got excited—I love mail, and with a stack like this, the chances of me getting something good were higher. I’m talking real mail—a handwritten note or postcard from a friend, a small care package from my mom or dad or grandparent.

  Real mail leaves an impression because it’s an event—the surprise of receiving it, the examining of the envelope, and the reveal when you open it. It’s tactile and ritualistic. When I was about seven, my grandparents accidentally sent my brother and me a postcard from their trip to London with two punks in leather jackets holding up their middle fingers straight to camera—we teased them about it for years. My other grandfather was a sort of mail connoisseur—he wrote me letters all throughout college; sometimes the letter would be covered in stickers, sometimes there’d be cash slipped inside, and other times there’d be a magnet his bank gave him for free. When I was away at overnight camp each summer, he’d send me care packages with fake cardboard bottoms he fashioned himself—he owned an Army and Navy Store, so he was often “fashioning things himself.” There was always a letter included in the package, resting on top of the boring packs of sports socks or Hanes T-shirts (to throw the counselors off), with instructions on how to pry open the perfectly fitted piece of cardboard he’d cut with an X-Acto knife. Underneath the fake bottom was neatly arranged candy and prank toys for my entire bunk. I loved finding that hidden loot. But it almost didn’t matter what was inside the package, the act of receiving that loving gesture, directly from him to me, was enough. Now sending or receiving real, handwritten correspondence is like owning a classic car; it feels more thoughtful, curated, something you just want to run your hands along, but ultimately, it’s no longer the most efficient way to drive.

  Even owning stamps seems bizarre these days. Imagine going to grab brunch with friends and someone says, “Hold up a sec, I have to pop into the bodega and grab some stamps.” Everyone would be like: “For what?” “Bodegas have stamps?” “Also, what are stamps?” I don’t think you’d even make it to brunch if they stopped to drop the letter in a mailbox. “You can use those blue things on the sidewalk!?” “I thought those were Banksys!?” We order more shit online than ever before and constantly get packages sent to us directly from the huge conglomerates taking over the world, but the thought of corresponding via snail mail with the people closest to us is absurd. What is happening to us?

  The efficiency and speed of email and texting is something I obviously take part in and use, almost constantly, but the connection between us feels altered now. Like we never have to give more than part of ourselves when talking to anyone in any situation. We abbreviate, we rush delivery, we unsubscribe, we edit ourselves. When I was in college and communicating through social media was starting to really take off, for the first time, you could connect immediately with everyone you’ve ever met and anyone you haven’t yet with one drunken click. Yearning for something more substantial, I did a project where I sent handwritten letters to twenty strangers in twenty different cities all over the country, to test what would happen. I found them randomly in the white pages, and shared something personal with each of them, a story about myself that was in some way associated with where they lived. I included another envelope (stamped already) with my address and asked them to write back sharing something of themselves with me. Would a connection be made? Would they, too, appreciate the long-lost art of letter-writing? Would this be the beginning of lifelong friendships and paper cuts (from opening so many envelopes)!? No, it wouldn’t. One person wrote back. A teacher and soap maker who had gone to art school and appreciated my curiosity. I’d written her about my experience at a restaurant in the Bay Area called Burma Superstar, and how my dad and I didn’t order, but rather let the waiter bring out whatever he thought was best. I told her about how I’d nev
er done that before and how it was one of the most delicious meals of my entire life. She sent me back a short, sweet note about the birth of her two children and how those days were her most memorable, her most remarkable. And that she too loved Burma Superstar. The experiment didn’t go exactly as I’d hoped, but that one letter was enough for me. A small, meaningful connection with a stranger in San Francisco, for no reason at all. So, it would make sense then, if you believe in destiny (jury’s still out!), that a lost, seventy-year-old letter would end up with me.

  Los Angeles had been thrilling—but also overwhelming, and I was excited to be back in New York. I sifted through my pile of mail, relieved to be home, relieved to be doing anything mundane in my space, but disappointed as it seemed to be the usual suspects, junk mail and bills. More specifically, it was mostly advertisements for stuff I didn’t need, stuff I didn’t want, or stuff I couldn’t afford, a casual reminder of exactly where I was in my life: Coupons for Buy Buy Baby? Nope. AARP membership information? I’ll pass for now. A catalog for Bose sound systems? Thank you, but my studio apartment with French doors (fancy) leading directly into my…BED does not require any speakers as the square footage is so small the audio leaking from my headphones does the trick. That’s how the Realtor should have sold it—who needs room for a sofa when it’s so easy to fill the space with music?

  I saved the Con Ed bill, the Design Within Reach (if your arm is a mile long) catalog as décor porn, and the Bed Bath & Beyond coupons for good measure—I had to stock up on trash bags to dump all this junk mail, so I might as well get 20 percent off. But then, just as I was about to toss the rest, an envelope caught my eye. I’d never seen one like this: an eight-by-ten envelope that was from the post office, like THE postal service, with a transparent window on the front that you could see through. Inside, there was a smaller, yellowed-with-age envelope with old-timey cursive handwriting. Not to put cursive in a category, but it was grandparent cursive. It’s different, it’s thoughtful, it’s beautiful. They were taught to write more formally than we are now, and even though I remember practicing cursive as a kid, tracing the letters on worksheet pages, no one cared. There was no follow-through with handwriting. Am I from the last generation to even trace those cursive letters? Are children still taught handwriting?! I imagine kids nowadays come into school and set up mini cubicles, adjust their standing desks and writing tablets, everyone jacked up on five-hour energy shots, checking their social media in the middle of math class, taking selfies while their hologram teacher goes on about fractions in the background. I clearly don’t have children. I’m jumping ahead (there aren’t hologram teachers, right?), but handwriting feels almost ancient while we download and update by rote to the latest versions and systems and software. Everything is on screens now, and it all feels so immediate, and so fleeting. The more we rely on intangible pixels floating around, the harder it is to pinpoint what is real. This constant connection is distant, and actually, disconnected.