Things fall apart
Everything tends to decay
And so it takes a lot
To combine atoms there in such a way
There exists the lure of that darkness
That lurks around the edges of every day

It takes a lot of work
But oh baby, it’s worth it.

I just finished listening to John Hodgman’s final audiobook in his trilogy, That is All. At turns melancholic, wry, and lots of other words people use to try to sound smart, That is All is also relentlessly, inexorably bleak. That the end is coming, death awaits us all, and there is nothing we can do: this is not subtext. This is what the book is about. This is text. I knew this going in; I read the hardback. What I wasn’t expecting was the presentation: a sort-of narrative that recounts John’s travels through the last days of the world. As the book rolls on, he migrates from scene to scene, interacting with friends and strangers and feral mountain-men who irritatingly already know most of the trivia he tries to tell them and refuse to be impressed by his supercar, before ending up, alone, in his survival-brownstone, with only Paul Rudd and the disembodied, prerecorded voice of Robin Goldwasser for company. Then: Ragnarok.

The mildly dramatized rendition of “How I Became a Former Professional Literary Agent” made me weep, because it’s almost unbearably tragic, because it hits grace notes that resonante all the way back to the earliest sections of the Areas of My Expertise and because it’s a damn awesome story and I’m intensely jealous.