Thank you for downloading this Touchstone eBook. Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Touchstone and Simon & Schuster. C H T S U LICK ERE O IGN P or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com Introduction Warning Signs The Simple Dog Motivation The God of Cake The Helper Dog Is an Asshole Depression Part One Depression Part Two Lost in the Woods Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving The Hot Sauce Debacle This Is Why I’ll Never Be an Adult The Parrot Dinosaur (The Goose Story) Thoughts and Feelings Dogs’ Guide to Understanding Basic Concepts The Party Identity Part One Identity Part Two Acknowledgments About Allie Brosh For Scott. What now, fucker? Also for Mom, Dad, Kaiti, Laurie, Duncan, Sarah, Joey, and Lee. You’re all great. It seems like there should be some sort of introduction to this. Here is a re-creation of a drawing I did when I was five: It’s a guy with one normal arm and one absurdly fucking squiggly arm. If you look really closely, you can see the normal arm under the squiggly one. What you can’t see is that in the original, the squiggly arm continues for the entire length of a roll of butcher paper. It started on one end and then just kept going until I ran out of paper. I remember drawing it and thinking, This is insane . . . I can’t even believe how long this guy’s arm is. If I had not run out of paper, who knows what would have happened. In its entirety, the arm takes up more paper than this book. Theoretically, I could have cut the roll of butcher paper into squares, stapled them together, and created Squiggly Arm Book. I didn’t, though. I considered that possibility, but, in the end, I decided I couldn’t realistically expect to get away with it. When I was ten years old, I wrote a letter to my future self and buried it in my backyard. Seventeen years later, I remembered that I was supposed to remember to dig it up two years earlier. I looked forward to getting a nostalgic glimpse into my childhood—perhaps I would marvel at my own innocence or see the first glimmer of my current aspirations. As it turns out, it just made me feel real weird about myself. The letter was scrawled in green crayon on the back of a utility bill. My ten- year-old self had obviously not spent much time planning out the presentation of it. Most likely, I had simply been walking through the kitchen and suddenly realized that it was entirely possible to write a letter to my future self. The overwhelming excitement of this realization probably caused me to panic and short-circuit, making me unable to locate proper writing implements. There was no time for that kind of thing.