The chat is named “Taco Tuesday 🌮” and we have not eaten a taco together since Obama’s second term.
Eight things that will keep you alive for about nine days: Stuff to Buy Before Everything Goes to Shit
There are five of us. We have been in continuous contact for fourteen years, and at this point the group chat functions solely as proof of life — a low-frequency ping between five biological units confirming that each remains, technically, above ground. That’s the whole product now. We stripped male friendship down to its single load-bearing beam: I am not dead, are you dead, cool, see you never.
Here is a complete transcript of the last eleven days. A thumbs-up on a Reel nobody opened. The word “lmao” with no capital letter and no detectable amusement anywhere in the man who typed it. A photo of a brisket at 5:40 in the morning from Dave, who converted his entire personality into barbecue the week the divorce finalized and now owns a smoker worth more than his car. One period. Just a period, from Marcus, at 2 a.m. We all thumbs-upped the period. The period meant “still here.” We received it. We acknowledged it. We did not ask why a grown man was awake at two in the morning typing punctuation at four other grown men.
The protocol
We have never discussed it out loud, which is what makes it binding. Seventy-two hours of silence from any member and someone calls his mother. Not him. His mother. We will not call each other — that would be insane, that would imply something — but we all have Pete’s mom’s landline saved under “PETE MOM (ICE)” like we’re an oil rig crew.
You've read this far. The least you can do is buy the "Still Weak As Shit" tee.
This is the state of the group chat proof of life system as of this morning: Dave smokes meat at dawn and posts the evidence. Pete sends me real estate listings in towns he will never move to, which I understand to be a cry for help about his marriage, which is currently held together by a shared streaming password and a dog with a thyroid condition. Eli has been sober nine months and tells us this in no way other than posting his run times, which is somehow more vulnerable than the drinking was. Marcus sends nothing but the period. And I thumbs-up everything, because I am the group’s emotional infrastructure and the thumb is all I’ve got.
Once, in 2021, Marcus broke format. He typed four paragraphs. His dad had a mass on a scan, his therapist had just used the phrase “avoidant attachment,” and he said he missed us and didn’t know how to say it without it being weird. It was weird. We were busy not responding.
Nine minutes of nothing. Five men in five cities staring at four paragraphs of naked human need like it was a bomb on a bus. Then Pete posted a video of a raccoon falling off a roof, and the tension broke, and everyone laughed, and we never spoke of it again. Marcus’s dad is fine now. I found that out from Facebook.
I know how this sounds
My wife asked me last month if I even like these guys. And the honest answer is that I would be on a plane tonight for any one of them, no questions, no details, I’d just go — and I will not call Dave on a Tuesday to ask how he’s doing, not ever, not once, not if you paid me. Both of those are true at the same time. If you can explain that to me I’ll Venmo you forty dollars.
Eli floated using an AI to auto-reply for him so he could “stay present in the chat without the cognitive load.” We banned it immediately and unanimously, which is the most emotion any of us has expressed since the raccoon. Because a bot can post the thumb. A bot cannot be the thumb. The entire value of the thumb is that a specific forty-three-year-old man in Columbus with a bad knee and a 401(k) he’s scared to look at stopped what he was doing and pressed it.
Last night at 11:52 I was lying on the kitchen floor for reasons I’d rather not litigate, and the phone lit up. Dave. A photo of a pork shoulder. No caption.
I pressed the thumb.
Dave, if you’re reading this: 👍. That’s the message. That’s everything I have ever wanted to say to you, and I’d die before I said more.