It's the year 2000 and the dot-com bubble just popped. Mike—a 22-year-old high school dropout turned hot-shot web developer—is broke, mysteriously sick, and convinced he might actually die on a futon in Brooklyn. Then Sean shows up: his new, punk, internet best friend—the kind of friend who can make the apocalypse feel like a hangout. Drinking until the sun comes up on the Brooklyn Promenade, they do what any two dumb, broke geniuses do when the world falls apart: talk shit, laugh too hard, and turn Mike's severance into a plan—hit the road, point a camera at the wreckage, and document the end of the internet. What follows is a raw, unfiltered solo journey across America, fueled by a habitual penchant for drug-induced debauchery and the desperate hope that somewhere out there, life makes more sense than it does in a fluorescent-lit office building. Along the way, Mike visits comedians and poets, influencers and drug mules—crashing on borrowed couches, talking his way out of trouble (or into it), and ricocheting through new cities and new tribes. As Mike keeps outrunning feelings, consequences—even cops—the road makes one question painfully clear: when the money dries up and the future stops glittering, who are you without the job title, the parties, and the act? And just when he thinks he's found his place and his people, 9/11 happens and changes the world forever. How You Wish You Could Leave is gritty, unpolished, and unapologetically male—told in the blunt, politically incorrect voice of the late 90s and early 2000s, before the internet learned to self-censor. It's about the unwritten rules of being a guy's guy—where loyalty is everything but saying how you feel is off the table. Until suddenly it isn't. Expect a fast, funny, no-filter memoir that makes you laugh your ass off while the heavy stuff sneaks in through the side door—for Gen X'ers and Millennials who remember life before smartphones, and anyone who wants to know what the turn of the millennium was really like. Edited by punk legend Legs McNeil.