10/1, 3pm—Austin TX, Burnet Rd.

I met up with Jessica, my friend and frequent reporting partner, this morning for a few hours to work on things. It was the first substantial face-to-face interaction I’d had with anyone who didn’t work at an Olive Garden since Thursday. The news is still depressing, and we cover some of the most depressing parts of it, but it felt better to just say all of this stuff to someone who gets it, and can relate to your frustrations. Afterward, I had to finish a post for Texas Monthly, an explainer of the trend of robot sex brothels—one of which will be opening in Houston soon, if the city doesn’t figure out a way to outlaw it—and realized that both Google and the other people at the coffee shop, if they glanced at my laptop screen, would have a very specific idea of who I was based on the things I had been looking up.

The post felt like a break from the sort of severely depressing stuff I’ve been working on lately, until I realized mid-way through working on it that it’s not actually a different topic at all, it’s just about a different aspect of the culture that leads to what I euphemistically refer to as “#MeToo stories” when asked what I’m working on. There’s a spectrum, and all of this is on it.

But, Jesus, you didn’t open this newsletter to read about that stuff. The reason I stayed at the coffee shop to finish the post, instead of going home to write about sex robots behind closed doors like a decent human being, is because the coffee shop was on Burnet Road, and I had left the house with the intention of eating lunch at Olive Garden before I knew where the day would take me and what I would end up Googling in public. Eventually, I finished writing about robot sex brothels, and promptly exited the coffee shop to go eat. It was later than I’d expected it to be, but that was fine—the meal could serve as both lunch and dinner at that point.

I entered the restaurant, which was not busy, and went to the bar section. I sat near a TV, which was playing ESPN and the end of the Cubs/Brewers Game 163. The server was presumably busy with prep-work or some other task that people who work in restaurants try to accomplish during lulls, which was fine—the Cubs were at bat with two outs in the bottom of the 9th, down 3-1, and I was happy enough to watch Javy Baez try to keep hope alive.

Doreen, who was the server for my first meal on this Pasta Pass journey, eventually returned and, I suspect, maintained a respectful distance for the duration of Javy’s at-bat. He singled, and she asked me if I was ready to order. I was. I asked for a glass of water, salad, and a portion of rigatoni, topped with five-cheese marinara and crispy chicken. I watched Rizzo chase pitches and she returned moments later with the salad and breadsticks. I only ate a small portion of each—at some point in the near future, I suspect I’ll begin to decline them altogether on solo-visits—as Javy stole second. I allowed myself to feel a brief flash of hope, and when Rizzo slugged a fastball, I thought for a second it would be rewarded—but then it dropped in right field, and the game was over. Milwaukee wins the division, the Cubs go to a one-game wildcard tomorrow night. This isn’t 2016 anymore.

I ordered the rigatoni because I’d already had the crispy chicken with five-cheese marinara and cavatappi, and there’s basically no difference between the two, but I didn’t want to do an exact repeat this early on in the process. I feel a responsibility to someone—myself, or Doreen, or the people reading this newsletter, or somebody—to not fall into a rut when eating at the exact same restaurant dozens of times over the course of a two-month window. Which is ridiculous, of course, when you put it like that. Furthermore, it’s kind of contrary to the whole point of the experience. $100 for an all-you-can-eat pass good for months is a fair price, especially if you take advantage of it, and the marketing for the Pasta Pass likes to talk about the wide variety of combinations a person can enjoy (391 possible meals, according to Eater), if they so choose. But also: Nobody buys a pass to let them eat over and over again at the same restaurant—especially the dang Olive Garden—in order to push the envelope. The whole point of the Olive Garden is that it’s comforting. You eat there because carbs make us feel good, sauce is rich, and chicken or meatballs or crispy shrimp or those giant Italian sausage links taste good. The company understands this. “When you’re here, you’re family” is a good slogan because it conjures the image of a warm Italian grandma, which you needn’t be even a tiny bit Italian to have in your head, saying, “Oh, you should eat!” as she loads your plate with a heaping serving of a meal too large for any single person to consume in one sitting. That’s what they are trying to accomplish, and they do. It’s why the pasta pass sells out in seconds every year—there’s a novelty to it, but also a comfort. If Applebee’s offered the same sort of deal, it would probably not succeed in the same way. Ordering whole-grain linguine with creamy spinach and artichoke sauce and garden vegetables might be someone’s idea of comfort, but it’s not mine, and gamely placing the order so that I could say that I did would be a fruitless endeavor.

I asked for crispy chicken with five-cheese marinara and rotini because that is the vision of the world that the Olive Garden sells—one in which there’s nothing to prove to anyone. It is the most normal and mainstream of American restaurant chains. There’s comfort in that, and also in red sauce. It’s still warm in Austin, but it will get cooler soon, and the news will invariably get worse. Through it all, the Olive Garden will stand.