It’s nearly April and still there’s nothing like hope. There’s not enough sun, and the way my bedroom window faces a wall, a big brick wall, I’ve just been keeping this fluorescent monster on above me, at all times, humming and gaudy through all of my hours on this MacBook. I’m searching desperately for the magical link, to get the least fuzzy, least choppy, and least commercial-addled illegal stream of a pro basketball game. My team the Bulls is in even worse sorts than I am. I’d tell you about it, if it didn’t completely debilitate my soul.
I smoke as much weed as I can find, but I can’t find much.
And on the twenty-fifth floor of that skyscraper where they pay me, that giant concrete Kafka punchline, the air I breathe is brought to me more by cost-cutting corporate ventilation than it is by the mother-loving earth.
An attorney I work for asks me, ‘John, can you find file XXXXX?’
I tell him I don’t know that file.
He asks me when I started working for the firm.
I tell him last summer, and he realizes that I wasn’t there when he started that file.
‘No,’ he says. ‘This would’ve been back when you were still enjoying your life.’
And then we are both laughing painful daggers; we are both so hysterical, in the face of our oppression.
And in that last episode of ‘GIRLS’ there’s a happy ending, and the absurd falseness of it just makes happiness seem that much more illusory.
But if the Bulls were good—if only the Bulls were good. If Derrick Rose were playing, making fools of giants and mercenaries, lifting the prole spirits to absurd heights, then all would be well.
‘Listen,’ I say to my lover, in the midst of one of our struggles. ‘Listen, honey: as soon as D-Rose comes right back, everything will be good and well.’
When she explains to me that she doesn’t care about that, I start wondering if we’re all aliens.
‘Well, listen,’ I say to her, ‘perhaps we need to find a new planet. Perhaps we need to begin building a utopia of a higher righteousness. Or perhaps we just need to imagine the world through a different lens.’
So we do. We wipe off all the dusty surfaces, run sponges over the bathtub’s acrylic, put all of the dishes into the washer, dispose of half-eaten frozen pizza lying in the sun. We put blackberries into yogurt, and squeeze lime into it, before chopping up onions and peppers, to go into the pan, frying with the sausages.
We walk to the sales-clothing store on the nearby street, and look at each other, trying on different existences.
I could be a Pink man, in this iteration. The world could be an altogether less taxing place for me, in this worldview conceived of anew. I could be free of my enslavement to Chicago Bulls ownership, imagined cultural integrity, and Corporate Law. I could be the kind of person who hyper-aims to get drunk on the weekends, and is always satisfied with life, when he nails the target.
My lover is trying on a sweatshirt, the kind a high-school sells to it students, and it’s making her look less critical and worldly too—and she knows it with that face she’s making.
We could pursue regularized inebriation so, so regularly, together. With no other thoughts inside our heads, we could have orgasms lasting for eras.
John Wilmes is a writer and professor in Chicago, and the author of Jad's Dad Milo, available at Mouse House Books.
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