The Hours Have Arrived. Use Them.
Pull up the American Pie Reunion poster and really look at it. Same faces as the original film, twelve years older, wearing the knowledge of it in every line. You’re older now too. So is everyone you went to school with. Eventually all of you will die. This is available as a free existential service any Friday afternoon, no subscription required.
Form a troll gang. Organize, deploy, systematically destroy every post ever made on every blog from here to the edge of the internet. Leave nothing standing. Then realize this already exists everywhere and has for years. Adjust your plans accordingly.
Buy a paint-by-numbers kit. Lock the door. Don’t come out until the finished canvas looks, at minimum, passably like a Caspar David Friedrich. A lone figure in fog. A distant ruin. Something appropriately bleak. Minimum.
Download Minecraft and play it for five minutes. Then uninstall it completely. The reason doesn’t matter—the graphics, the open-ended purposelessness, the competing demands of your actual life. The outcome is the same. This is called knowing yourself.
Buy some dead fish from the market. Take them home. Observe, at some point in this process, that they are long. That they are slippery. That they have been gutted. That they have an opening at one end. That you are male. Arrive at whatever conclusion presents itself.
Paste queer-positive slogans over far-right election posters. Stand in front of polling stations and explain patiently to elderly voters that the party promising to protect traditional values does not, in fact, have their interests at heart. Do it calmly. This is civic service. Bring snacks.
Write a press release. Open with "Dear Blogger." Make sure the rest reads like it was composed by someone who has never read a blog, met a blogger, or considered why anyone would write anything on the internet for free. Nobody will read past the greeting anyway, so what comes after barely matters.
Get publicly outraged that Pokémon discriminates against disabled people because one of its moves is called Paralyze. Write extensively about it. Then drown yourself quietly and without ceremony, because you apparently inhabit a world with no more pressing problems and have arrived at the absolute floor of human concern.
Smile at the sun. Maybe it stays out longer if you’re nice to it.
Be happy. It’s the last mission and by far the hardest.