Ten Little Missions
We’ll all die, so get that settled first. But the weekend’s still there, and weekends are when things happen—some on purpose, most because you’re bored and the internet’s given you ideas that sound good at two in the morning.
You could waste eight hours at Gamescom standing in line for Call of Duty. Write to HBO. Specifically HBO—not MTV, not Fox, definitely not some German network—demanding they make a show about bloggers. They won’t respond. But there’s something good about that pure futility. Tell a little kid the world ends in four months, give him a cookie, don’t explain anything.
Get high and paint yourself the way Brian Lewis Saunders did, over and over until your face stops being your face and starts being something closer to drowning. Send weird pictures to strangers online. Buy a wrecked submarine and disappear underwater. Go around signing things that aren’t yours, then act like you’re doing the owner a favor. Find an eating contest and see how much potato salad you can force down before it stops being food.
The stupid moves are easier. Call the girl from third grade and ask if she wants to come over and help with homework. Pretend there’s still something there. There isn’t. But the reaching is the thing, I guess. Write down who you think about when you’re alone, post it somewhere public. Hannah. Someone else. Everyone does it. There’s a whole website for people doing exactly this. It’s darkly funny how we’re all the same—identical in our loneliness, reaching for the same ghost.
But you’ll probably just sleep until noon and let Saturday happen to you. Same result either way.