I bet Bill Gates has a jetpack. I bet he’s not sharing.
I bet Bill Gates has a jetpack. I bet he’s not sharing.
I could live in this cushy chair forever and never be sad.
We’ve got money and fine weed and a big TV.
All the video games that we used to play
when we were children. All the TV shows
from our ten-year-old Saturday mornings.
I could live my whole life
and never grow up.
Would that be enough?
Let’s live off our privilege.
Let’s never help or hurt anybody.
We’ve got it good. Let’s sit in our chairs
so we can appreciate how good we’ve got it.
It doesn’t take much money to be happy
if you’re a small person. And we’re small.
And we’ve got more than enough cash
for personal happiness. It would be enough.
‘Enough’ sounds like a foreign word,
a pretentious word, like ennui or schadenfreude.
‘What you’re experiencing sounds like what the English
call enough. It means “such a quantity
that your demands are met fully.”
When you sit in a chair and eat waffles,
you are feeling enough.’
Stuck-up children in France
putting on shorts and sandals and socks
because enough is the hip emotion of 2011.
Enough with the big words and the beauty,
all we wanted was happiness,
which we found in this small beige room.
How about every Friday night,
let’s smoke one for the unlucky people
who couldn’t coast like we’re coasting.
Keep them in our prayers.
Maybe one day they’ll be happy.
Until then we’ll pray for them,
mourn that they could not be saved.
We could not save them.
Even if we tried it would not be enough.
We could work, perhaps, to save some of them,
just a few, but that doesn’t seem like enough.
We don’t even know what to save them from,
or who they are, and if we tried to learn more
our learning would not be enough.
Maybe if we spent a lifetime applying ourselves
we could find an answer, like a magic silver bullet
to shoot all the werewolves, but that’s a long shot,
and none of us know if, after decades of sacrifice
and expense and unhappiness, it would be enough.
The world is an unhappy place
and nobody has what they want
except us. Let’s sit in our chairs
and play all the old games.
Let’s try to hold on
to happiness.
“Want to see Barnum & Bailey when they come into town?”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
“Yeah, so? What’s the problem with that? Are you allergic to peanuts or something?”
“No…”
“Well, good. Because I want to eat peanuts when we go to the circus.”
End-of-finals roommates #1: Upon unlocking the Pokemon Center song in Brawl, we promptly locked our arms at our sides and pumped them back and forth, mimicking how the guy in the Game Boy game does it.
End-of-finals roommates #2: There were five Happy Hippoes in the box. We each ate two. Then we vowed to stay up until 3AM, split the fifth in two, and wish each other a Happy Three-in-the-Morning.
End-of-finals roommates #3: I pressed the pause button. “You’ve thrown me off my beat,” he said. “I’m sorry,” I said, “You’ve thrown off the emperor’s groove.” Together we yelled “Sorry…!” and mimicked the sound of a man being thrown out a window.
Tonight I had a dream where my father headbutted a man who makes milkshakes. But he headbutted the man justly.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m all right. It just bothers me how he put on such a false exterior for everyone when we first met him.”
“Of course he did. He’s an actor. He’s the director of the acting program.”
No matter how much heartbreak hurts, don’t pretend like you’re a pimp whose two hookers just got incarcerated and ask her how much she’d want to get paid for an impromptu threesome. That is what we call “bad love.”
Don Cheadle on the silver screen is such a delight that you could forgive him for the Bay of Pigs. Only you don’t have to, because he didn’t start it.
I know where all the lonely people come from. But I’m not telling.
