It’s 4:32 PM, and the $472 you made from sweating your balls off this week just got deposited in your account, so it’s time to reunite with the only person in life that’s been there for you more than your Mom, the sleazy guy that runs the liquor store a town away. Whenever you walk in there to buy a plastic fifth, two tins of Zyn, and a rack of whatever beer makes you feel whole again, this man looks at you the way golden retrievers look at their owners in those videos of troops returning home from tours in Afghanistan. As you’re loading the back of your car, you look down at your belly and realize that you should probably get a workout in before you turn into a “nah that’s alright I don’t want to go in” guy when your friends are all swimming on the fourth of July. So you text some people and organize a basketball game that will have more white shooters than a CNN segment about the NRA.
One of the most depressing things about getting old is hearing the phrase man, I gotta stop vaping four times during a game to eleven that lasted over twenty minutes. Not only are you worse at basketball than you used to be, but the dream of being scouted by Tom Thibodeau while shooting around your school’s gym and living out the plot to Like Mike is dead. You’re not the professor; you’re just a guy that’s been congratulating people on Linkedin as they perform menial tasks at internships their uncles got them. After leaving the court with a statline that reads something along the lines of:
2-7
3 rebounds
3 turnovers
2 assists
You go home where you walk into a kitchen full of women that look like Megyn Kelly aged ten years. This is a nightmare. You are berraded with questions about your love life, future, and opinion on liberal professors by a group of middle-aged women that use books about other women who escaped tyrannical governments as an excuse to drink 4 glasses of wine before 6:30 at night. You’re getting peppered like Phil Mickelson from the media, and your Mom is at the point where she’s bragging about your brother because your accomplishments are so barren, but you find a hole in the coverage and sprint upstairs where you shower and watch the video of Biden falling off the bike for the ten-thousandth time.
You don’t know where you’re going tonight, but hopefully, it involves a pool, drinking eleven beers, and losing money on college baseball bets that some kid with 6,000 followers on Twitter proclaimed as locks. With a friend’s parents at their second house for the weekend, something opened up, but just as you’re about to leave, your PS5 controller starts whispering in your ear. You never play with me anymore, I miss your hands on me. You quickly get yourself out of this tempting situation and head to your car.
Your night is mediocre at best. It involves four guys in a room displaying each other’s Tinder matches and ends with you glued to a YouTube video your one friend thinks is funny, but the rest of the room is too high to understand. Life in the big city.
