A man with twisted dreadlocks and a shark tattoo on his neck gives you a $50 tip and all of a sudden you have options. Your shift ends in ten minutes and your friends are out and sending gibberish texts that have your phone going off like a strobe light. Your options are going home, saving the $50 and eating this week or cabbing it into town, meeting up with everyone and spending it. It’s the choose your own adventure story you’ve gone through every weekend for the past two years. You know if you don’t go out then there’ll be food to eat, ten $5 falafel rolls to be precise, but if you don’t, you’ll miss out on who knows what and there’s no way to press rewind. Then there’s the fact you have an inspection in the morning and there’s two extra people living in your house, a hole in the living room wall and three cartons of empties covering every horizontal surface. No one out is going to be awake in the morning to clean any of it, you’re the sole sober hope and an eviction is looming. But, then again. Your shift ends, you grab your knock off and the rest of your things. Putting on your jacket you feel a box in your pocket and your eyes light up. You remember you spent your last $20 on a pack before work and you haven’t opened it yet. You tell yourself you don’t really need them and that if you don’t open it you can probably sell them to some drunk in the club, get your money back and then have it all – food for the week and the night. You’re resolved, you tell yourself you’ve still got it and walk to the taxi rank. There’s no cabs and so you wait, you check your phone and then your watch and then you’ve run out of things to do with your hands and so you open the pack of cigarettes and light one. Whatever, you think, you’ll work it out. A cab arrives and you head in. You meet up with everyone and they tell you you missed the band. You shrug your shoulders and decide you want another cigarette. You pat your pockets but they’re all empty. You realise you must have left the pack in the cab. You sigh and go to the bar. You know there really was only ever one option.
Order a White Chocolate Frappuccino. Ask for the waitress’ number when she serves you and nod silently when she declines. Get in your rusting Ford Fiesta and drive away. At a red light, suck aggressively until you have a brain freeze. Clench your knuckles around the steering wheel until they are white. When you get home, feel inadequate about the rundown sharehouse in which you live. Open your laptop and look at universities. Be impressed by their insignias, Latin mottos and sandstone buildings. Start studying every day and every night. Take Ritalin if you can’t focus, Modafinil if you’re tired. Ignore your erratic heartbeat and the cold sweat on your lower back. Sit your SAT’s, UMAT and any other standardised test you can find. Get accepted into Harvard. Oxford. MIT. Study aeronautical engineering. Medicine. Law. Take on triple the normal course load, preside over a frat, captain the rowing team and acquire first class honours. Upon graduation, be recruited by NASA. Walk on Mars. Come back to Earth and kickstart an I.T. company that makes Apple look the way Apple made Microsoft look. Float the company in a highly publicised IPO that puts you on the Forbes list. Make sure you are also going to the gym twice a day, every day. Do sit ups until you have a twelve pack and eliminate all preservatives, carbs, sugar, fat, salt and colour from your diet. Get weekly Botox and yearly facelifts if they make you feel more ‘you’. Use your money to start a band, to make movies, to fund charity work. Walk red carpets and prepare award acceptance speeches. Be invited as a guest on Letterman. Ellen. Oprah. Do not miss these opportunities to have people notice you; it is vital that these interviews go viral. Talk about your struggle, cry, laugh, make provocative statements about the state of the world and jump up and down on their couches. Then go back. Drive there in your Lamborghini Hybrid. In your left hand, hold your autobiography. In your right, one of your philanthropy awards. Walk up to the counter. Be rude to the failure in the green apron. Tell him you don’t want anything to drink. Tell him you are just looking for someone. Realise then that you never knew her name. Realise you have forgotten what she looks like. Realise that three decades of your life have passed. Order a White Chocolate Frappuccino. Get in your Lamborghini and drive away. At a red light,
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