Joy
Joy
I tell you how, in the Babaoshan Cemetery, there is a VR simulation of death: the white explosion and cumulo-form clouds, a Chinese temple offering the gateway to heaven, gold-rimmed. The setting called ‘Hollywood hero’ that forges blockbuster lives with the tidiness of ants, but no genre for days measured in murder mysteries and washing lines and mailboxes that swallow hands and restless bees. You keep the best plates in the back cupboard with the whiskey and the papers I am not allowed to see, though I looked, and saw. When I used the good cups, the ones so fine it was like drinking from some impossible thing like a handful of riddles or sky, you said it was a waste, that the everyday is a penance of the plain and the ugly and the dull. You kept every box: television, stereo, knife set, phone, matches, dried beans, light bulbs and pills. Said one day, you never know, and so the cabinets were a Tetris dream of cardboard and old pamphlets and all and every cable. I tell you how I once read that you cannot pin joy like a moth, how some only live for a day or a month and would not queue for a film, or for virtue, or for light. But you tell me how the cowboy is the real star, whose plans are of things being held for tomorrow, whose epic is not of dying for the day but of the horizon, of the not-yet, the maybe, and the might-never-be.
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