What Thou Lovest Well Remains American

In the glowing lobby of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, one is to choose
one’s skater. Hair type, board. One can even be an alien or Jesus
or a number of other secret characters. It’s important to have choices
otherwise senates would get lazier. Declarations would be made pretty much
to nothing. On the other hand, too many choices can be an issue, too,
as we learn in every sitcom ever made when the lovable leading man
gets roped into too many dates at the same time, changing outfits and
forgetting to remove or put on the fake mustache, until it all blows up
in a hilarious way. And if the cameras stayed with this story? If pain
had no cherry in the middle? No accompanying crowd of people
laughing? I very rarely wake up in a different country and yet I don’t know
where I live, what to call it. Like someone went in and set things on hard
mode. Insane Mode. Immortal. Where once every fifth party the anecdote
of the bystander gets repeated, and every fifth month you’re the bystander,
only, because you can’t stand outside of a moment, you never do the thing
you thought you would, or do it in a really lackluster and disappointing way,
so that one can continue to believe there is fire on all of our sleeves as we
just keep drinking cool glasses of water. It’s important I remember that
the rapture is happening, but it’s the slowest rapture, the last place
rapture, out of breath, so slow it doesn’t appear to us as anything other
than regular life, where a mole of oxygen equals six point zero
two two times ten to the twenty-third atoms, and, when mixed with
methane, makes combustion, and what have we learned about
meddling? In the movie a woman asks a mad scientist for a love potion
and it all goes wrong; everyone so menacing in their passions, not willing
to accept what they can’t have, so it gets dark fast, with lots of death
and yes, that’s part of the rapture, too, the love-potion rapture, which could
happen to anyone. It happened to Matt from the neighborhood. He loved
fast cars and the fast feelings he chased with the help of beautiful crystals.
But before that, because he had a PlayStation, his house was a church
where for hours in the afternoon we got to choose who we would be
as we skated through the cityscapes of our world. You couldn’t pay me
to forget it: Matt, sitting on the carpet in front of the biggest TV on the block
flouting gravity as he executed The Puppet Master, The Tail Slide, The Air-
walk, pressing left, left, circle, x, as though he was saving our lives, and only he
knew it, as though this moment was in a museum, preserved in glass, of a time
we were visited by a beautiful stranger, capable of touching god, and he had
come all this way to wave beneath golden numbers that stretched to impossible
heights, a score so high we would never be afraid. Our friend, the Martian.