My friend Kristen and I are sitting at a café on a spring evening in the year 2017. She is finishing a glass of sparkling rosé and a cheese platter. I am downing detox herbal tea and picking at a small bowl of fruit. We are both eating and drinking what we are eating and drinking because, after a dark, seemingly endless winter, we have both decided to live. Please hold your applause.
On Election Night 2016, Kristen and her husband (also named David) came over to our house to watch the results. My David prepared an elaborate cheese platter. Kristen brought a bottle of vintage rosé by Veuve Clicquot with which we’d planned to celebrate. (We were a roomful of intersectional feminists, and half of the room was an interracial gay couple, so you can probably guess what we were hoping was going to happen.)
But by the time we were able to get together, it was already clear that the world we had imagined was crumbling around us. Kristen sat quietly in a corner, wiping away tears. My David jumped up suddenly, radiating anxiety, and ran to another room. That left Kristen’s David and me, making casual conversation, pretending that the world that we knew was not ending.
I like this about Kristen’s David very much. He’s always polite and hospitable; I love decorum. This is probably surprising if you know me, because I am prone to yelling sassy things. Also, I know that I have a very expressive face that cannot tell a lie, and I have no problem deploying it to project my displeasure in literally any situation. But deep down, I believe in a certain order. I like RSVPs, good service at restaurants, and polite party talk.
I was suddenly seized by the realization that this was, indeed, a party, at my house no less. I became obsessed with the idea that everyone should have fun. Yes, a megalomaniacal moron was being elected in a soul-shaking rebuke of all my hopes for this country, but I was worried people would give the evening low marks.
“How was Eric and David’s on Election Night?”
“Nice cheese plate, but kind of a meh mood. A little bit apocalyptic maybe?”
“How gauche.”
I’m a better party planner than that.
I leapt up and declared, “I’m changing the channel! This is depressing.” I flipped until I found something that would lighten the mood: How to Train Your Dragon 2 on Nickelodeon. Perfect for an Election Night party. And then we sat there in silence while everyone stared blankly at animated magical beasts sailing through the clouds until, finally, I burst into tears and told my David we had to move to Canada because I couldn’t bear to lose the right to marry.
As far as parties go, it wasn’t my best. But it wasn’t my worst.
Kristen and I were spouses before we were married to either David. I mean work spouses but I’m sure it’s still a legally binding union blessed by God and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. After she and I had been together for a blissful couple of years, I got antsy about what I was doing with my life and left the company at which we worked. This was my second work divorce and, let me tell you, they never get easier.
Years earlier, I had a friend, Rob, who was my cubicle mate and first work spouse. His real-life wife also worked at the company, so maybe she was his work spouse, actually. He and I sat next to each other, though, so the jury is still out. This was corporate Big Love.
One morning Rob just up and quit, and I was so distraught I had to take a personal day. Okay, not a whole personal day, but I did come in super late. Okay, I always came in super late, but this time it was with a purpose.
Years later, when it was me who up and quit, I was shocked by how hard it was to be apart from Kristen after working six feet from her every day. We started meeting for weekly wine dates where we would rail about intersectionality and theater, and the bartender with the purple hair would make great wine recommendations and laugh at our jokes because we were actually hilarious and she liked us and not just because it was her job.
Kristen loves wine. When she gets a new glass of wine, she attacks it with her nose, taking a deep breath to start the experience. Then she’ll take a sip, and if it’s good, she’ll let out a rattling moan. She’ll then turn to me and excitedly describe what’s happening. “It’s like a damn raspberry, Eric. With a little bit of cut grass and a…is it? Yes, by God, it’s red pepper!”
Then she’ll hand me the glass and, every single time, I’ll take a sip and say, “Yup, that tastes like wine.” Because I am a terrible friend. And husband.
We are a great match, even though I don’t know how to smell wine (I have sinus issues!). We also have great actual spouses. My David performed Kristen’s marriage to her David. Then Kristen spoke at my wedding. And then we were two work spouses with spouses, and we were in each other’s lives forever.
Anyway, I tell you all this to say that Kristen and I are two friends who care deeply about each other and a better world full of nice things and people. And so, after a dark winter, we’re sitting in a café, and she is having wine, and I am having tea, because we’ve thought about it, and we’ve decided we’re going to live, today.
At this particular moment, I am on one of those detox diets because I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been and I kind of don’t feel good all the time, and it occurs to me that maybe they are related and if the world is going to end, do I really want to pass on without having tried one of those fad diets at least once?
Anyway, just in case we don’t go to war, I want to look as good in my fifties as Angela Bassett does, so I’ve cut out sugar and dairy and pretty much everything great for a month. I have decided to live, everyone! I’m living! Put me on the cover of a magazine.
Kristen is eating the exact opposite of my meal, because wine and cheese are actually what living tastes like. I will enlist in any army that fights to protect vineyards, and wherever it is that cheese is made. Cheese groves? I will fight for them.
In this moment, we are really happy. We are talking about the things that we love—theater, wine, cheese, baked goods, Beyoncé. And the conversation slides effortlessly from the deep and meaningful to the slight and ridiculous. We talk about our love of relatively frivolous things like our record players or Kristen’s fantastic new haircut.
There is a moment, when things slide back to the more serious, that we feel a little guilty. Who cares about our little joys in such a time as this? Aren’t there more serious things to talk about? Have we called our senator today?
I always feel weird about thoughts like that. In such a time as this, shouldn’t I be more serious? In such a time as this! (As if time is ever anything but serious and potentially grave.)
I think it’s important to revel in the small things that make us joyful, to indulge when possible and not problematic, to steal laughter and hoard it. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d fight for a cheese grove’s right to exist. Because if there’s no cheese grove, what are we even fighting for? (I believe it was Winston Churchill who said that.)
I call my senator, a lot. Just to chat. I write letters and commentary to stake a claim for the things I believe in. I vote. I march. I tap-dance for justice. And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.
Yet despite our issues with the present, Kristen and I acknowledge that it’s probably the best time yet for us. We’ve had many an office conversation about time travel (haven’t you?) and decided that, if given the option, we would only go forward, because there’s literally no time in human history when it was great to be a woman or a gay black man. So, if you’re selling time tours to the past, it’s going to be a no from us.
The other thing about the past is that it stinks. Not colloquially. It smells bad. Everything in the past smells. We have access to so much body spray and cologne, yet the present is still kind of ripe sometimes. Just imagine all of that funk, but without deodorant and with crossing the Great Plains on horseback. No thanks, ma’am.
I’m obsessed with how bad the past must have smelled. I can’t watch period drama because I become fixated on how every single person on-screen must reek. I love Hamilton, but even sitting in a Broadway theater, watching Lin-Manuel Miranda and Phillipa Soo and Daveed Diggs and Leslie Odom Jr. tear the roof off, I still had the thought, All of these characters smelled really bad in real life.
It’s not just early America that smelled either. Everyone in the fifties and sixties smoked constantly, according to the extensive research I did by watching two movies. Remember when you used to go out to a bar and maybe six people were smoking and you still couldn’t wear your coat for a week until it aired out? Well, imagine that all the time everywhere for your whole life.
Cave people stank. I can’t even write about it. It grosses me out.
Louis XIV didn’t smell good at all. Sorry—it’s true. I know the French aristocracy was obsessed with perfumes and wigs and generally acting like rich drag queens, but I guarantee you that Louis XIV ended up smelling like your teenage cousin who got some cheap cologne from Rite Aid and thinks splashing it around after playing basketball won’t fog up your car windows with funk. Louis XIV, I’m sorry, but you have to walk home. I just had this leather cleaned.
Going back in time isn’t worth the aggravation. The scent will never leave your nostrils. That’s also one of the issues with the present: a collective refusal to acknowledge the stink of the past. Rejection of time travel is one of my core beliefs for olfactory reasons and also as a form of social justice protest.
Which is why it’s such a shock when Kristen, on her second glass of rosé, tells me that despite all this, she has this fantasy about time travel to the past.
“Hear me out,” she says, waving her hands in the face of my disgust. You think you know some people. She continues: “I’ve been trying to figure out ways I can go back and warn Hillary.”
Okay, I am on board the train now. I’ll bring my smelling salts.
Kristen says, “I keep thinking if I go back to the beginning of the campaign and I say, ‘You need to just release all of your emails right now,’ it’ll be fine. But then I think I should go back further, so I go back to when she’s secretary of state and tell her, ‘Oh, girl, a private server, no.’ But then I remember, LOL, misogyny is the reason we’re here, so I need to go back to whenever that didn’t exist and I keep going back further and further until I’m all the way back before the Big Bang, and when I get there I whisper to the cloud of dust, ‘It’s not worth it.’ And then I fade away like I’m Marty McFly’s siblings.”
I applaud this plan, because I am not sure if space stinks, and also I am a sucker for any plan that invokes Back to the Future. The possibility of changing the present is never so alluring as when it comes about by changing the past. There’s a certain poetry to time travel. In the place of the hard, incremental work of effecting change in reality—calling your senator, voting, drinking detox tea, and then waiting—you get to see your impact appear in an instant, fully formed, functional, for better or worse. You get to find out how it ends. You get to see time unspool before your eyes and then knit itself back together again, hopefully better, hopefully brighter, hopefully overflowing with cheese groves.
Of course, there is the danger, as explained by Doc Brown, that traveling through time will rip a hole in the space-time continuum. Attempting to fix the past breaks the future; isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think? This is going to sound morbid, but if someone invents time travel and then accidentally breaks time, I just hope I die the day before. Like, in my sleep or something. Because, ultimately, I’m not end-of-the-world material.
I can’t help but think constantly about the end of the world. I don’t want to. I want to prepare cheese platters and drink champagne with friends. I want to live my life. But I cannot escape the end of the world. Headlines declare the end of everything from democracy to the climate itself. Disaster movies and post-apocalyptic movies are all the rage. And I don’t want to alarm you, but I am aging. Our time will come to an end.
And I find it very annoying. The thing is, a catastrophic end to the world as we know it sounds like a lame experience. I am not interested in the least. It’s scary, yes, but mostly dumb. And the way we’ve been taught to think about it is so improbable. We are not going to band together and listen to a bunch of scientists to save humanity like Jake Gyllenhaal in a disaster movie. Sorry. You know how I know? Because a bunch of scientists are telling us how to save the world right now, and half the world isn’t listening to them.
We may very well be living in the montage at the opening of some climatological disaster flick. I’m the one idiot holding up a sign that reads “Stay hydrated!” as the sea levels rise on the beachfront property I just bought. No one is interested in humor during the apocalypse, but I don’t let that stop me. It’s all I have to offer in this scenario. Because I am not end-of-the-world material.
Listen. Here’s my living will, okay? I have no desire to survive the apocalypse.
The minute the cable goes out, I’m gone. If I can’t watch rebooted versions of television shows I used to love, what even is the point? What even?! I do not understand the people in disaster movies who want to survive so that they can rebuild society. That sounds terrible. So boring, and yet so much work. Haven’t these people ever worked at a small nonprofit? It’s that. But with, like, zombies. No thanks.
I don’t want to shoot a gun. I don’t want to figure out how to make fire. I don’t want to have to dig deep to find hidden reserves of resilience. Ugh. I don’t want to form a new system of government with a bunch of other idiots. I’ve only memorized Angelica’s part in Hamilton; I wouldn’t even know where to start with creating a constitutional convention.
I am not post-apocalypse material. I melt down if they don’t have the shade of fabric I want at Crate & Barrel. I certainly don’t want to forage through what used to be Seattle in search of materials to make my own crates and barrels.
And if the post-apocalypse comes about because of a massive plague or something, I have no useful medical or scientific skills. Once again, I’m out. I would like to be Patient 15. Maybe Patient 20. No higher than 50. I don’t want to be Patient Zero, because then everyone would blame me, which is rude. What you’re not going to do is besmirch my fair-to-middling name in your dystopian digest. I’ll tell you that much. I don’t want to go first. I just want to go early, while they’re still doing nice tributes to the victims on television and I can get my own grave plot.
In terms of worst-case scenarios, dystopia is even more annoying than apocalypse, come to think of it. I am definitely not making it through to fight in the resistance if it involves anything more than retweeting things I agree with. I’m not surviving the takeover by some power-mad weirdos dressed in all their monochromatic shapeless dystopian haute couture. I am mouthy, and I get easily annoyed, and I don’t know how to shoot a bow and arrow, so dystopias are a solid no from me. I’m basically Peeta from The Hunger Games, except gay. I am here for the baked goods and then basically I’m going to be dead weight. Cut your losses.
There’s always a huge, complicated system for subjugating people in dystopias. There’s always an oppressive hierarchy. And the people at the top, well—the bureaucracy is astounding. Do you ever think about that? Who is pushing paper in the Capitol? Who is the Housing and Urban Development secretary in Gilead?
Who is copyediting all the dystopian newspapers? Do people still recycle? On what days? Is it the same schedule or a new one? Do you still file taxes or is it just pillaging? Are there still stamps? Do they still release the special Valentine’s Day stamps? Who do I speak to about my 401(k) in the dystopia? Who is updating Google Maps with all the new dystopia fortresses? These are important questions.
Our government, old, creaky, barely continent, is hard enough to run as it is now. The dystopian government wants to, like, enslave all women or set up a national murder game? We can’t even get single-payer healthcare, so I feel like this is overreaching.
Governance is hard; why would I stick around after all of our infrastructure crumbles and they ban all the good TV and try to be a mayor or city council member or head of the jury duty commission or whatever? The only thing that appeals to me about that scenario is the possibility of a cape. I feel like in four out of every ten dystopian governments, once you reach a certain level of power, you get to wear a cape.
Do you ever worry that, given the opportunity, you’d help to usher in a terrible world to save your own skin or to provide for your loved ones? Everybody thinks they’re the time-traveling hero, but deep down do you ever think, Actually, though, I would totally murder Katniss Everdeen if it meant I could eat well forever?
I never ask myself these questions.
Any time I start to wonder, Am I dystopian? I laugh and remember that I’ll be dead before dystopia really starts to take hold. I exist in flashbacks only. I’m that guy in the soot-covered photograph that the ragtag band of resistance fighters stare at fondly in the flickering light of the gasoline fire. “He was funny on the internet,” they say.
When it all goes south, I want to be remembered, not relied on.
The problem is doomsday isn’t coming. And I don’t think we can turn back the hands of time or whisper to the cloud of dust, as much as I’d like to. I think we’re obsessed with dystopian or apocalyptic scenarios because, despite their darkness, they’re comparatively easy outs. Kind of like how sometimes you wish your company would just go out of business so that you’d have to go on unemployment and finally finish your novel or paint the study or hike the Appalachian Trail like you’ve always wanted. Actually living, getting up every day with all the fears and tragedies and challenges and potential joys of being a human in regular old neutral-smelling, depressing times, is hard enough.
But it’s what we’re given: flowers and sunshine and push alerts on our phones and midterm elections; pop-up restaurants and flawed history books and strangers in offices who become parts of our lives. There’s fighting for social justice and being brokenhearted about deaths that could have been avoided and being terrified about bringing a kid into this world and being even more terrified about leaving a kid in this world and trying to figure out how to wake up every day not thinking that the world is going to end. Even though it will. I’m here for that. That mid-topian life.
How are we supposed to live without a meteor bearing down on us? How are we supposed to find the best parts of humanity without a brutal regime at the door? How are we supposed to tell the people we love that we love them if we’re not five minutes from being destroyed?
That’s the challenge of being alive.