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Slowly but surely, I've been considering getting my life together.
I'm not as much of a mess as I used to be, but my life could use some improvement. I could smoke a little less and go to the gym a little more. I could probably stop drinking as often as I do. I mean, I would still get drunk on Fridays, Saturdays and every other Sunday like a reasonable adult, but I could probably afford to stop getting hammered on Wednesdays Thursdays, and the occasional Monday. I could also afford to get on my Nancy Reagan shit and start saying "no" to drugs. Even if it's only every once in a while, I should probably stop saying "yes" every single time.
I turned twenty-seven recently, and I've suddenly been hit with this late-twenties motivation to better myself. A strange, parent-like voice in my head has started saying shit like, "You need to eat more vegetables" and "When the hell did we start having lower back pain?" and "Don't forget, today you've got to make one of those grownup phone calls where you yell 'REPRESENTATIVE!!!' into a phone for three minutes before being put on hold for an hour."
Everything seems to be guiding me towards self-improvement, and I'll spend a few days out of every week doing adult shit like buying cheap books I'll never actually have time to read, pretending to enjoy bougie foods and browsing. And I'm not even browsing for stuff I need. I'm just walking into stores and browsing shit because that's what grownups do.
For those few days, I'll be able to fool myself into thinking that I'm ready to buckle down and continue making healthy choices. But then I make the mistake of watching the news, and it's almost like Brooke Baldwin is staring at me through my TV screen saying, "Hey, dude. North Korea could bomb the fuck out of us any day now. So why bother?"
On Monday, North Korea's deputy U.N. ambassador warned that "a nuclear war may break out any moment." Now, the fate of the world rests in the tiny hands of Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, two pesky daddy's boys who would almost certainly be friends if they weren't so busy trying to kill each other.
It's not that I'm afraid of a worldwide nuclear fallout. We're all going to die, and there's something charming about knowing that we'll all die in the same fire. But if two tubby honchos are going to blow up the earth, then I at least want to know when. Because if it's going to be anytime soon, I damn sure don't want to waste my last living days suffering through healthy life choices.
I'd like to think that, under normal circumstances, I would adjust to my age and spend the next few years following the arduous path towards being a somewhat put together thirty-something. But it's hard to make responsible decisions when, without a moment's notice, we could all be swept up by the sweet, fiery clutches of nuclear war and/or the cool, soothing embrace on nuclear winter. So until we return to normalcy and every country with nukes goes back to reluctantly agreeing never to use them, I guess I'll just stay drunk.