Hot air balloons

In July

I’ve been watching a lot of soccer and playing a lot of piano lately. Feeding on other people’s legacy. Have you ever wanted to become immortal? I have. I wish that I could because I waste hours every day on my phone. My brain has been rotted. I walk past a street corner and smell something foul, perhaps a dead animal has curled up between the daylilies and the switchgrass, or perhaps the stench is escaping from my own head, and I am finally smelling the wasted potential in my skull.

Sometimes the mundane hangs so heavy. Time feels suspended at nine o’clock. I no longer crave the stability of a job, though some days it’s harder to fend off lethargy. Sometimes my dad works on his days off. When I ask him why, he says

Nothing better to do

I wonder how he will fill his days in a couple of years when he finally retires. Will he finally feel free to not work, or will the temptation hang over him the way hot air does in a sunny room? I think about buying a car sometimes, an old manual transmission one. I could drive it up to Madison and leave it in their garage. My dad and I could fix it up and learn a thing or two about each other. Maybe this could occupy his days instead of work. A car, the symbol of American independence, could save our Taiwanese faces. But I don’t have the money to buy his freedom.

They must have used up all the cool air in the office buildings today, because the air is especially heavy. There is not a single cloud holding back the sun, which is expanding the cracked asphalt, the rubber, and seemingly time. And the air. Supposedly, this substance can lift us among the clouds, where we can drift aimlessly above the office buildings. There would be no need for cars and air-conditioning if we had hot air balloons to take us to the sky