Welcome to 🌱🌞 Real Boys Reality 💫 🌺 🌏 , the favored Substack for the sophisticated, cultured reader to amuse himself with as he lazily scrolls his tablet and sips his Negroni, waiting for his slim, dark-haired, 5’9” ballet dancer date to meet him at a lower Manhattan bar.
He (the hypothetical reader, resembling, perhaps, yourself) feels enlightened to be in an inner circle of sorts. The best Substacks, he thinks to himself, are the niche ones, not the ones griping about some controversy in the New York Times, but the ones created by wandering artists of the written word, traveling just slightly under the radar, spilling gems of poetic insight, unperturbed by the shifting winds of fashion among the decadent literati elite.
Oh, what joy he has found in his life! A few thousand words of wit, biting commentary, menacing prose, and striking insight, delivered into his inbox every week or so. There is nothing in life like a good friend, and he feels he has found a friend in Reality gamer, a man who makes his mind accessible and is a voice of consolation to the disturbed, his written word like such soothing melodies of a harp or a flute.
As the immaculately cultivated reader chuckles softly to himself, he lifts his gaze from the screen and carefully ponders Reality gamer’s latest point about Deleuze’s inversion of Hegel. He stares expressionlessly at the entrance of the aforementioned lower Manhattan bar so as not to miss his date’s arrival. It’s 6PM and there are only a few other people there — an art student with a sketchbook, a seemingly agitated man hunched over and thrusting his leg up and down like a jackhammer, a mid-30s looking couple sipping IPAs and checking their phones, not speaking — and suddenly there she is, cutting a striking figure in her cropped trenchcoat against the backlit outline of the doorway.
Or - wait, is that her? You never really can get the full image of the person from her profile. Ah okay, no, it is, she’s heading exactly this way. He casually pivots on his seat away from the tablet, smiles and gives a friendly-yet-sharp, salute-like wave. Standing up, he sweeps his vape pen away into his pocket, but leaves the tablet conspicuously lingering on the table. Perhaps she will see it and ask “what are you reading there?” And then he will have the discussion material he needs.
He will then — in an unpretentious, non-“mansplainy” way — thoughtfully expound on Reality gamer’s dynamic, provocative insights into culture, the human condition, God, sex, the soul.
Intrigued by his depth of emotion, she will bare her soul to him in return. The tensions they carry in their bodies will begin to dissolve, their posture will be a little more easy. His chakras will get a little closer to alignment with hers, and he will begin to know the woman behind the makeup, the fancy jacket and skirt.
He blinks rapidly, returning to the present moment. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry I’m late” she says as she leans in for a quick fraction of a hug. She was only twelve minutes late, and fifteen is normal for Manhattan, so he doesn’t know why she is so apologetic. “That’s alright”, he responds. “Would you like to get a drink?”
The conversation begins flowing somewhat; they talk of their work, favorite places to go in the city, family. It’s all quite pleasant, but to his frustration it’s thirty minutes in and they have yet to, you know, vibe. Connect on a level she can’t reach with any other of the three thousand other guys on the street who would fuck her. Demonstrate his sophistication, intelligence, wit.
He can’t just namedrop that he’s a reader of Reality gamer’s Substack because she probably doesn’t know who that is, and if she does then it would seem a little gauche, a little overly direct. Unfortunately, she never did ask about the tablet on the table, and now the screen has gone dark, and he should probably put it away — every time she gestures with her right arm he’s a little wary of her spilling her drink all over it.
As time goes on he’s getting a little nervous, and now, one hour in, he’s outpacing her on the drinks at about 2 to 1. Talking about pets. Talking about the best way to prepare coffee. Talking about TV shows (he prefers Twitter for his mindless entertainment, but he lets her talk about Schitt’s Creek and Broad City for about fifteen minutes).
Then something happens. “Hey I was wondering…” — she begins, leaning slightly forward in a way that would be only tempting to read as an act of seduction — “And not to make this sound like a… job interview or anything, but where do you see yourself in five years? Like do you have any, you know, what are your…” — she searches for the word for far too long, then figures it out — “ambitions”.
His throat clenches. The worst question she could have asked. The future is a black inky streak of hot tar. Beyond two and a half days from now there is a border of jagged, scribbled red, like the fire on the edge of a stove burner consuming a tangle of writhing worms.
Trapped in his career in e-commerce which, six years in, he is finally realizing he never had the knack for, he cannot possibly claim to see success in his future. He’s past the point where he’s actively suicidal because he has truly resolved to leave it — not immediately, but definitely one day. That and anti-depressants. A million dreams flash before his imagination every day. He could be a rock guitarist (he’s alright at it), or a personal trainer (he lifts), or a photographer (how hard can it be?) or even literally just be a drug dealer (you meet cool people and be high all day, and can make a lot of money!), or… can you still be a pirate these days?
He will entertain these possible paths in life, and they will give his soul a quiet joy, hope, a bit of resolve, for maybe a half an hour, if he allows it. Then it will crescendo a bit; he really could do it! Other people do, and he is a pretty successful guy, he has a fair amount of drive and charisma… He’ll let himself get excited, start pacing frantically a bit, smiling to himself. And then, at the peak of enthusiasm a switch will suddenly flip. Out of nowhere, the joy is gone and in its place: pure, unadulterated dread.
What is he thinking? He’ll never quit his job, and he knows it, and he never should have entertained these fantasies, so pathetic and embarrassing in hindsight. Every time he goes down this train of thought and abandons it, he only reinforces the inevitable conclusion. He’ll never be able to defend his decision to his family and friends, let alone gather the confidence to be a guitarist playing in front of a crowd of thousands, or something like that. He’ll never be able to take that blindfolded step off the plank, knowing that there’s a ninety percent chance of water a hundred feet below. And the worse he thinks about it, the worse the fear, dread, agony is.
Frozen, muted in front of his companion, he scrambles for something to say. And then he realizes: perhaps this is not a terrible question, perhaps this is the best question she could have asked! For it is an entry of sorts into discussing… Reality gamer’s Substack!
“I don’t have ambitions”, he announced. “I follow the vibe”.
“The vibe?” she asks. “Like…”
“Well, it’s like,” he attempts to elaborate, “it’s like… Have you ever heard of the user Reality gamer on Substack?”
“Substack?” she asks. “That’s like a blog site, right? I think I heard of that.”
“Yeah, it’s like a blog but you also get it emailed to you. Anyway, there’s this guy on there, Reality gamer, he’s amazing.”
“What does he post?”, she replies.
“It’s amazing!” he repeats. “All kinds of stuff, like you have your standard sort of cultural criticism, like more normal essays, but he says that the internet and mass culture is, you know, people see it as this junk, but he says it’s like nature, it’s like uh, the wild, and we need to become almost like — or we need to actually become like romantic poets, and turn posting online into poetry!”
“He writes poems?” she asks.
“No not like poem poems, but part of the idea of it is that the boundary between poetry and everything else needs to be broken down, or already is broken down, and what makes something a poem or not is just whether or not it knows about the vibe.”
There are a few moments of silence. Both parties take the opportunity to sip their drink (hers a gin and tonic, his a glass of cabernet sauvignon). “So how do you know what the vibe is?” she eventually asks.
“Well, that’s the thing, the vibe is just the vibe, you know it if you know it… but Reality gamer has a whole philosophy of it! He’s figuring it out, like, at least he says he is, if you read his essays, he’s getting there piece by piece…”
She leans back in her chair and laughs. “So he might not know what the vibe is either.”
“No!” he protests. “You know it when you feel it. The vibe… the vibe is… okay, the vibe is like the Holy Spirit.”
Suddenly she puts on a different expression, pulls her body straight up, adjusts her arms inward. “Oh,” she asks, “are you religious?”
“No, no,” he says. “This is like… the point is that it’s beyond churches or whatever, it’s there, it’s everywhere, it’s on the internet, you can call it God or you can call it whatever you want, it’s the same thing.”
“Mm”, she responds.
There is a long pause. Somehow he feels like he failed to communicate the depth of Reality gamer’s insights. Somehow he feels he came off somewhat, perhaps, deranged. Had he simply had too many drinks? Or perhaps the insights were never there to begin with, perhaps Reality gamer was just a semi-psychotic individual who charmed him with his tantalizing prose into thinking he had something of value to say. Perhaps all writers were like this in a way, so many charlatans, perhaps the only voice of wisdom one could trust was oneself. Of course, his inner voice was one of confusion and despair, but…
“Uh, anyway,” he began. “It’s just something I’ve gotten into lately, and…:”
“No, no!” she interrupted. “It seems really cool. There’s all this stuff on the internet I don’t know about. I really should read more, I’ve been getting so bored with what’s on Netflix but I just don’t know where to get recommendations.”
“Oh!” he said. “If you’re interested, that’s awesome!” He grabbed the tablet off the table and frantically started making motions with his fingers, then laid it back down and slid it toward her. “Hey, here you go. The button’s here. You should just