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“I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.” Frank O’Hara

I am the least difficult of boys. All I want is a giant robot. Had I this giant robot I would first use it to go to space. I’d party on the moon and spend the next day recovering from my hangover by gathering up all the subsurface water and bringing it back to Earth in a big sack. I would then park my giant robot in downtown LA and open a food truck that sold next to nothing but moon water. And, baby, I would go easy on the literary agents that came knocking on my robot to sign me up for a ghost-written account of how I was famous for something all of six weeks. I would not ridicule them for selling out to the lowest common denominator of readership or building their reputations with agencies that do everything in their power to undermine your intelligence by hawking the same schlock that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. (By then I would probably be picking up business with the moon water and planning a second moon party, this time with special VIP guests.) I would not go on to say that I was, in essence, damning my own Go Green Campaign that donates a percentage of each sale to research for alternative fuel sources by launching this repeat trip to the moon (the robot is fueled by crude bitumen pumped from Canadian tar sands). And I would finish this round trip by nominating myself for governor of California on the sound bite of the season ticket.

When Frank O’Hara wrote Meditations in an Emergency he was transcribing a self-deprecating whirlwind of contradictory and facetious notions following a breakup. He appreciated the split desire to both inflate his sense of self to Pharaonic proportions as well as languish in one’s own silly box of abstract as well as petulant limitations. Why boundless? To admit boundaries is to nakedly admit our own limitations. A man must be many things to himself: an athlete, a superhero, a professional appreciator, a musician, a sexual divinity, damn funny, serious, debonair. A man has to be open to the possibility that what he is has not yet been discovered by the outside world. What he will be is intrinsic to each day he ain’t. Men do not idolize Luke Skywalker, who looks away, “to the future, the past, never his mind on where he was—where he was going.” They sympathize, even empathize that without that “what if” inciting us to dream our limitations would be ironic in the wrong way.

But staring down the barrel of the real world does this make me an able partner, a good choice for a woman with a career in mind and bills to pay?

I’ll have to ask my giant robot.

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