"You hear about Kanye?"
You see the message flash across your phone, and your heart jumps. And then stops. Then jumps. Then stops. Your heart becomes Zach Lavine.
Your mind races. "What did he do this time?" you think. You hope perhaps he said something inane but innocuous. Maybe something about dolphins. Yes, that's it. Dolphins. Maybe Kanye tweeted that he spoke to a dolphin, and that dolphin gave him a couscous recipe. Or maybe he revealed that Saint was conceived on top of a dolphin. Or maybe he announced that he's changing his album title to DOLPHIN WAVES. Of course that makes no sense. But this is Kanye, remember? And you're still a Kanye West fan in 2016, so this is what you signed up for.
So you hope for the dolphins. You wish for the dolphins. You pray for the dolphins. You'd give a kidney for a fucking dolphin.
And then you click on the message. And there are no dolphins. Just Kanye West, tweeting about Bill Cosby.
You become distraught. Dismayed. Dejected. Derailed. And a bunch of other sad-sounding words that begin with the letter "D." You need a drink. Immediately. You search for whiskey. Or rum. Until you remember your wife is trying some diet she saw on Shark Tank, and you now temporarily live in a rum and whiskey-less house. So you grab a bottle of flavored seltzer water, pretend that it's Ciroc, and swig violently and passionately. The zero calorie fizz juice drips down your chin like a madman. Your beard glistens. Your eyes sweat. You sit on a futon.
You feel an urge to jump online and defend Kanye. Afterall, he is not R. Kelly or Bill Cosby. He hasn't done anything criminal or diabolical. He just says some remarkably dumb and occasionally problematic ass shit, and you just want him to stop doing it. You really, really, really just want him to stop. You want to grab his tiny ass by the collar and shake some stop into him. But this doesn't make him a bad guy. Just someone who maybe needs a dolphin.
But then the urge to defend dissipates. Because why bother? Maybe it's the seltzer talking. But you just don't want to put forth the effort anymore. You've resigned yourself to this life — of remaining on Kanye West island — and part of that resignation is the acknowledgement that Kanye West is both uncaring of and impervious to defense.
So you put the laptop down and pick up your phone. You look through your contact list, hoping to find others in a similar predicament. So maybe you can invite them all over to play Spades. You find some survivors. You send them all the same message "Hey, everyone. I know we all can use a pick-me-up right now, so come on over and play Spades. I have seltzer water."
You wait an hour. No one shows or even responds. You check your phone again. You drop in it horror and you scream. You collapse to the floor. That message you sent to the rest of the remaining Kanye West fans in your address book? You just sent it to yourself, seven different times.
You crawl to the futon on your knees. You put your head in a throw pillow. And you sob into the night. Soundly. Softly. Desperately. Your body shakes. Quivers. The noise you make reminds you of the chorus from "All Of The Lights." This makes you cackle, loudly, like a mad scientist. The maddest scientist of all-time. A furious fucking scientist.
And then you say "fuck dolphins, man." And you go to sleep.