#ihopejohnroberts

Today #IHopeJohnRoberts finds it incredibly difficult, emotionally, to make himself go to work, but he rallies because he's read that predators are only emboldened by fear or weakness, but when he gets there Alito and Thomas act completely normal, treating him like nothing unusual happened yesterday, which is almost more frightening than the weird cultist shit they pulled less than 24 hours ago, because now he doesn't know whether they're just superb actors or were actually demon-possessed or something and have no memory of it.

Today #IHopeJohnRoberts goes for a walk on the Mall at lunch because he wants to see the reflecting pool for himself, and honestly it looks pretty gross to him, and as he stands there looking at the water and wondering whether maybe the stink and decay is a metaphor of some kind he sees a chip of blue paint floating on the surface of the algae and without even thinking, because he is an orderly sort of fellow, he bends over and picks it up and next thing he knows he is being manhandled to the ground and handcuffed and told he is under arrest for vandalism, so he insists very loudly and repeatedly that he is the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, dammit, and so he ends his day not in a jail cell but heavily medicated in a locked room in the Psychiatric Institute of Washington on a 3-day mental health hold.

#IHopeJohnRoberts 's wet shoe starts giving him a blister.

As he's walking down a random street in downtown #KansasCity just east of US-71, contemplating his life choices and wishing his blister didn't hurt so much, #IHopeJohnRoberts unexpectedly gets slapped in the face by a thrown naan, as a broken baguette flops limply into the middle of the street beside him and a bunch of teenagers go "oh, shit!" and flee frantically down the fire escapes from a nearby roof.

As he wanders aimlessly through downtown-adjacent #KansasCity neighborhoods nursing a holey shoe, a blister, and a cheek that smells like garlic naan, #IHopeJohnRoberts comes across a castle, an honest-to-God castle, with turrets and crenellations and everything, and wonders if the graffiti is historically accurate, the same way ancient Greek statues actually were colorfully painted. #KC

As he continues gazing at the castle he unexpectedly stumbled across while roaming downtown Kansas City, #IHopeJohnRoberts has the flawed yet surprisingly generous thought that it's sort of sad that Black people have to live in lower-quality houses instead of in a cool castle like this one, not realizing that what he's looking at used to be a "workhouse" (prison).

#IHopeJohnRoberts is getting pretty hungry and there's a really fantastic-smelling KC BBQ place right across the street but he realizes he stashed most of his money under the mattress in his motel a couple of miles back and he only has $4 on him.

#IHopeJohnRoberts almost gets run over in the street by a rogue AI.

Wandering, wandering, wandering hungrily through unfamiliar streets under the darkening sky of a strange city, #IHopeJohnRoberts suddenly wonders if he's a ghost, and tries to think of a way to test it that won't involve physical pain or talking to people.

As he wanders hungry and lonely through the streets of an unfamiliar city, #IHopeJohnRoberts is mugged by a sad Iraqi teenager who's just trying to survive since his parents, including his father who was an interpreter for US troops, were deported in large part due to rulings the Roberts Court made, and loses both the $4 he's carrying and the gold Omega watch his wife gave him for their 10th anniversary.

After getting robbed of his $4 by the desperate child of deported immigrants, #IHopeJohnRoberts continues walking back in the direction of his hotel, hungry after not having eaten anything all day, and then two blocks later comes across a tiny lunch joint advertising brisket sandwiches for $4, but he doesn't have his $4 anymore so he just keeps trudging along being hungry.

As he tries to find his way back to his cheap motel in a city strange to him, #IHopeJohnRoberts sees a public library and stops in to see if there's any news about his disappearance, but they don't have paper newspapers hung on sticks anymore and the free computers are all being used by unhoused people playing Wordle.

#IHopeJohnRoberts finally reaches the cheap generic motel near the bus station where he's rented a room without ID for cash and goes to his ground-floor room #107 and puts his big old-school key with the diamond-shaped plastic fob into the physical metal lock but it doesn't fit so he reverses it and tries again but it still doesn't fit and then the door bursts open and he's confronted by a huge bald tattooed caraway-skinned guy with a fading but visible erection behind the grayish tighty-whities he's wearing and behind him on the bed Roberts notices a skinny naked woman he thinks of as "mulatto" with small deflated pancake breasts and clothespins ??? on her dark oval gravity-drawn nipples right before the huge man shoves him backwards yelling "this is not your fucking room!" and as Roberts sprawls backwards onto his back on the dirty concrete he sees the motel sign looming above him on its thick metal pole illuminated against the twilight sky and even as he's falling he notices it says "Rodeway Mo-Tel" whereas his is the "Road-Waze Motor Hotel" and gosh does he feel embarrassed as the guy kicks him once in the ribs (soccer-style because he's barefoot) and slams the door closed again.

As he stumbles away from the wrong motel trying to find the right motel, #IHopeJohnRoberts has to stop because his ribs are hurting from that kick the guy gave him, and he slumps against the wall of a building and just sits on the sidewalk waiting to feel better, and a passerby sees him slumped on the ground with the hole in his shoe and the wet clothing and the look of despair and hands him a card with the address of a volunteer-run cafe that serves the unhoused, and Roberts simply has no tools or life experiences whatsoever that might allow him to even begin to know how he feels about that.

#IHopeJohnRoberts finally finds his own motel, and he unlocks the door and goes inside and takes off all of his dirty wet clothing and steps in the shower and just stands there for twenty minutes, sluicing off the day's experiences, the grime and the damp and the mugging and the hunger and the confusion, and then steps out and realizes the maid didn't leave any clean towels, so he has to put his wet dirty clothes back on and walk down to the office and ask for some.

After he finally gets dry and clean after his long long day, #IHopeJohnRoberts remembers that stashed in his duffel bag he still has a ham sandwich in one of those disposable triangular plastic holders that he bought from the vending machine in the bus station a day or two ago, and he's so tired that instead of going out for food he just eats that even though it's stale and has that raglet of limp lettuce and just that one little packet of yellow mustard instead of his usual Dijon, and then he collapses onto the creaky double bed, but even though he's utterly exhausted he can't fall asleep because his mind is racing about rats and castles and the tiny knife the sad teenager was holding when he mugged him, so he tries to relax himself by masturbating while thinking about his beautiful and beloved but now estranged wife and not even that works so then he thinks about the woman he saw earlier today in the wrong hotel room with the flat saggy breasts and the clothespins on her nipples which was weird and yet inexplicably arousing and that actually works, but then after his tepid and unsatisfying orgasm dribbles weakly into one of those thin scratchy washcloths cheap motels always provide he started feeling guilty for fantasizing about someone other than his wife and he starts crying a little but without having any very strong emotions and finally he manages to quietly cry himself to sleep as the evening sounds of the unfamiliar city sing their dissonant lullaby.

#IHopeJohnRoberts dreams he's died and is now a faint, unhuman-shaped, almost Dalek-like ghost wandering stiffly through the backstage of his whole life, moving from scene to scene at will and tasting his past experiences, not re-experiencing them but just sort of impartially tasting what his life was like, and then finally getting bored of his own life begins tasting other people's lives, part of a crowd of similar mechanistic ghosts jostling around each other emotionally tasting each other's lives after having tired of their own, and so beginning the slow thinning of the sense of self that eventually leads to total dissolution (which explains why our planet isn't overwhelmed by billions of really old ghosts), and then an ambulance screams by Roberts' motel and he awakens with a start and is sad that he has to start experiencing his own life again.

When he wakes up in his cheap Kansas City motel this morning, #IHopeJohnRoberts discovers that most of his shirts and all of his socks and underwear are dirty so he quite resiliently washes them in the bathroom sink with some of the shampoo the hotel provides and hangs them over the various drying bars and feels proud of himself until he realizes that he now has no socks or underwear for the next few hours, so when he leaves his room to find some breakfast he's going commando in grey wool slacks and a raggy Harvard Law t-shirt he usually sleeps in, sockless in dress shoes with a hole in one sole.

As the Chief Justice walks incognito around Kansas City sockless and commando, #IHopeJohnRoberts notices a headline that he has signed an order allowing Trump to keep building his ballroom, and wonders who is signing his name to things in his absence, and feels like he probably should be upset about being usurped and impersonated, but really isn't, at least not yet.

As he strolls through Kansas City looking for a low-profile breakfast joint, #IHopeJohnRoberts quickly realizes that going commando in damp wool slacks isn't exactly helping his jock itch problem.