“A World Without Pants”

And other crazy art my buddies and I made, to laugh at a time when we might've cried

- BY Justin Heckert FROM SLATE

TWO WINTERS AGO, more than a year after my old college roommate and dear friend Paul was diagnosed with ALS, he started making pictures.

By then, he was gradually losing the ability to do almost everything else. He could still walk at that point, often through the leafy corner of his Boston neighborhood, but only with the help of a cane. He could eat solid foods, albeit with some trouble, and could drink the medication powder he swirled into water twice daily—a cocktail so bitter it made him physically wince—but he began coughing more and more as he labored to swallow anything at all.

“I’ve got ALS, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it,” he said in a group text with me and his other former college roommate, Evan.

Such moments of honesty would snap Evan and me back to the reality of Paul’s condition. Through messages, Paul had remained largely upbeat in the face of a terminal prognosis, showing us that he was still a 42-year-old in the mood to live, and laugh. He sent us texts encouraging me and Evan, Paul’s best friend since childhood, to spare him no humor during the time we had left. So jokes and GIFs and memes became the rule. When he did share anything about his deterioration, those texts amounted to a kind of desperation. How much time did we have left?

Then he began showing us the “art” he was making.

Paul started dabbling in this art in late 2023, while confined mainly to his chair—both to pass the time and as a fun distraction from reality. He’d send us some of his creations over the group chat because he thought they were funny. But I can’t say he actually created the images. He used his fingers, technically, but not in the way an artist holds a brush; Paul merely typed the words of what we wanted to see into the prompt bar of Midjourney, an Al image generator that posits to the user, simply and kind of horrifically, “What will you imagine?”