A solid seven refreshed, awake moments before the alarm. You woke up ahead this time, and not annoyingly so, not the type of early where, before the morning can even enter your register, there is the blaring sound of the alarm. Finally, it wasn't one of those. You got to sit there for a second and enjoy the realest silence, when faraway sounds still permeate softly, but it's also silent.
That peaceful awakening feels so far gone already. It's only been an hour or two, but now you're late. Not because of a disturbance at the root, though. Delay appeared later. At first, you were all good.
Everything fell into place and started flowing when you got out of bed. The sheets returned beautifully back into place, and water came out of different spouts, sinks, and filters, splashing onto your hands and into your cup. Nothing gets in the way as you take in fresh air and let stale air out, uninterrupted.
Not like there's some grand mission for anything to get in the way of, no, but you do have somewhere to be, and the feeling left behind by inertia's absence is positive. Today, you suddenly want to do something (again). Another day in paradise. Fit is calm, time to bounce, and you've accounted for everything. Easy.
Your keys...
you tap your pockets, waiting for the sign of the object, like wind running briefly through chimes. You're looking to hear just that one small sound of proof.
found them. On the couch, though, not in your pockets. The laminar flow of the morning now has a noticeable imperfection: you can see how things come together to build an illusion of smoothness, but that it's actually quite a complicated machine that, only by the grace of god, operates with any sort of coherence. This random stop sign presented in the form of where-are-my-keys has made you aware that you are on a road, not in a void, and that things exist as a culmination of everything before them.
You left the house and walked over to your car, and a breeze started, then stopped. Bluetooth didn't want to immediately connect, either, inviting the CD that's been in there for years to get going, like it always wants to. The glitch of misplaced keys, the glitch of messy bluetooth and maligned satellite signals, the stop-start of the breeze and your 16-year-old car engine, all of these strange and small and chaotically normal interruptions produce a similarly strange and small microspasm in your sinuses. The most small-scale of cellular reconfigurations enacted by a hidden, congested agenda, playing out at large. The hypermodern flows of 2025World reproduced, once again, in your nose holes, just to get the point across.
Everything that happens, happens imminently, and you are constantly reminded that you are just a salmon or a turtle moving along. Small interruptions collide and prop up congestion like propaganda, or like beavers rushing to obscure the sound of running water. From one sniff to the next, your passages go from clear to spongy.
And the gas is low. Who was driving this thing, anyway?
Whatever. You're still good on time, so you may as well hit the good gas spot. It's a little out the way and a dollar cheaper per gallon... you perform some quick brain calculus and see that it can't be more than eight minutes added to your trip, which is fine, the point being: you woke up plenty early, early enough to just go get the gas without doing any mental math, yet somehow, here you are again making calculations.
You peel out of morning traffic into the gas station, thinking there's an empty pump, but it's actually out of order. By the time you get to fill up, youi've seen more than one mom get coffee and snacks from inside, and you've already been sitting there long enough, damn, you might as well park up and get in there yourself. The eight minutes you budgeted for has become 15, but you say, you know what, it's all starting to slip anyway, and I may as well go in there myself to get a granola bar.
The card reader makes that awful sound when you tap it, like a bird that someone tried to teleport across wires, that died while being reconstituted as fluid data. You tap it again, and as you leave the shop and click back into your car a horn blares from behind you, and you jerk your head over your shoulder with the granola bar unwrapped as you peel out of this intrepid, stereotypically liminal space.
OK, now you're finally a little late. The day itself, a biological individual, begins to feel a bit different, or rather, you begin to feel a bit differently about how this whole day is about to go, and this simple bar of granola, this snack, it is supposed to serve a purpose, to stave off the encroaching, stormy blob of negativity.
Ultimately, it's just a granola bar. It was placed there, right there at the register, packed in the language of the readymade, handable to you and every part of the experience by design. This purchase decision was made before you even walked in, like so many decisions you don't even realize are being made for you. The moment of weakness at the gas pump that led you to spend, already a chain of events that's taken hundreds of words to describe, and everything else has been left out, everything even more important.
The closer you get to running out of time, the more intense the smell of fuckit in the air becomes. You're back on the highway, swimming, and even though you were only pushed back, like, 15 minutes, traffic has lightened up. The fricative energy of stalling, of waiting, has excited particles and increased their motion. You can't help but ascribe this release to your change in attitude: ever since you stopped resisting the morning of interruptions, things started to free up again. By overcoming the stress of unexpected delays and malfunctions, you have freed yourself, and now the road is clear.
You would have thought you beat the system, so-to-speak. The granola bar is sweet. The sun is shining. You're gonna actually be fine on time. But, then, like the unknown second when you look down and up, and realize it's not twilight anymore, but full-on night, another sniffle makes a run through your passages.
You would have thought you could wait, or scorn, or drive it all away. That you could ignore this inexplicable link between you and every cell and every agent, and disregard how your nasal flows are informed by and connected to the hypermodern flows that built you. The road, the satellite, the NFC chip and GPS, your alarm clock and obligations... nothing comes that easy. And this time, instead of just sniffling, you feel a heavy sneeze coming at 70 miles per hour.
What's worse is that you've just taken a bite, and your mind is drifting. So you're choking on this granola bar, trying to fill a hungry hole, trying to focus on the road, trying to not blink for too long, or to even sneeze, already missing the awareness at a generational level of all the insane risks you're putting yourself at, because the time and date and everything leading up to now has told you that this is the safest and most efficient way to get around, somehow. Barreling down this gray skyway trying not to crash, not to choke, and not make a mess.
The people who came before you never could have known this feeling.