It's about staying away from routines now because the dangerous thoughts, the recklessness and the impromptu flights of imagination find you in the routine. The memories vivisect your brain and you find yourself staring at a green light with the honking not even registering. It helps that you drive an official car but society has a short fuse these days and in the end it doesn't care and the not caring doesn't matter. The streets have faded names and even those names are forgotten.
There are moments of sheer terror when the clicking catches me, when I'm where I'm supposed to be at the appointed time, and I'm jolted with the realization of the beautiful irrelevance of it all, the algorithm of this atom connected to that atom until handing over a credit card or sitting on the sofa or walking to the mailbox become an ordinariness that glides by like driftwood, pulled along by a force greater than ourselves and we only think we have some control over it. We've been brainwashed all our lives. But the strictures are locked into place until the choices are cut off; you can no longer pull back that card or burn that sofa or walk past that mailbox. Decisions have signposts and even the way you ignore them follows a familiar process because the mind latches on to the familiar when it's scared. There is plenty of scared to go around.
How many times did you hear the disembodied murmurs, the snatches of conversation, the tinkling of glasses, the scraping of chairs, the music pushing against you, the smoke lingering in traces, the cursing, the feigned coolness, the buffalo wings only warm not hot, the stagger to the bathroom, the staring at the tiles? How long did the embrace last before it was withdrawn, how real was the expression, how empty were the words? Did they lie? Didn't you know?
Time is a fluid commodity that speaks its own language and every struggle to keep up only makes it waste away faster. What is faster, what is slower? In the deep reaches of interstellar travel there are no gravitational orbits around a particular sun, no more heliocentric ticking, you float unmoored and the best description of time is not a clock but deterioration, the universe still finding you even way out there, still dismantling you atom by atom, planting charges in the fissures until you get bad news from a doctor's visit, or from being hurled suddenly into a windshield after hitting a tree and then you stop but the rest of the moments continue without you. You left an impact but you didn't leave an impact. You existed but you didn't. Think about it too much and it will drive you mad.
What matters now are the connections, the lives touched, the laughs expressed, the quiet moments of joy that only you will ever feel. They matter because they were sense impressions and sensing is a permanent currency. We worry about digitally accumulated money as if we're taking the wealth with us, or taking the debt with us. When the firing sequence is perfected along your lifeline, it won't matter. We let the talking heads connive us into talking about freedom as if we were ever really free. Why, you must be free, you just bought a new HDTV. Who lives in what country, who dies where and were they happy or bored or terrified or clueless? Politics gets nothing done, lives are lost because of bad luck or bad geography. You're you and you will only ever get to be you, there is no one else, there are no stand-ins, there are no rescues.
Look outside. Look inside. There you are.
