My daily routine is going great! (Part 2)
A treatise on the brisk fall stroll.
The air is crisp and the leaves fall in lazy surrender. The sun is low molten gold, Grizzly Bear is queued up on the Spotify, and I’m rocking a thick cardigan paired with a cozy crew sweater and an apple tart for breakfast. The herald of the vanguard announces its presence. I hear the brush of feathers as they pass by on their journey. I remain here yet still I travel with them. Many people struggle with mornings that feel deeper and darker than months prior, but I value the luminous dawns, the baby blue skies, the gentle chill that warms your soul. You can complain about a cold day, or you can view it as a soup opportunity.
I wander the winding paths to the gentle caw of crows. A magpie scolds me from the branches of a sycamore and follows me to the next. The maple trees are a particularly vibrant display, a blazing sunset palette. The lindens are wisps of tissue against dark branches, leaves becoming a firey patchwork as they turn, a radiance of colors from delicate greens and yellows to glossy bronze. Paths become tunnels of gold, carpeted in fallen leaves and overhung by furnished branches. The ground disappears beneath a crust of copper. To walk through autumn is to walk an uncertain path, hidden by drifts of kaleidoscopic leaves.
A banner notification pops up with the fresh warm glow of my iPhone. The boss is texting me on my day off and the work that was planned to await me after I arrive back to the office from my mental health day is now suddenly top priority. Two missed calls and no trip to the neighborhood café because everything has to be done by 11 AM.
At this sudden panic, I hear the leaves as they walk, and they crunch with the pacing and ferocity of a mounting anxiety attack. They lie on the ground so lightly dead, neither there nor here, and I remain alive until the accounts team murders me for missing a deadline. My hands shoved in my pockets and my neck wrapped up all tight, the gentle, cadenced vibrations of my pocket are too much to bear—emails after emails, the banner notifications pile until my screen fills and then compile into an endless scroll of conversational threads and revisions and requests and various urgencies and manias. You know, a guy with an MBA once pointed to tuna tartare and asked me if it was cheese and I have never forgotten this, and most businesspeople aren’t as intelligent as they think and Covid should’ve illustrated how much white-collar work is just glorified paper-pushing, like, a person’s job responsibilities could strictly involve scheduling Zoom meetings, and their resume will read “Facilitated essential internal communications and ensured cross-department collaboration through shared organizational goals” and a place like Deloitte would eat that shit up because I imagine their entire business model is premised on self-important consultants yelling at each other about how their client deck has Arial font instead of Helvetica Neue so now there’s no more economic development, and isn’t funny that we’re going on four years of Why don't people want to return to the office? because right before this sour sentiment, they invented a deliberately uncomfortable toilet so your bathroom breaks at work would be shorter, so in 2019, companies were all about “We installed a special floor that zaps you if you talk to a coworker too long. Move along cattle!” and in 2024, they’re complaining, “Hey! Why is office culture dying??” and, speaking of office culture, people need to have a better attitude about getting in the proper mental state for meetings—Wrong Mindset: Meeting in 10 minutes, I should prepare… / Right Mindset: That’s 10 minutes of perfectly good lying down time!—and speaking of mental shifts, I think I’ve been going about salary negotiations all wrong, so the next time I ask for a raise, I’ll tell HR that my landlord desperately needs the money.
I wander through the creaky woods, frantically inhaling air that’s earthy and sweet, listening to the whispering breeze tenderly caressing the branches and helping shed leaves. As I watch them flutter downwards and drift softly to the ground, it’s almost as if nature is communicating that the old year is gone, all its hopes and dreams stripped away. The day has a fluidity, a sense of what was and what might be, full of possibilities that have yet to be imagined, like getting laid off for missing this deadline. More emails letting me know how urgent this assignment is because everything is urgent, although if everything is urgent then nothing is urgent, which illustrates how words are never only words because they define the contours of what we can think and do, like, do crackheads ever say “I’m too broke to tweak tonight,” no, they get up and make it happen, after all, it’s called narcan and not narcan’t, and whenever I see the word “Latinx,” I pronounce it in my head in the same punctuated way that DMX would yell “D! M! X!” and then I listen to “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” so am I losing my mind? Probably. And, for some reason, that reminds me of a tweet that said: “Before was was was, was was is. After is is is, is is was.” and that blew many people’s minds, but this should be obvious to anyone who understands the English language as the person teaching teachers how to teach teachers to teach teaches teachers to teach, who in turn teach students, but none of that really matters because we’re already living in Orwellian times, but not in the overwrought ways right-wing idiots shout 1984 whenever someone tells them they’re a stupid asshole for bitching about how the Little Mermaid can’t be Black but they can’t suspend disbelief when it comes to the fucking talking Rastafarian crab, but anyways, we can’t communicate with each other, as all meaning and definition has been annihilated and words only gain a stable definition through repeated use in a specific context, so if a word is being used online, by definition, there is no context, so terms like “incel” or “schizo” or “racist” or “gaslighting” or “grifter” or “woke” or “neurodivergent” lose substantive meaning and are turned into cheap, flippant pejoratives for people to describe what they already dislike—but now people think these words are an intelligent and elevated way to smear whatever they already swiftly dismissed as bad—and, dear god, “My brother in Christ” has gotten old so fast and refuses to die for some reason, but “Love that for you” has been rampant lately, the young New Yorker’s “Bless your heart,” so considering all this, HOW THE FUCK IS EVERY GODDAMN PROJECT I’M WORKING ON A MATTER OF PANTS-ON-FIRE EMERGENCY??
I am almost out of the park and everything is glowing, a golden light cast through the trees and peeking around the clouds. An older couple is nestled against each other as they enjoy a coffee on the bench. It’s crazy how dating isn’t just dating anymore and you are picking your potential apocalypse partner, so you have to choose wisely by updating the prompt questions on your dating profile: Do you know how to start a fire? Do you know how to use a crossbow or hunt with a spear? Have you fired a gun? Can you hike long distances? Can you steal a car? Do you watch zombie movies? What is your stance on loyalty? Now this makes me want a coffee except I can’t stop at the café because of this stupid fucking project, and I don’t get people who don’t like coffee, because the point of coffee isn’t “sugar” or “milk” or the flavors you may mix in, the point of coffee is to drink it black, bitter, and scalding hot, and the point of coffee is to suffer, so you know when the good times are. If that couple were two drug addicts, I wonder if they would lovingly look at each other in the eyes and say, “What’s ketamine is ketayours.”
Red, yellow, russet, orange leaves dancing and shimmering against the fading blue sky. The sun low and the air soft, the breeze blowing through my wild hair as my shoes scrape across the pavement, and my knees are starting to buckle, a reminder of my impending mortality as I waste away at a fake email job just so I can afford the privilege of existing. I’m beginning to realize that 90% of party conversations in my 30s are essentially, “Oh my god—I just finished watching [TV SHOW]! It was so good!” and “Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to start that!” and nothing is appealing about going out anymore, because it’s essentially the remnants of my night owl friends texting me, “Hey man, you want to come out with us tonight? We’re going to this horrible nightclub that sucks, but at least it’s also expensive.” My generation is aging horribly, like, it’s one thing to be a Harry Potter adult, but I can’t get over how infantilizing the menus are at chain family restaurants—it’s like they want to humiliate you, they want you to know that you’re eating like a literal child when they make you order a Chicken Dipper or a Clucking Crisper, and as if that wasn’t brutal enough, whenever I hang out with my friends, I don’t know whether we’re chillin’ or vibing, because chillin’, by definition, is stationary, if not minimal in movement, but, movement is not required to vibe, so one can vibe every time they’re chillin’, but one cannot chill every time they’re vibing, I think(?), and as I get older, the idea of kids becomes a topic of consideration, but the only reason I would ever saddle myself with that responsibility is so I can tell my first-born that Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” is actually “Stairway to Heaven.”
I won’t be able to rush to my apartment with enough runtime to finish this assignment before the deadline, so I wait for a streetcar to take me the rest of the way. Snug in my cardigan, I stand on the edge of the platform, just out of the reach of whizzing cars. I squint, the bitter sting of the cold wind seems to be trying to strip away the layers of plastic falsehoods that are a part of my life. So I whip out my phone to dick around on Twitter, and it makes me realize there’s nothing more dangerous than supreme moral conviction, like, all these MAGA cranks will say God can do anything but also God can’t be gay, and my favorite is when they get into abortion arguments and they think they formulated this epic own by asking “How would you feel if your parents aborted you?” which is such a stupid fucking question beause I wouldn’t feel anything as I would’ve never existed, and anyway, the default mode of perception in America is an ever-shifting landscape of terrifying absurdity, as we project a paranoid fantasy around us and interact with the world through a digital matrix that feeds us something that we individually perceive as the real world, but instead, we subconsciously select what we choose to believe and react to this phantom realm, since social media suspends us in a floating cloud of pseudo-interactions, and this is the reality we find ourselves trapped within, like, clammy grifters and clout remoras try to make a little bit of hay for themselves by pointing out something that one segment of this terminally paranoid group of people can respond to, which is why this culture war is so deranged—totalizing yet unserious, terminally exhausting without ever becoming interesting—yeah, so people on Twitter are like, “Owning decorative throw pillows makes you part of an oppressive bourgeoisie that genderizes normative sleep patterns. Under our neoliberal hellscape, according to Hegelian dialectics, this makes you post-neo-proto-fascist” while people in real life are like “Hey, did you watch the Succession series finale?” and I have also come to terms with how evil is now manifested through glib irony, like, when you watch any Marvel movie, nothing means anything, and no emotion is ever genuine because everything has to be ironically detached and preemptively self-aware, and this mentality is psychotic and can make anyone pathologically incapable of being sincere; we’ve gone from nihilistic evil to edgelords trying to be Thanos. And given how much I think Elon Musk is a smoothbrained nepo baby grifter whose only genuine invention is taking the concept of the subway and making it shittier, and given that he degraded Twitter into a Nazi cesspool full of sexbots, for some reason I hopelessly stagger back to the hellsite and I can hear people asking me, “Why are you on Twitter if you don’t like the CEO?” well, I have some news about every product on Earth… So I come across a tweet that says, “Dudes be asking where the bitches at but never look within themselves” and I can’t wait to look at this tweet again as a fat 50-year-old alcoholic that’s stuck in the same job forever.
The streetcar smells of homeless people and garbage is strewn across the seats. Neighborhoods pan across the windows, and all I can think about is a story last year about a batch of Panera lemonade that killed a bunch of people: What would happen if you ordered five of them? Would the franchise manager call a social worker? If you wanted them poured into a bread bowl, would it come with the suicide hotline number? The streetcar zips by the neighborhood café with all kinds of baked goods on display at the front window, which confirms that I am in my waggling-fingers-over-a-treat era and going “Don’t Mind If I Do” Mode.
As I reach the front door of my apartment, I turn to look down the length of my street, blinking against the wind, one last glance at the line of soaring trees before my eyes are glued to the MacBook. Over the last few years, millions of people realized there’s nothing innate about the miseries work inflicts on you, and, in fact, many of the indignities of work can be removed or mitigated at no cost and could actually create a happier and more productive workforce, so knowing that and trying to reinstate them anyway is absolute sadistic behavior, like, every article about remote work is sure to mention workers “being in their pajamas all day,” just absolutely sneering at the very idea of people being comfortable. Well, at least I have my benefits, which makes me wonder how some people are still confused about why teeth and eyeballs need their own insurance plans: Teeth are premium bones, and without eye insurance, you won’t be able to read emails like, “Client has moved the deadline up to tomorrow morning, so we’ll need you to stay late.”
Well, that was a relaxing little jaunt. A long walk through the brisk air is the best way to clear my head. Every day, I’m stuck in the same grind, the same stupid obligations, the demands of competing deadlines, the idea of being a professional. But today, I am grounded. I begin to work on the assignment and remind myself of that meme: My favorite conspiracy theory is that everything is going to be okay. Yes, happiness is an inside job.
Almost choked on my indica gummy reading that narcan’t line. This is brilliant my dude. Really covers all the bases, tragedy and comedy, the forest and the trees, the zeitgeist and the milieu get the picture. Arrows by any other meme would smell as sweat.
👏👏👏