My daily routine is going great!

A treatise on the evening stroll.

---

The clock at the top-right corner of my MacBook Pro reads 5:30 PM and I haven’t left my apartment once today. The last email I will send before signing off begins with, Hey there! I’m sorry for the delayed response... but maybe it’s time to remove the “I’m sorry” from my correspondence. I can’t uphold the lie anymore. I switch the opening sentence to Thank you for your patience and slam my laptop shut. The silence around me sets in and I am firmly in my romanticizing my mental illness window to introspect or some shit. Maybe the northern cold and limited sunlight bring that out of us, but I am also wanderer-and-his-shadow-pilled, so the open sidewalks beckon for a somewhat aimless evening stroll and for me to let my thoughts defragment. I have also established that “enjoys walking” is, like, 40% of my personality.

The more car-brained among us may wonder what a walk will accomplish. Well, I once saw a morbidly obese woman in a scooter at Disneyworld knock over a small child, and she just said, “Watch where yer goin’ little mayn,” took a big sip from her XL McDonald’s Diet Coke, and kept going. At the very least, I aspire to avoid such a cursed fate. But walking at our own pace, I’ve been told, creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state. It’s great for my interior mind-spirals that descend into free-jazz mental ward sermons. Whenever I strut, the pace of my feet naturally vacillates with the cadence of my internal anxious stemwinders; apparently, we can also change the pace of our thoughts by walking more briskly or by slowing down. Since we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to walking, our attention is free to wander, to mull over creative ideas or solutions for a project, or to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from our highly textured mental landscapes. Or you can walk while listening to a podcast so you’ll never be alone with your thoughts.

No matter what, it’ll be great!

THUD. THUD. THUD. My footsteps are the only sound I hear, pounding against the concrete of the city streets as I wander through the clouds of thick steam bursting from my mouth and quickly evaporating into the frigid air while window after window nears, freezing with its blue fog of television light or a couple hunched over a supper of pizza, and the image holds while I pass by but then slides into the forgotten, except I think, like, about a third of adult couples cheat on each other, so is that woman a sidepiece while the man’s partner is out of town or am I sexist for assuming she’s not the one cheating on her husband or maybe I’m projecting my own normie monogamous relationship onto other couples and anyways none of this is really my business but I do love to people-watch because this one time I witnessed this guy interrupt a woman who was reading at the bar and after she told him that turning vegan was a monumental shift in her lifestyle he told her he worked for Purdue chicken as if that wasn’t going to horrify her and, my god, these ultra-modern houses look so sterile and uninviting and really mess with the rest of the neighborhood vibe so I guess I get where NIMBYs come from when they say “neighborhood character” but I also hate NIMBYs but I also hate corporate condo developers so, you know, in a leftist utopia, I’d be a bureaucrat, but, like, a dope bureaucrat that builds cool neighborhoods with record stores and restaurants that actually serve authentic cuisine and another young couple is jogging at a pace slightly slower than my fast walk and I haven’t gone on a long run since January because work has been beating my ass and my foot still hurts from when I went skiing in Banff and what if this pain just lingers and my body is just slowly breaking down forever and OH SHIT I hear the patter of their destination wedding plans in the Dominican Republic, which, weddings are narcissistic enough, but to expect all your friends and family to shell out thousands of dollars just to watch you two arrange your love in a way to capitalize on tax benefits seems to be a bit gratuitous and now they’re talking about their friends who don’t want to come, but also, you two are being unrealistic about your expectations of people, especially in this economy, and FUCK now they see me…

I am at an intersection and I’m supposed to turn left or right but it doesn’t matter because I am walking away from nothing and I have no destination but I do have to be up for work tomorrow so that’s technically not true but work and money manage to be social constructs that dominate our lives but how do so many people just let work suck up the majority of their lives just so they can make gobs of money for rich assholes who doesn’t care about our existence and AI is probably going to gut the entire creative industry so I’m fucked, but what makes these business idiots think that their jobs won’t be replaced, like, how hard is it to look at a spreadsheet and leverage a bunch of numbers to rationalize a decision that they already wanted to make anyways because the whole point of consulting allows mediocre execs who run dysfunctional compaies to outsource responsibility for their choices, which all this added market bureaucracy would undermine the premise that the private sector is super efficient but that’s also because I view business administrators in the same way that conservatives view government bureaucrats and anyways assuming we need AI to replace these corporate drones gives them more credit than they deserve because most of them could be swapped out for a busted Chuck-E-Cheese robot on the fritz that just says ARE WE ALIGNED? ARE WE ALIGNED? ARE WE ALIGNED? and, goddamn, it is chilly so I should button up my denim sherpa against the cold, wet evening air and continue to my right, but I still shudder and walk on and I hope I don’t slip on any black ice because eating shit would really scuff the vibe and ruin this peaceful walk, and speaking of scuffed vibes, Stranger Things goes from decent to bad-but-kinda-fun after Season 1, but it should’ve been left as an anthology and JESUS the wind rushes and envelops the exposed back of my neck and I’m so cold and the buildings lower around me and there is no sound, except my footfalls on the damp concrete and a huddled-up man is lighting a crackpipe. You know, nothing is ever on fire—fire is on things.

The wind picks up and howls through dark alleys and narrow streets with dull lights, its icy fingers running across my cheeks, and there’s an elegant, tall woman strolling rigidly and her face is pulsating as if intermittently electrified by pain and she is walking a Great Dane the color of dryer lint and I feel so bad that such a majestic dog is plagued with heart problems but the real plague is every time I think the Marvel bubble has finally collapsed, I’m proven wrong and, really, the ultimate consequence of Snakes On a Plane is that it has led to media conglomerates realizing that they could monetize people irony-hyping something stupid on the internet, thus leading to the rise of LOL so random!! movies like Cocaine Bear—although it is morbidly funny that it was one of Ray Liotta’s last performances—but that flaming piece of garbage Everything Everywhere at Once thought that hotdog finger shit was so funny, and my favorite part was how they made that joke eight times, so I keep walking and yet there is nothing to walk from, and nothing stopping me except I am enveloped in the smells that accompany a strip of Korean restaurants and the bold aromas of bulgogi waft into my nostrils, and I am reminded, for some reason, of how much pop chips fucking suck.

Outside the bar are several finance bros drunk and lonely, their secrets spilling out their mouths and down their shirtfronts, their bile spelling out a few choice phrases like I GOT A SIT DOWN WITH THE CFO TOMORROW TO SEE IF WE’RE HITTING OUR KPIS and MY GIRLFRIEND IS SUCH A FUCKING LOSER DUDE SHE’S LIKE 25 AND ALL SHE DOES IS PARTY AND DO BLOW AND SHE’S STUCK AT HER SHITTY ENTRY LEVEL JOB AND I’M ABOUT TO TURN 35 AND I CAN’T HAVE THAT NEGATIVE ENERGY AROUND ME I JUST NEED TO FIND SOMEONE WHO’S LIKE A LAWYER OR A DOCTOR OR SOMETHING BUT CAN ALSO PARTY ON MY LEVEL and IS IT GAY TO JUST TELL YOUR FRIEND THAT THEY HAVE A NICE DICK and I ONCE K-HOLED TO ICE SPICE and such are the feelings we spill from time to time on the shoes of strangers, our inner monologues a thing we choose to choke or choke on as the moment dictates, and depending of course on the price of whiskey, and outside of all this, I would inflict my feelings on unsuspecting citizens, like “Money Machine” is still the worst fucking song I’ve ever heard—absolute garbage—and I’ve listened to it several times on repeat and I love it, and, holy shit, someone who is director-level at my company once began a sentence with So those who subscribe to round-earth theory… and then the finance bros call out to me, TELL US SOMETHING, so I let them know that pharmaceutical ads are jarring and dystopian; every commercial break now is diabetes, psoriasis, eczema, asthma, Crohn’s disease, heart failure, kidney disorder, macular degeneration, thyroid eye bulge, or generalized myasthenia gravis. But I’m just an opinion with a mouth.

White upper-classness has since infected the city, though, and now everything is frenzied with renovation, and it is remarkable how property developers have taken control over all aspects of urban planning so there are luxury condos and gastropubs that sell smashburgers for $25 without fries and now gentrification rolls in like a tide and leaves behind a human flotsam of homeless in sleeping bags and isn’t it weird that we don’t actually own money but we just take turns having it, and the most unrealistic part of Monopoly is everyone begins with the same amount of money, and if money is the root of all evil then why do churches ask for it—and now that I really think about it, taxes are just a subscription to your country that we can’t cancel no matter how bad the service gets.

The wind comes and scoops me up, because the wind is a fucking asshole, and the romance of the city night does not always get to win and there is a man who hisses nasties under the light outside a convenience store with bars over its windows and I put on my don’t-fuck-with-me face and he averts his eyes and keeps his agitation only at a hiss and this evening feels like my legs won’t carry me for much longer and the neighborhood goes dark as I walk, and a second neighborhood unrolls atop the daytime one and there are a few street lights, and those I pass under make my shadow frolic; it lags behind me, gallops to my feet, gambols on ahead and the only other illumination is from the windows in the houses I pass and the moon that orders me to look up while feral cats dart underfoot and there’s probably a lot of cannonballs on the ocean floor—damn, but actually that’s crazy—and mirrors don’t break, they actually multiply and people who are physically attractive but have terrible personalities are just human clickbait and how do we get up every single day and not get used to it and lemons are not naturally occurring, they are a cross between a bitter orange and a citron so life never gave us lemons… WE INVENTED THEM!!

Alright… I’ve been shuffling around for 30 minutes, surrounded by dirty walls of snow and staring at my feet, and I’ve been waiting for something to happen. I haven’t had a single thought this entire time.

I find myself limping and the limp morphs into a kind of pained bopping and I am freezing and I don’t feel any better. I was promised that a silent peaceful stroll would transform the quicksilver of my consciousness into genius creative thoughts, but all I got was cold fingers and toes.

In the comfort of my apartment, I can amuse my brain with three different screens at the same time and not have to worry about the cognitive silence I just experienced. I don’t think humans were meant to “walk for leisure.” We should be either lounging or running for our lives. No in-between.

So what are you waiting for? Throw some boots on and saunter around for 30 minutes after work without a single thought in your head in freezing weather.

---