TICK

I am currently slightly weaving in my chair in a saturnine dizzy unpleasant fog, the result of a particularly broken up and useless sleep period. I am used to coping pretty well on little rest and yummy coffee, but this morning is just a blurry unfocused piece of crap. I kept waking up all night, every few minutes in some stupid cycle of konked out depths and total HELLO I AM FULLY AWAKE AND LOOKING AROUND IN THE DARK NOW. There was no particular reason for this; no looming international flight to take, no morning meeting with Bill Gates, not even multiple car crashes in my neighborhood. Each time I would wake, I would go AH CRAP in my mind, and look over to the clock next to my head, its chartreuse-green digital bastard numbers telling me what was what.

12:07AM. 12:49AM 1:21AM. 2:50AM. 3:19AM. 4:01AM. 4:43AM 5:07AM. 5:55AM. Tick tick tick.

The alarm went off at 6AM, and as usual I listened to the extremely annoying sounds of the SOFT LITE RADIO assholes talking like ninnies about nothing and playing bad oboe music. I leave that station on my alarm because it makes me reach over in my haze and turn it off is disgust instead of lying there and listening. It is the first step in getting up, always a lousy thing for me to do. Tick tick tick, GET UP.

Oh, just fuck you, Time. Fuck you. You you you. Fuck fuck fuck. How I hate that there seems to be no way of getting around measuring time, having time run and rule and ruin everything. I think about time being a construct of Man, but that is really not the case. Even a fucking CELL knows about time. Example:

Bacteria Unicell 1: Oh hey, ‘sup.
Bacteria Unicell 2: Oh hey man, good to see you.
BU1: Yeah, I’m just chillin’. Hangin’ loose. You know.
BU2: Yeah man, I hear ya. It’s all good.
BU1: Yeah.
BU2: Mmm hmm.
BU1: Hey?
BU2: Wut?
BU1: I’m kind of feeling something here.
BU2: Oh yeah dude? What’s goin’ on?
BU1: I dunno man, like something is going to happen.
BU2: Oh wow man, really? You think?
BU1: Yeah, I am kind of feeling this pressure. I think…
BU2: What, man? What is it??
BU1: Dude! I just looked at my messenger RNA watch! It’s mitosis time!
BU2: Whoa! Dude! Awesome!
BU1: Well, I’ll see ya. Time to split. Some bitch needs more Botox.
BU2: Alright! Peace out, Clostridium Botulinum!

Tick tick tick. Like a bomb, ready to blow you up good? Like a blood-sucking pest, slowly taking away what you need to live? Like tic with no k, this building of pressure, involuntary yet certain, resulting in some kind of change of movement, cyclic, impossible to control? Sometimes I feel like I was born with one of those awful “countdown to your death” estimator clocks right in my brain. It runs, like a galloping SMPTE code, all the fractions of all the seconds going and going and going, gone gone gone. You can’t make more. As far back as I can remember, Time was never my friend. It only felt like loss.

Ah, well. No matta. I will take a nap later on and hopefully have a couple hours to readjust my sullen deprived body, while all kinds of things change and move and happen, unknown to me.

The Chambers Brothers -- "Time Has Come Today"