Crud Meridian

Agency is a difficult concept to square with the staggering speed of life. I sit with my furnace droning. I am surrounded by half-read books, signs of the type of person I would like to be one day. Without turning my head I see piles of mail, paystubs, a naked stack of envelopes, errant USB cords, at least two empty coffee cups. I can draw no path between any one item to another. They’re just the accretion disk of my life.

Though I ostensibly have will in this world, any forensic effort to draw out some chain of decision making seems to reveal a consciousness little more advanced than that of a predictive-text algorithm, attempting to make the most coherent choice in the immediate context but with no awareness of any larger sense of formal coherence.

I cannot refrain from responsibility for my actions, and yet the apparent personhood behind them is laughably inconsistent. A dull phantasm. A smiling corpse rolling down a hill, thumbs outstretched.

When did I last make a decision that was a decision? And not a reflex from some dull ache towards the nearest security? I have values and goals and yet I string a life together only moment to moment, satisfying only what is immediately needed in each.

Is the idea of living by broader principles a cute delusion? Are we all condemned to a life of easy pleasure bruised with grip marks? The elements of my life cohere only as some byzantine conspiracy of small manias, devouring what is immediate without foresight or regret. When I tell you about my life, describe hopes and goals and plans, I am only describing the cliff I would most like to fall off of, the branches I hope to hit on the way down.

Are you like me? Do you sometimes wake to the day only after hours of consciousness, to find your domestic surroundings unfamiliar? Have you been framed by some antecedent doppelganger, forcing you onto a path alien and overwhelming? How did you find yourself here? Do you long for the clarity of only one thought, the strength of any clear conviction? The desire for a pain articulate and local? I have been kidnapped by my own body as it hurls through time, and at best maybe I can kick out a headlight and wave to passing motorists.