Daywalkers
Mostly I do what you do, it’s just I’m not doing it when you are. I’m still never really awake when I’m staring bleary-eyed at my flood-light lit backyard, placating myself with reassurances that I’m only smoking a cigarette because you can’t drink coffee without one, strecthing that drink out so I have time for another while my dog stares at me trying to decide whether to entice me into a game of fetch or go to sleep. Later I eat cereal watching everyone else in the house enjoy a roast dinner, because somethings just aren’t right that early in the morning of my night. I drive to work in the aftermath of rushhour, with the last stragglers of that days workforce flowing down the roads away from me… Christ, I almost delved into figurative language there, that’s how bad my grip on normalcy has got.
Unless you’ve worked night shift, alot, for a long time, you just don’t know. Everything becomes just a little out of step, a little askew. Things seem pretty much the same yet not quite right, like someone snuck in while you were asleep and fucked with all your shit, putting it back where it was but forgetting that you always put your watch clock-face up. You feel like someone’s grabbed your plane of existence and twisted it just a little bit to one side. It sounds like I’m exagerating, and I probably am, but sometimes you can almost see the edges where my world and reality meet. It’s mostly just the little things, like getting up when it’s dark. Not honest morning dark, just before the sunrises, but night dark when you can see the last little afterglow of sunset like a horizon-wide penumbra and your body tells you that’s just wrong.
That feeling of things not quite right stays with me all night. I work strange hours, with strange people, in a strange room deep within the bowels of an unusual building. Everyone and everything at my work has an unsual edge to it, a peculiar warp that on a really bad day, like today, makes everything seem like you’re looking at it through water.
Nothing and no-one is nearby our little world at that time of night in that part of the city, so we do most things with less options. Even dinner becomes something hard to do. If you don’t bring your own the only food available is from the vending machines, floors and corridors away. Leaving our strange little room is a relative rarity, so it’s part of our etiquette you ask: “Anything from the machine?”, a mantra intoned so monotonously and freighted with such grim expectations that it’s started sounding a little strange to me, gaining new meanings. It’s now The Machine. Funny how such a little thing becomes important, but The Machine worries me, always evoking for me some Huxley-esque distopia. I’m sure the machine was sourced from Orwell’s Ministry of Plenty, here to give us the food we need and just maybe a little soma. A little soma would be good right now. “You want anything from The Machine?” I’m starting to think I really, really don’t.
I work alot of hours, strange hours, but sometimes that doesn’t seem so bad. Yesterday I worked for a long time, spending first eight hours in a staff room reading a book I’ve always liked, and then eight hours in our strange little room discovering once more how little I know about the internet. Webcomics people, I knew they were there, but in such density? I read seven different artists’ entire catalgoues, some that had been posted tri-weekly for four years, and skipped briefly through I don’t know how many others. Make no mistake I was at work and I wasn’t neglecting my duties, I just didn’t have anything to do but be there. I made five hundred and seventy dollars. Like I said, on days like that it doesn’t seem that bad. So hurrah to you mechanical overlord of vending, for trying your best. I shouldn’t fear you, you’re just doing your thing.
