I wake up to the soft radio static tuned to zero station. There’s a burr of voices nearly discernable above the red numbers which mark the morning and order me to get up.

God made half of humans active in the morning and half in the evening so that someone could be on watch at all times. So humans make being not being a morning person a moral failing. Me, I’m not much of either. Display on the thermostat set for too cold, but I don’t rightly feel it. (What are hours for me? No circadian rhythm anymore. The dead of night I suppose? But still, we keep office hours so the clock is master.)

A quick shower, setting my wet-radio for actual music and then fresh liquid bandage for my knuckles. Television on and I check my phone while not making breakfast.

I wish I could have a cigarette. I want a jacket that smells like cigarette breaks.

Television off but my flat opens onto a boulevard and I can see the opposite street where an antique tube television is showing the trailer for Ocean of Noise. People move in regimented ant-colony lines according to lighted signs, making way for car traffic that was given priority over pedestrians in the 1930s when auto manufacturers invented the crime of ‘jaywalking’. I wonder what new crime self-driving cars will invent to justify their own industries’ failings?

A coffee shop. Nose burned out, can’t stand to drink it but the barrista is friendly. I ignore the digital menus and ask for a latte with ‘my usual surprise’. It comes back with a Scottie dog’s smiling face etched in the foam on the top and I smile at her.

I carry the coffee with me, staring at it. Imagining the dog, dashing ahead of the ant-lines and the people staring at their phones, shocking them out of their complacency. A female college student is scowling because her touchscreen phone has a cracked screen and a jagged purple mark intruding across its display like a broken eye. It responds only sullenly to multiple furious pokes.

A car could hit her if the crowd wasn’t guiding her steps.

Stock market banners proclaim the imaginary heartbeat of an economy recovering without bringing back jobs. On the bay tourist kiosks follow me down the elevator to work, where I sit and stare at computers.

There are some breaks. I get to feed our flying pet. “Come here Beloved. You get a lunch break, eh?” She has a tracking bracelet these days with a little green display that winks at me. Later I check my phone down to the cells before I give my thumbprint on a touchscreen and update the health records on one of our grosser patients.

Pissing rain on the way home. Just a carnival of lights, and my coat which does not smell like cigarettes pulled up tight around me. A thousand spectators, and I imagine they are open windows I can’t see in.

The same trailer playing on a loop as I jiggle the key to my apartment. The television is on inside. I am certain that I turned it off but these things are omnipresent. I watch the noise for awhile like the human flotsam of a prior age.

I shut the television off and check the thermostat before going to bed. My eyes register a red peripheral smear from my alarm clock. I shut my eyes and try to pretend the minutes on the display are not moving.