This day everyday

The spoor of the day….like the marks left behind by animals that a hunter follows in the jungle! He decided one morning as he woke up, the freshness of a new day, spurring him into an action that he had just conceived, to follow all his thoughts and actions as they spent themselves through the arc of the day. He’d woken up.. his sheets entwined around each of his legs…effectively pinning his limbs down.. with the lack of energy that signified mornings to him, he was loath to any movement at all. His mind still hazy, struggling to recognise and label the matter around him as it swung into focus. The whirring of the overhead fan sent the pages of a book on the table a flutter. He looked at the clock balefully.. reminding him of the places he needed to go that day, the things he had to accomplish from now on till the night brought him back here…a circle full-well spent. Each day measured like this.. unfortunately they had not invented a scale to measure the measurer! A clock by his side that voraciously tore up his space into chunks. How he wished that space and time the continuum it was, could be separated, so that like a child he was in an expanse with no boundaries, no parts of it that he had to manage. He lowered his legs down off the bed and realised that he must keep a part of the promise that he had made to himself.. that he would stretch before he did all else. A call to the day with the same poise and pause that this brought to his mind, Or else he feared he would feel fractured as he sped from one affair to another. Nothing to hold it all together for him….no glue except his breath and a keen mind watchful of things around as the Megatripolis burst into a million doings of man. And so he pulled up his calf muscles to begin and caught sight of the skies outside. Cerulean blue skies…. his favourite absorption as it took his mind away…the dog wandered in, as always wishing to play and be out for her walk. He picked her up…. both his arms encircling her ribs and nuzzled her satiny fur. This tiny thing with her incredible expressions and ways had walked into his life and he had succumbed as he had to many such visitations. It was always like this, them sharing his stretch. In a while, he crossed his legs, got up, switched the fan off and watched the rustling of the papers of the book come to a halt. He liked this.. watching the minutiae of life all around.. he didn’t exactly like to call it this… his life.. as all life was presumably like this only! He heard the call of a bird outside the window and he got out into the kitchen to, pushed the plug into its socket to heat water in the kettle. He knew the first ritual of the day would take him into the next and before the evening was done, a host of habits and familiar circumstances would lay him hostage to them. He kept telling himself that he must remember to breathe…. impossible if you know what I mean! You forget the very things you swear to remember. You have to remember to remember… or play some such solipsistic game, with what seemed to him an ongoing recursion with words. Coffee his favourite brew of the morning, bringing to him, the shaded hillsides, canopied by avenues of trees. He’d spotted a barking deer once close to the bushes with their berry red seeds! But now, he was here, holding a newspaper in his hand. It was called the Daily Sweep. He’d sit now and scan the daily hubris section for an appraisement of the cities doings all over a day’s worth. The terrible calamities that befell the Earth and its inhabitants as they sped through their days. The numerous wrangles, the cantankerous nature of dialogues, the demagogues behind pulpits, the lies and schemes of the peoples in power, the great success stories.. we were fed garbage of this sort first thing in the morning. It had been a pattern, much like all the others during the day and he could never resist the cartoons! You learnt to deal with this as with much else of the litter that accompanied you. Modern life was an engagement with this sort of thing and presumably once evolution had stop and advancement had kicked in, you were prone to these sorts of perambulatory discourses. Breakfast was simple. That was simply washed down, the liquid grain and fruit swill that easily digested, stuff that you didn’t have to chew through, so early in the day, though it packed enough calories to last you a while. While he rinsed the dishes and talked to the dog, he muttered to himself….exasperated at this side of his nature…his grasp of time was tenuous at the best of times and now, whilst hurrying, he grumbled to himself that he could be much better than this and how he wished he was! He would have to cut corners in order to make it through a city that swilled with numerous activities based on time. One wrong move and he would have it from his co-conspirators, he would be out of the game or that’s what he feared..most of the time! The laggard who was left behind…. He folded his clothes off the line and rushed into the shower to the jet of water. A fine mist soon had made the walls and the windows invisible to him, and he switched off again, catching these moments throughout the day to fall into other spaces where thought couldn’t follow. They were sudden, unplanned and his senses were bright at these moments. He soaped quickly and let the bristles wash down his body as he shaved, a little off each side as he couldn’t see what he was doing in the misted up mirror. He didn’t mind really. He’d gotten used to the taunts; the jibes flew over him now. Looking at his body brought him no feeling as it once had during his youth. It was no longer a changeling and brought to him few pleasures other than the routine ones of feeding and drinking and keeping it well tended. It had become a habit like much else and he feared this sense of growing old all too early in life. The kind of jobs he did, didn’t awaken much natural instincts and he felt most of the race had become heavily neutered because of the lives they led. The heavy paws of big money and expenses clutched everyone and he saw how everyone made adjustments and lived these lives accommodating powers that they were all too ill equipped to disabuse…