Friday always hurts. Divestment is a bitch; Job does its best, a mild pre-exmmersion palliative analgesic plus some standard reality counselling hypnotics, but still, RL is always a grind at first. Gravity reasserts, data access is torturously slow, cooking—sheesh, and the sheer effort of having to interact on the poverty of the human-only level.
Coarse lumpen humanity everywhere you look. Brains, mouths and tongues forming (so slowly), the info-poor commerce on the pitifully narrow organic bandwidth that is people. Clawing dunk goo from your eyes at 19:02 on a Friday evening, you have to start to consider the gross coordination of survival until Sunday p.m. Still, a beer and a snuff later, things start to look up a little; you remember that you have some friends, a life (of sorts), even a favourite bar, your groin twitches as well—endocrinologically your brain stem remembers other pleasures as well.
Priorities: A shit, a shower, a shave, some eat. The microwave dings and you boot Backchannel; piggybacking the WorkSpace portal, Backchannel is another small stolen secret in your privacy arsenal. Horded compulsively by WorkSpace peons this is an essential part of weekend planning; ducking (we think) the social control heuristics and content checks used by WorkSpace; Backchannel is a home-grown hiatus, a carefully tended killfile allotment oxbowed off from the rest of the corporate net. I place a multi-shout to my crew (keywords: booze, gear, tactility) and prod listlessly at my plasticized macaroni cheese.
21:00: It’s fucking packed at Soylent (20th anniversary of Heston’s death, should have remembered). I greb dibs on the next round and scan the crowd, immediately I clock the smooth dome of Brant’s head, bobbing a good 20 cents above the crowd denominator, he spots me at the bar: Christ, human contact feels good; the hug lasts a good 30 seconds, the first pint a good ten seconds less.
23(ish): We manage to get a booth at MAC, vectored in on a wave of carelessly squandered first week pay and a slightly hysterical group psychosis. It’s a good vibe, no rugby shirt twats or Shermanites; the music is good too—lots of bass, not too loud and not so achingly hip that it’s unrecognisable. Cale breaks open a cheekily secreted wrap and the bubble comes down—that warm amniotic of inclusion that only good friends, good drugs and the weekend ahead can bring.
02:07: (I know this because from my prone perspective on the damp concrete I can see the LED clock high on the gherkin above). There’s a rich salty taste in my mouth and there seems to be something wrong with my jaw, my arm hurts too and I can’t feel the reassuring lump of the PDA in my back pocket. Worse yet, I can see the orange blur of a WorkSpace Security logo and the bland syntax of a construct voice advising me to keep still.
A downspiral montage:
- The sting of the intoxicant analysis.
- The drone of the duty sergeant.
- The smell of vomit on myself.
- A sense of panic of shit yet to happen.
06:14: Home again, FWIW. I’m still holding a wadded, bloodied dressing to my lip; my head’s fucking killing me, I’m on my own. RL can go fuck itself; I pop a valium and crash.