Fatigue is a god. At first, driving him away takes just one cup of coffee. Twelve or so ounces of slurping, and voilà: The amount of caffeine in that mug is sufficient to stop the adenosine from telling my brain to tell the rest of me that I’m tired.
As far making sacrifices to a meddling god go, this is a great deal. I usually drink the coffee in front of an internet-containing screen like the one in front of you, and I feel armored against its endless attacks of curiosities and wonderments. I read more, I read longer — the scroll shall not win, I will pummel the scroll into its footer end! Ideas that matter — ideas with shapes that I’m sure fit the paws of other humans I consider myself serving — persevere through my monkey mind’s regular flurries of distraction like a gleaming new ship riding the bucking hills of an ocean storm.
Remember: The exhaustion never went anywhere. It put on a mask; layers of coffee grounds silenced it. The body’s call for rest and healing? Ignored. The damage builds, the infrastructure making tomorrow possible is turned to cuts of meat feeding the satiation of desire today.
After a few years of weaving that fable called a career at little (The Albuquerque Tribune) and big (The New York Times) publications, after the tenth or hundredth time of being asked to produce error-free and writerly and newsworthy arrangements of text on deadlines as short as 45 minutes or long as eight hours, my one-cup gift to this god became insufficient.
Our lord at war with Productivity, Fatigue, was no longer pleased with a single cup, and I suffered. The editors guiding the shovel of my fact-corralled creativity started to find holes: What about this? What about that?
This and that, this and that, I wanted to close this eye and that eye. I wanted to rest. I wanted to remember when I felt life, rather than harvested it for bullet points of success meant to assuage a weed of meaningless and disconnection that, some 30 years later, I’m sure was transmitted there by someone else, a seed shaken from the constricting vines encasing those older humans’ own lives that grew into my thicket of a story that sheltered and trapped me in equal measure.
But there was no time. Other gods required sacrifices. Knowledge and metrics and health and so many other ideas pulling my behavior like a train on tracks. They too needed my offerings before they would release the magical artifacts of meaning: cars and cancer-free intestines and houses and vacations in Mexico and a much better blender and protein powders and cards on Valentine’s Day. If I wanted to truly harvest all the the promises of a society built around converting the flowing vibrancy of life into the dead edges of convenient products, I needed a second cup of coffee. Certainly I couldn’t just stop. No, no. And become a mud-splattered zombie content with the miracles of breath, sensing, and connecting? While my checklist of American accomplishments turns into a stack of empty boxes scraping the sky before pursuing the stars?
One cup of coffee became two. Fatigue, placated, returned to Olympus or Heaven or Hell or Nirvana or the Upside Down or Valhalla or Jannah or the shadowy realm of dust bunnies beneath my bed.
It didn’t last. Two became three, three unto four, and then a greater unit called a pot took over. I did not gain more glory with the ever-growing gifts. Nope. I won the right to remain the same, to keep treading the toil-built wheel at success’s soulless pace.
From a distance, I look like a thirstier and thirstier machine running at greater and greater RPMs to travel less and less distance. Zoom out, and you can see millions of these machines like me. Together they meld into a massive vehicle called a country, the USA SUV leaking meaning through broken windows, frayed tubes, rusting shocks, disintegrating pistons.
You can see the broken people who have slithered into the breaking driver’s seat of this breaking machine. You can see them worshipping dead numbers, dead ideas, the deliverance of death. You watch them choose to sacrifice real human beings for their own little fictions, their own perverted gods, watch them call for more and more murder to staunch their own bleeding. The weapons and the shape of violence change, the greed and fear do not. They are the Aztecs all over again, the same slaves to power trying to glue together narrative consistency as the earthly foundation of that tale falls apart.
The RPMs grow. Sleep stops obeying alarms and chooses when to strike. The hollow men fill their mugs with flesh. I am pulled into their waves of desecration. The story slows.
Originally published on Substack.