A Day In The Life Of America

America wakes up early. There is much to be accomplished today, as with every day, helming the great vessel of liberty. Dawn arrives and America is out the door, hair wet with petroleum products, cup brimming with truly international spirit – five mornings a week scurrying towards the unknown, the maybe – and what America knows is what it earns on paper with full medical and dental, the perceived fortune, the rate of feigning compensation, the low altitude surmising, data swimming, carbon copying, the papers and papers and papers to validate other papers and the collectors asking for all of it back, the fixed numbers computing into patient, foreseeable ends, as long as America doesn’t panic. America knows when all is said and done that it’s all about the paper.

America saw this coming and so it endures. Tech booms, instant commerce, ones and zeroes, umbrellas beyond good and evil, instinctual liquid communication, all begat by the ink and the paper. Here it is, a dollar. This is the proof of survival, the record of eventuality. Behold the faces of my heroes. This is the story. All of America is written in the lines of the dollar bill, and America wakes up early for remembrance and reclamation. It knows what it has to do, it goes to work, and it embraces the inevitable.

One might suspect America has forgotten its own story, today, living through its hypothetical self, reflecting through looking glasses of mass frequencies, having lost hold of its ferocity. But to evoke the America of dangerous mythology and survivor of plagues is to reclaim the Idea of America. The Idea is America as Rebel. The Idea is America as steadfast insurrectionary, rejecting the huddled shade of ruins in someone else’s kingdom. America in its infancy was baptized in waters of recklessness, refusing to submit to any one will save its own, wailing incessantly through dissonant clamor and gun powder. Its primary manuscript spat mutinous claims into the face of the dying king, declaring each and every one of its defenses along the way. America was and is and always shall be the insurgent son, even as mendacious father. It was for spite that America roared its rebel yell. This is both its infection and its excuse for forgetting.

America takes a short lunch because there is still a lot left to prove. The story didn’t end yesterday at the edges of the ocean, after America had spread into every crevasse and across each desert a bold new incentive for efficiency, after it had lay waste to incumbent cultures and bordering rivals, no, the story must persist with the same blind fortitude as is natural to its bloodline, so it means America can’t take a long lunch. America’s grandfather didn’t take long lunches in the middle of dodging bindlestiff thieves at transit camps or hammering stakes for a dollar a day, one pair of pants, one pair of shoes and two meals plus the weekly pouch of Bull Durham for rolling one’s own. The Idea is manifest in dirty fingernails, in time deposited and demanded for the story, in the sacrifice of days. And America knows the legacy of an era relies on the maintenance of worth, which in turn means that America must prove the almighty dollar again and again.

In any fraction of a second now America could strike it rich, fat filthy rich, and so after lunch there is talk of streamlining, focusing to targets and various formulas of sizing and sourcing, increasing and diminishing, all of which adds up to America growing stronger each day. The numbers are almost incalculably vast, the pie of far too infinite proportions for any one set of hands to grasp, and so America is forced to share and gamble, but only to help make it appear even. America rolls without fear and never shows its bluff while the game is being played, and it’s always being played in the afternoon. This is when America speaks. America deals gratification in fistfuls, stretching its dollar into fourth and fifth dimensions. It shaves off each corner of exchange, it puts names and operators into the air between hands, and the dollars multiply and multiply throughout vacuum regions of plastic indentations. Credit is America’s dangling carrot, its flashy promise of immediate delight drowning the coughs of rabbits deep in their holes, and the globe spins to chase this carrot because at the heart of mankind is a hole that needs filling and nobody fills it better than America. America knows how to give. So the entirety of afternoon’s zeal is dedicated to manufacturing and producing the right medicine, the right way, for the right holes to fill, and pouring without flinching until the flowing stops. America knocks off a few minutes early if things work out all right.

At home America demonstrates its abundance. It eats too much too quickly from places too faceless for reproach, and it throws away the scraps. It chooses from thousands of regularly scheduled programs. It lie dormant with stimuli, fatly tickled over the same seven melodies as the evening before, watching for its own face but never finding the perfect fit, unsure of its own skin. America could stand to sweat more often. Its tubes are filled with everything every day, things that held on too tightly, things that are repeated, and it tries madly to forget. It drinks to forget. It laughs to forget. It makes love to forget. And yet still, still, still there’s the hunger, the thirst, and the ever-emptying void, waiting for whatever is next. Maybe America is next, it thinks. Maybe just maybe there’s some space on that mountain face for my head, for me to be beholden. And so it watches itself and waits.

Approaching midnight, America tries in vain to reconcile cries of its millions upon millions of anguished faces, wearing eyes that have seen every place there is to stand or float, all asking why - why did you sell me down the river? Isn’t there any more to value? America tastes the bile soaked hulls of African ships, face down with shackled wrists, and it tastes the price of its money. It tastes the cruel staleness of the dying heart in paper. It smells leather searing through flesh, and it rolls from side to side, holding its stomach, trying to shake the truth away. There will be no reparations for some acts. Some sins will go unforgiven. The fool’s gold will only shine for so long, and on some distant tomorrow America will have its reckoning. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow will make up for it all. Yes, tomorrow, says America yes yes tomorrow yes.

posted by ZHorton at 1:01 PM