Contactless

I notice I am being overcharged for my coffee, but I still tap my card. The screen on the credit card reader glitches when I hover over it due to, I guess, some kind of magnetization. A split-second glimpse of a primordial residue in the flow of optimized life. I don’t say anything until after I pay. The manager arrives with annoyance in his tone at the new hire and I offer not to accept the partial refund, but accept it nonetheless.

I sit in the corner booth, a persisting unease prevents me from reading or writing as I intended to and my mind drifts towards fragments of the absolute. I think about the ghostly signals that govern me beneath the veil. About the technology of nature and its omnipresent influence on my impulses. I no longer have reason to be here.

I think about my thoughtless walk here. How often I’ve left the house with no destination, always ending up at one of three places. Today, again, the expensive Japanese cafe. It is as though there is an invisible tunnel that connects my house here. In this tunnel I have no ideas, no perception, no momentum — just an infinite music library pulled from the air to pacify me. It is now raining outside, though I could’ve sworn it was sunny on my way here.

I have always been drawn to the glitch. The rarity of a glitch. I have always liked working on my obsolete laptop, forcing programs to overload into technicolor hellscapes. I like visual failure— programmed, definable failure. A sort-of rhizomatic collaboration between my own futility and the futility of a robot. And I think maybe the true function of forming a routine is to allow us to finding meaning; new movements at the breaking points.