Life's Minutia Through Sci-Fi Lenses
While out on my run tonight, I was struck by some incredible imagery, and this short story began to weave itself in my head. This is a work of non-fiction, but it's written in the style of my Sci-Fi prose.
Taking the daily details of 2004 and putting them to text would give any vision of the future from the seventies or eighties a serious run for its money. It's amazing what comes down the pike without any of us really seeing it coming.
The smell of bacon assailed my senses all at once. I ran past the all night convenience mart, obviously preparing a bacon-egg-n-cheese, as my mouth filled with its taste. It was as if I were chewing on a piece of bacon right there as my fatigued, running sneaker clad feet pounded the pavement, my run taking me quickly past the source of the overpowering scent.
The air was wet and heavy, carrying the smell with such force that my brain was powerless to think of anything else and immediately focused on the fact that I could not decide whether I should miss bacon or not, trying to remember which side of the raw-foodist/vegetarian/unapologetic-meat-eater coin I had currently flopped to.
I glanced down at my palm, flipping back it's cheap leatherette cover and pressing the switch with my thumb. Its bright, hi-res screen winked to life, scrolling the name of the song that was playing, streaming perfectly from its compressed home on the little stamp of ram within the mini-computer straight to my ears.
The humidity saturated air created a rectangular halo around the almost too bright display, and I looked up briefly to make sure I wasn't going run headlong into anything or, for that matter anyone. If looking at street names and landmarks alone, I was hopelessly lost, but through the haze I could make out the purple lights of the bridge, not too far in the distance.
There were an awful lot of people on the streets considering it was midnight on a Wednesday in Astoria. I'd grown accustomed to running my little zig-zag pattern down to the water where people rarely ventured, checking out the view, and then racing myself in a straight path back, trying to build up my speed. I'd been slacking the past week, however, and wanted to change things up tonight. The run had felt fluid and easy as I started out, and before I knew it, I'd gone far enough south to ensure that if I had to walk back it would take me quite a bit of time, and fast enough to make the risk that I would be walking home a reality. That thought only occurred to me as I doubled over from a nasty little bowel cramp, caught in a strange pain that I could still probably ignore but was slowly beginning to realize that I shouldn't.
The stitch in my side had subsided now, and I had resumed running a while ago, leaving behind the strange, perfectly cleaned off ear of corn which had kept me company on the corner. I had sat there, butt firmly planed on pavement, trying to stretch out the cramp and ascertain whether I had ruptured some internal organ or not, pondering the array of city-creatures which had likely picked each kernel off the corn, leaving it a symmetrical work of art in the gutter for me to ponder.
My mind went into a sort of auto pilot as I mouthed the words to the music coursing through my headphones, plodding northwards, intent on completing my run without stopping after having to break for the cramp halfway through. Consequently, the road home, came and went, and I turned right a few streets later, swearing at myself for not paying attention and over-shooting.
I smacked the steel door of the apartment complex with a sweaty hand, "touching home base" now a part of my ritual, and moved from a run to a walk, stretching my hands above me, and making my "victory lap" around the block as a warm-down.
I was upstairs and out of my running clothes before the sweat had a chance to make my genetic skin disorder go itchy, and sat down heavily in the adjustable computer chair as it hissed out air. Ironically, the leather of the chair and sweat left on my skin managed to make my inner-knees itch like crazy anyway, but I wasn't showering yet.
I began to type, anxious to add another article to my blog. My daily readership was fickle and posting once or twice a day was crucial to it's growth. Anything less, and the new readers wouldn't come back enough to make it worth their while to keep me book-marked.
70 unique readers a day seemed to be my current plateau, even following a rush of coverage from some major blogs on the net. I'd recently begun to find my voice, favoring punditry and fresh content over personal rants and blind reposts of news from the net. It meant a lot more work for me, but it was winning over readers and had already won me some influential links in the blogosphere.
I shifted in the seat, moving the keyboard into my lap to reduce the repetitive stress injury from typing at a negative angle.
There was more technology in my living room than the NASA control center had in all of the 1980's combined, yet I still couldn't get a decent computer desk or chair for less than $200. I longed for my workstation at the office, and then winced at the implications of my workaholic nature manifesting itself to that degree. I was getting far too comfortable at the chair in my office in the city, and it was taking it's toll on my body. My nightly runs had been a direct effect of that toll - I was determined not to allow myself to slip back into obesity and "programmers butt."
To my right, another computer whirred to life. The little beige-box was spinning up its gigantic hard drive to record something or other on TV, doubtlessly time-shifting some import like Iron Chef of Most Extreme Elimination so I could watch it later and skip the ads. It shot the remote commands over serial cable and the cable-box readout dialed 0 6 6. I honestly didn't even know what channel 66 was. I hadn't channel surfed since putting the time-shifting box together for Christmas that year, and although I'd seen much more TV in the months since, I'd actually spent quite a good deal less time watching it thanks to the lack of reruns and ads.
Distracted, I returned to my article, did a few read-throughs for consistency and flow, and began to fix the typos. Of all the amazing gifts open source had given me, I was cursing Open Office tonight as it tried to "smartly" replace dashes with full hyphens, and insisted that I was misspelling triborough and really, truly, meant borough.
I searched in vain for an option to turn the fucking auto-correct off, and resigned myself to resorting to vim on the server to make the final edits before posting. I also reminded myself to make a backup before making the last edits, wary of losing another article to a hasty rm -f as I had the night before. Two hours of punditry about a mega-corporate food-chain had been reduced to a lame one liner about undelete on Linux. What a waste.
