1. The first half having been given up to space, I decided to devote my remaining life to time, this thing we live in fishily or on like moss or the spores of a stubborn candida strain only to be gored or gaffed, roots fossicked out by rake or have our membranes made so permeable by -azole drugs the contents of the cell flood everywhere. The bubble gun I’d bought on Amazon had come, so flushed, time’s new novitiate, I stood outside the door in velour slippers with a plastic wedge, from M&S, the toes gone through, and practised pulsing softly on the trigger, pushing dribbly hopeless sac shapes out, dead embryos that, managed all the same to right themselves to spheres, and bob as bubbles do, the colour of a rainbow minced or diced into the ornamental tree, or else just brim the fatal fence, most out of reach of the toddler capering side to side to keep his balance on the grass, one snotty finger prodding like a rapper turned jihadist’s threat of threat and all, ten seconds in, unskinned of radiance, re-rendered air. This would have been in that sad hobbled stretch of week between a Sunday Christmas and new year, my friends all 40+, harassed by infants, joylessly still slugging Côte de Beaune and fennel-roasted nuts, the liver detox books not downloaded to app but only browsed by phone in the dark mornings, slitless. (I lay there worrying at my own which had the meaty bigness underrib of foie gras entier. The pillow case smelled horsey, sheets unchanged, the laundry everywhere, mountainously.) It wasn’t till my birthday, Jan 3, when schools went back, search engines saw a volume spike for ‘custody’ and gifs of sullen cats with emery boards explained the dead-eyed un- sheathed fear produced by credit card repayment plans and pissing on ketosis sticks that the month could manifest the rawness of new year: poverty then, and mock exams; now, enzyme supplements, and softening the 11s, scooped one layer deeper by all that red wine, by summer’s oxidative damage. 2. The dry trees lolled in drunken groups outside front gates, waiting for the council van to come. Today, which was my birthday, macerated shit in nappies from the 24th, threaded by the bin in links, by twisting, like short sausages or poodles fashioned from balloons, was binned along with bean tails, tonic bottles, nails, a mini Lamborghini’s snapped-off wheels, a magnum bitter round the rim with old champagne (that halitosis smell), and twenty near-identical reception Christmas cards: a stippled snow-hung tree a bloated, ravaged robin. My son propped on one hip, front door ajar, both shivering in the not yet dawn, the heating just about to crackle on — raised up his palm in silent pleasure at the work being done. One man, his shoulders dewy with reflective strips, waved back and called him by his name — the weekly ceremony — until he bristled in my arms legs stiffening with joy. 3. Downstairs I mixed some Movicol into warm juice and saw a squirrel run across the grass, freeze skinny as a meerkat on the mostly mud I’d tried to reseed twice last summer. (After moss killer, waiting, something ferrous, the shady lawn seed recommended by a friend eventually produced, as if by staple gun, a few sparse fiercely emerald reeds which died.) Both boys had scrambled over look! and when they turned away behind the mouth and nose breath diamonds, fading, the squirrel was spray-digging, pelleting again, even though he must have polished off his nuts by Halloween. We’d seen him, bushier then, a baby really, slyly going back and back, as we did on school coach trips to the battlefields of Ypres ripping through the Monster Munch long before the sickening ferry with its waffle smell and slot machines, the textbook poppy fields we’d seen on Blackadder, now stretching flatly, forever. I suppose the squirrel didn’t know the days would stick like curtains catching on the outer edge of the metal track, the yellow fleur de lys a half inch less wide open every morning. I knew that I could probe it, hey Siri, do most squirrels make it through to spring in their first year of life in urban environments, but the fact that I was always ladling porridge as he dug, donating raisins, doing calligraphy with smooth or crunchy peanut butter — there was that whole jack-o-lantern month, involving apricots, when it rained — only added to my sense of having been complicit in his losses: the bad grass, the Amazon deliveries that kept coming in white Toyota vans, the part-thawed corn cobettes siloed in their own brown bag, spongy with a mortuary softness that repelled me. He’d seen all that. The boys must be upstairs — a long withdrawing roar of Avalanche! the scuff of falling cushions — so I grabbed a handful of cashews and stood, unseen outside the window, scattering them contritely on the mud, around the reeds now colourless, and the small quill of his wavering tail. 4. It being my birthday I was standing there, lost in the screen, the screen the same for reading on and writing this, for writing to, for finding out how many steps I’d taken yesterday/ in March last year, when I had spotted, bled, the algorithm always and upbraidingly concerned with sensed decline: a higher average headphone volume, deafness beckoning, and fewer steps, an upward trend in weight from these slack days around the year’s end picking at the Roses box, and making desperate cupcakes from a bbe last August box mix (the dribbly icing misty on the spoon, the wafer dog — a fireman — loosely hanging on) morbid obesity, then death. Its view of future time was, In a sense, so frictionless I envied it — that whole fin- de-siècle confidence: if history wasn’t progress it was Untergang, Déclin, the line traced out as if a ball dropping from the balltoss met the racket’s sweetspot swoof
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence