It's gone forever. Just in case you forgot. Today, at any given point, will be gone in the span of a few hours. You expect "tomorrow" just to keep coming infinitely, day after day, but what you call "tomorrow" is gradually changing in to the next stage of your one-way journey through this life. It is never going to be quite the same day as this one. Human perception of time is called "chronoception-" and it's various malfunctions within the brain have been linked to things like schizophrenia. Many, many people have a sense of chronoception that isn't calibrated to the human lifespan- for whatever reason. So they push today's burdens and hopes alike off on to the shoulders of tomorrow- and the funny thing is, you can't just expect that it will always come.

Went to bed much earlier tonight after a long work week- I meant to get my 2 year old to sleep and get back up to write, but I knocked the fuck out as soon as he did. Somewhere in between that time of sudden sleep and his mom waking me up, the magic of subconscious undercurrents gave me the following dream:

Was driving to work in mid-week morning traffic. Slipknot playing on the radio, window down and a cigarette in my hand. Child walked out of nowhere in to the road and I swerved to miss it- went offroad and for a strange moment I felt the car rattle as it rolled over rough surface. Inertia beginning to propel my head towards the windshield and the very beginning of a fatal impact of my squishy body and that vehicle in to an unforgiving tree. The same type of messy scene I would have been responding to years ago as LE.

Blinked in that moment and I'm driving down a washboard dirt road in my childhood town. Familiar, but strange and artificial- houses look similar, landmarks resemble the snapshot of my memories. There is a stagnation and stillness to the air, almost a vacuum- no breeze, no ambient variation in the cloudless sky...just the golden light of a dead Sunday afternoon in nowhere. My first tipoff to suspicion is my inability to navigate someplace familiar- and stopping to get directions from several houses brings me interaction with various deceased friends, lost acquaintances and dead family members. All of them happy and quiet, but giving ambiguous and brief responses- the strange combination of being glad to see me in a relaxed peace, along with a sort of distraction- a knowing preoccupation without very much to say. And without much luck getting direction from them, I drove past the town's familiar old church looking for signs of life or clues. All I saw was a couple of limousines and the hearse. Some poor sucker had kicked the bucket, but it was only beginning to make sense why (uncharacteristically) no one had gossiped or told me about the funeral.

Then I heard my son's mom through the car radio attempting to wake me up. And back in to the realm of the living I went.

That slow, still and eternal Sunday afternoon- the peaceful and reassuring, simultaneously unnatural and foreign place where nothing has urgency or purpose. It's where we're all going.

Yesterday. It's gone forever. Just in case you forgot. Today, at any given point, will be gone in the span of a few hours. You may naturally expect "tomorrow" just to keep coming infinitely, day after day, but what you call "tomorrow" is gradually changing in to the next stage of your one-way journey through this life. Make it count, pumpkin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKEiUURUVR8