The music is loud, the air is loud, the day is loud and it hasn’t started yet. We’re all wasting our time, but some of us have extensive angry justifications for it. But we cannot justify our time. This is an absurd proposition.
The breakfast isn’t ready. The tables are set. The orange juice sweats. The air shimmers and thickens and slips around the room like syrup. Entirely inappropriate 1970s party music is piped in, louder than any human could have the capacity to endure at 6:40am in the desert, just in sight of the cool and smoky mountains, always just outside the grasp for a city gasping for water.
This old man, fresh from the same fitful hotel-bed sleep as the rest of us, cantankerously up and bathed and dressed at this awful hour, stands before me in the willowing blast of hot air. And this old man has the audacity to ask me when breakfast will be ready.
Ready? Fuck, it’s ready now, if you’re clever. There’s no food. Soon, a dead-eyed woman who saw more terrible things before the sun came up than most of us will see in a lifetime will bring terrible powdered eggs and terrible dry biscuits and she will be proud because it is better than it would have been if she had not worked as hard as she did. When will breakfast be ready? To my undeserved and impossibly exacting standards, breakfast will be ready Thursday night, or Friday morning, when I escape the sucking gravity of this city and its bizarre mixture of broken glass smiles and pathways graveled with crushed spirits.
When will breakfast be ready? It is ready. It is over, and it has been ripped from the chaos of the universe and laid miserable before you on a plate which was only by the grace of god (and on the backs of countless miserable serfs) brought half way around the world from a kiln that burns literal children across an ocean choked with garbage and flotillas of the forgotten and the damned on a ship powered by deceit refined to purest greed to this table, for you to look at and feel better than. Perhaps it is you who are not ready, standing useless and looking between the room empty of eggs and the madman ranting about the world condemned for simply being born poorer than you.
Breakfast will be about five minutes late. Suck it up, buttercup.