Tomorrowing
The quiet art of arriving before you get there
The Janky Time Machine has a new noise. It’s the sound a kettle would make if the kettle were also a fax machine and also frightened. It does this whenever the chronometer (and I use the word generously, it’s a parking meter I rewired) loses track of which decade it agreed to visit. This time it set me down a comfortable distance up the calendar, in one of those airports that turns up in every era. Too bright. Carpet patterned to hide whatever the carpet has seen. A bookshop by the gates selling the one thing everyone in the terminal is too tired to need.
That’s where I found this. Top of the bestseller pile. Over a million readers, the cover brags, have “already arrived.”
Appreciate the situation with me for a second. I am a man who travels through time in a leaking contraption held together with hose clamps and DO NOT TOUCH tape. I go to the future. I do the thing. And the future’s number one bestseller is a book explaining that going to the future is the entire problem. Stop reaching. Stop leaning. Stop arriving. Sit very still and let tomorrow come to you, like a cat that likes you better when you pretend you don’t care.
The machine, idling behind me and dripping something blue onto the “authentically distressed” floorboards, respectfully disagreed.
Here’s what got me, though. Scrape off the incense and August might be onto something genuinely bleak. People up here are wrecked. The bone-deep kind of wrecked, where the hot new product on the shelf is permission. Permission to put the planner down. They’ve been chasing tomorrow so hard for so long that somebody finally worked out how to sell them the chair to collapse into. Twenty-nine ninety-five to sit in it. The Receiving Stance, trademarked, which you are not allowed to be taught, only to recognize, ideally once the card has cleared.
I put it back on the pile. Mostly.
I’ll have bought it eventually, I expect. The grammar up here insists on it. And the thing I’m taking home with me, along with the blue stains, is that the future really is fine without anyone sprinting at it. Always was. I just prefer to arrive the loud way, in a machine that smells like a struck match and screams like a kettle, while everyone up here learns to sit perfectly still and calls it getting somewhere.