Late Night Penny Arcade

What could I possibly write at this moment? A day filled with writing and revising and reading for passages and fuck and here I am well after 1am and I feel the automaton at my back, as if I'm racing the maze, sustained argument long lost but somehow, incessantly, going through the motions (being gone through by the motions), feeling the pulse and move of "thoughts" in absence of anything particularly being on my mind. Is this the insistence of the letter? [Just look at the pool, not the reflected clouds going by]

Some 9 or so years ago I worked a register over some xmas saturdays at the container store in buckhead. Endless lines and every item, somewhere on its underside a sticker with a barcode that I had to pass in front of a scanner. How many items in 6 or 7 hours on the register? Then dreaming seemingly all night of one item after another and needing to find and scan that fucking bar code. That might sound better than the day's shift, dreams could present one with more interesting items, but all that mine gave was this endless sense of the need for speed, a methodical, machinic, procedure driving me though I was so tired even asleep. 

That sort of automaton at my back now, else I would not be writing this and am so simultaneously zonked, but I either sit and write or I pace and mull stupidly what I'll try to say about american exceptionalism tomorrow in light of what I have said about politics already. Ok, so why not?

American exceptionalism is a bit like . . .