I ate a burger

Some people show up and the lights are already on. of course they are. Switches work, water runs, things are just... functional; and some people don’t. Not poetic “darkness,” mind you, literal dark. Like you know, you can’t see your hand past 7pm, like night is a real constraint, like you plan your life around the sun or prepare candles or you’re screwed.

thing is, this isn’t not-so-distant history or a story written in mythos. This is now. You and I are in same timeline, are same species, but the three of us have totally different baselines for what “normal” even means.

One kid grows up thinking medicine is a given, food is just there if you’re hungry, school is boring but inevitable. Another kid, same planet, maybe same state even, knows water comes from a well, and if you’re sick, well, you just... deal with it. Or you don’t.  And everyone kind of knows that’s how it goes.

There isn’t one human experience. That idea’s kind of bs when you look at it. It’s more like billios of separate processes running at once, all labeled... whatever they were labeled at birth, all giving a different output, none of which line up at all. When people say shit like “what it means to be human,” they’re usually just describing their own narrow and tiny slice and pretending it’s universal. It’s not. It never was.

We have numbers that could be mapped to a map of the world but we don't do that. Data like who ate, who didn’t, who had access to meds, who died from something stupid and preventable. But we don't. Why bother? Someone has to haul those bricks or man the turret. And, I sure as shit am not going down the sewer to clean it and I don't think you will either.

But being born into less doesn’t make you less. If anything, it drops you into a version of reality that’s a bit more honest and strippedd down. You see how people actually behave when things aren’t padded and softened. People with comfort sometimes have to get smacked hard by life before they learn that stuff, if they ever do. Most don’t. Some just float through, insulated, clueless.

Atleast, that's what they would like us to think. But reality is that understanding things in a more "honest" way doesn’t fill your stomach. Doesn’t keep a kid from being hungry. And that’s the part that kind of sits there, ugly and unavoidable, no matter how you try to frame it.

So, then, tell me now, how was lunch? I had a burger from Burger King.