Nine More Minutes Hats

Nine minutes is a strange and specific amount of time, and almost nobody knows why it is nine. It is not long enough to sleep and not short enough to ignore, and it is the unit in which a very large number of people begin every day — not with waking, but with a brief, sincere negotiation conducted at partial consciousness. The bargaining is genuinely impressive. Whole timelines get rebuilt in seconds. The shower can be shorter. Breakfast is optional. The commute has slack in it, probably. Every one of these calculations is performed with real rigour by someone whose eyes are closed, and every one of them is wrong. The alarm, meanwhile, was never an instruction. It was a proposal, and it opened the negotiation, and it will be back in nine minutes to continue it. These hats belong to the negotiator. The strangest part is that it never works. Nobody has ever arrived at the second alarm feeling better than they did at the first. The nine minutes are not rest — they are a small, doomed act of protest, repeated daily, against a day that is coming anyway.