On an early morning, when your body is powered only by the adrenaline of waking into a dark Earth, a lot of things are glowing. The clay-pinched lidcorners of your eyes focus them (your eyes, that is) like binoculars, and like magic, the sky suddenly enrosens. Trash bins, greener at this time than any other, are small hash marks in your field of vision that help you gauge the space, the distances between. The bins modify your sleepy eyesight, giving you a sense of texture and depth for the first time since yesterday; they are smaller and closer together the further they sit down the street, a special gift of depth perception. In the back of your head you feel pleasant magic. Wet and warm, in the back of the skull, the occipital lobe feels great. The sensation of perceiving low, yellowy light on the shiniest edges of objects both feels terrifically sunshined and cozy, like a cat stretched out in a bright patch on the carpet. You are familiar with the golden hour in the evening, when the sun falls, scrapes itself against the horizon, and drops its good blood onto tree leaves, causing warm golden pools, toasted skinshine, and other beauty. The sunrise is nothing like this. It’s quicker, you squint and think I should not be seeing this, in a humbling moment very unlike the lazy entitlement you foster before nightfall.
So you have arrived at the morning light, with your binoculars and bin oculars, so to speak, the air is lighter, more high-altitude (that is, it appears to be, like your synesthetic displacement of the hum of an airplane cabin onto the similarly pink clouds outside your window), and as you have already noticed, a lot of things are glowing. Puddles are especially reflective, and windows, and metal baubles on fenceposts gleam, and so on. You are looking down a street, and to your delight, there are many more textures and watercolor shades. There are right angles, some flat slopes, browns and bricky oranges, warm blue, disconnected neon behind glass, sidewalks, trees. It’s still- you would feel relaxed and unwatched if not for one thing. The unifying accessory to your scene, a monument of two golden arches osculating on a forty-foot pedestal, hanging above, so bright it’s nearly translucent, glowing and catching the gold, a sponge for sunblood on a red prismic platform.
The enormous McDonald’s sign is the colors of this morning at all times of day, on all days, so it is sort of the god of this time (in a barrenly etymological way, if you’ll forgive me, the zeitgeist). It is the literally shining example of sunrise perfection, as it achieves what parked cars (and discarded Coke cans, open/closed signs, and bench ads) strive for during sunrise, and does so completely effortlessly, and with total confidence. Every single thing in the world is swaying slightly during this time except for the unmovable geist, the McDonald’s sign.
The McDonald's arches tower high above the street. Standing just underneath, you experience vertigo, and a mild fear of being crushed. It is the kind of gut fear that reminds you that you are an animal. The arches are the glowing eyes of the predator that is this part of the Earth, as natural as a shrinking cat pupil.
Simultaneously, they are a witness mark of the culture you take for granted. The world's most recognizable corporate symbol watches rooftops. You often think of security cameras, but not of the giants who are always looming over the street. The Googie design was meant to remind you of luxury once, walking under a glowing, futurist arch and into the sharp frontier of affordable instant gratification. There is a drop of brutalism, too, in the hard molded edges of plastic, the thickness, the masculine imposition in space. This is a shape carefully crafted to evoke images of power and wealth.
Back to the first kind of wonder, though- the natural kind. Let’s consider how it makes you feel like a mouse. You look up at something enormous in this morning light, where everything is uncanny and glowing and alive, and it is special because you are witnessing it alone, or nearly alone. This hour is the one where nothing is for granted, because it is very still and very fleeting. You don’t, of course, take any of it for granted, and you pause to look down at the light that with each passing minute becomes oilier. The golden arches are a dreamcatcher in this landscape. Or, no, the orchestral conductor. Or, no, the lightning rod. They are so high up, and so much bigger than you, and morning light will never pass through your bones like that, and your blood will never be as red as that rectangle. And as if you needed a reminder of what it could mean to be eternal, it reads: BILLIONS AND BILLIONS SERVED.
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