each day a car Knievel had to clear
I literally wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.
Context
The day-counting fallacy made image, and Joelle's whole relapse history explained by it: proud of each clean day and lining them up like the trucks under a motorcycle jump, she made sobriety into an accumulating impossible arc — hundreds of cars stretching ahead, no one could clear them — and so she always broke. The cliché "keep it in the day" turns out to be literal engineering; the future, added up, is precisely the thing that cannot be jumped.