To Live

Retail work is hard.

Let's just put that on the table, where everyone can see it.  Take a good long look at that for me, ok?  Think about that really hard.  Now think about any worker at every grocery store, corner store, supercenter, clothing boutique, or other place where you can buy shit.

Depending on the size of the store, these people spend all day on their feet, moving things, lifting things, shifting things, bending, crouching, sweeping, mopping, walking, putting things on racks, inviting people to buy this thing or that thing, but mostly doing the annoying, monotonous work of making the store not look like shit.

And they do it all for minimum wage.

That could just be Meijer, where I work, that people are putting in that much effort, but I suspect it's pretty ubiquitous.

And it's HARD.

This is backbreaking, agonizing work, and even if you nearly kill yourself working, you still bring home a check that's barely worth looking at.  I'm not even including fast food and restaurant workers, because they have their OWN unique pile of shit to deal with that I can't even begin to address, because I've never done that work.

It saps the life out of you, though.  I feel disposable, used, and utterly interchangeable.  Because I am.  They don't need ME.  They just need someone, a body in the uniform to do the work and take the tests and move the thing and lift the thing.

I'm so tired of feeling like shit.  I ache, in a bone deep way.

I realized, the other day, that all of my fiction, as well as most of my poetry, it has the common theme of escaping, running away, and that's all I really want to do.  I want to get out, go away.  I always feel like I'm asking too much because I want consistent food, consistent ability to pay my bills, consistent shelter, but I know I'm really not.

And it's not like this shit gets better as you get older, it just gets harder and more frustrating, and that's so disheartening.  I even know that my depression's flaring up right now because I'm hungry, and that hunger and slight malnutrition contribute to the way my body is aching right now, but I know that's not the fullness of it, that is not the long and short of it all.

Why do we have to make it so hard to just fucking live?