"update"
He made you touch all those weird pictures with your moist fingers
I smirked weirdly at someone questioning my behavior
I trusted he knew what he was doing
I smirked blankly on top of a mountain
Thought of directionality, fatigued
I watched myself shift, satisfactorily, into something updated
Something I liked more
Being updated
I like it more
And hate everything else more, as a trade-off
We temporarily increased each other's sense of feckless rage
And drunkenly swifted into the sleeping clerk's cage
"blank moment"
"I feel innocent in this blank moment
I felt tired at the park with my friend.
Psytrance bass in the distance
I saw dogpoop
I spit phlegm onto Aloe before pooping
The strand connected to another leaf like it wanted to
I thought vaguely, “physics”
Before clocking in I imagined humans not knowing their heartbeat
We pretend to know ours
We were born four hundred years after we decided to return to knowledge
After being religious fanatics for a thousand years
But we know nothing
And I feel something nice and bad."
"This isn't a poem this is just a story about being at work"
A man who looks and acts like Robert Downey Jr. comes to the register to buy his two shirts. I ring him up. The total is nineteen dollars and eighty-four cents. I joke and say “That’s the year I was born. Just kidding.” He doesn’t laugh but instead says, it’s also a great dystopian novel- I affirm him to stop him from saying more and show that I am already aware of the very famous book-“That’s the world we’re living in now you probably don’t remember what it was like before,” and I affirm him more to extinguish his unprovoked streak of low-level conspiratorial behavior. He says he’s probably acting crazy and I just act like I know exactly what he means about everything.
-
The security guard complains of ailments throughout the day. Hunger, leg pain, general fatigue. At one point he approaches me and asks me directly, “Let me ask you something. Do I look sick?” I say “no Patrick you look fine.” Later he gives me a salty pastry that was quite good, a pastry from a bag of other pastries that a customer drops off to him. He says he can’t eat any of it. And is also allergic to Ibuprofen. At the end of our shift he buys a Giants hat for 5 dollars, a hat which he asked me earlier if it looked too small on him, I said no.
-
My newly hired coworker throughout the day talks to me many times at every opportunity after I inquired about what book he was reading during lunchtime. He tells me tales of darkness from his time visiting Las Vegas, where he apparently was dating a stripper. (He seems to be about 19 years old.) The book he was reading at lunchtime is called “CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU MAKE ME WANT TO GO BACK TO BEING A HOOKER.” We discussed vapes, cigarette types, and the apparent child-trafficking infested landscape of Las Vegas that Jose says he dreams of stopping, and that that is his true calling. Stopping child trafficking. Because the girl he was “working with” in Las Vegas’ mother was called Brooklyn’s Finest and was one of the hottest hookers or something in New York back in the day. Jose has two phones and was interested in me making beats for him to rap over, he also said suddenly to me “I need forty thousand dollars so I can buy this condo in Atlanta.” and I said I related.
-
A really beautiful woman who comes in and buys one thing usually was there today, she remembers my prank on her fondly where I pretended like her signature for the purchase wasn’t valid because she just did a scribble on the touchscreen (and we laughed about it.) I wanted her to talk to me and ask me out. No one has asked me out. I offered my technological help to an older nice asian lady with dark blue hair who carries a small white fluffy dog in her hands (who was sick the other day so she was without her.) She said she couldn’t figure out the hardware with her wifi setup and I told her I could come over and mentioned another time that I helped an older woman with internet off the job, when I was 18 in Northern California, working at T-Mobile. When the town burned down, it was a month after I was fired from T-Mobile. My boss and coworker Mitchie asked me if I was okay and I’m not sure if I responded. Later, years later, I accidentally called my boss when meaning to call my friend with the same name and he was suspicious when I said wrong number, but then explained who I was and what had happened. He wished me well. He would always mention how he used to be skinny, and how he used to be a talent scout. He was from Citrus Heights or somewhere adjacent in the Sacramento area. I also saw the older woman I unsuccessfully tried to help with her Comcast subscription. She was at the local park which was a grassy area with a large sectioned off area of the main river flowing in the city turned into a pool. She hugged me and we were appreciative of each others’ mutual survival. When I left her apartment when I was 18, she gave me a large bag of jewelry that was owned by her or her niece. I liked her apartment. Her name was Margaret Ann. She was probably about 65. Some people are incredibly kind.
-
I feel tired at work sometimes, and sit down on the temporary comfortable furniture that rotates at the front of the store. Men in trucks arrive and bring furniture in and out, and take rejected items, many of which are books I often spontaneously decide to sort through and put into a box. Even though many of the books I throw out are the ones I see the most older people looking at (self-help, diet books, unknown autobiographies.) I deem useful books fiction and usually don’t throw those away. Sometimes I go into the bathroom for a few minutes and sit on the toilet with the seat closed and look at my phone or myself in the mirror. When I’m on break or lunch, I usually try to step out of the store and go for a walk or sit on a curb and smoke. None of my coworkers leave the store when on break, and only Marcelino leaves for lunch occasionally. He is my age and has a boyfriend who he lives with, along with their two cats. He hasn’t been to many areas in San Francisco and lives a life like one would in Sacramento, or a suburb of Los Angeles. He plays video games and Facetimes during lunch with his boyfriend explaining how to get more XP in video games. I thought about him the other night and played Team Fortress 2 and enjoyed it.
