I’ve been counting candy for the past half hour.
A lie: I’ve been counting packages of bubblegum, pharmaceuticals, and potato chips all afternoon, but probably only moved onto the candy ten minutes before my break, which is now.
Inventory is always a hard day. I wake up cringing and falling asleep and eventually make it over here and unlock the doors just as one could start to see in the sky that its going to be another cloudless day. I do all of the same opening procedures, sometimes rigidly moving my arms while i complete my work, as if i needed to pretend that i’m a robot.
Today we have to count everything in the store. We do it once a month. Walk around with clipboards and lists upon lists of each product, each flavor of bubblegum listed, every kind of batter separated by letter and number in the package, and then we count. Once a month I find myself squatting between the rows of condoms, marking down magnums and ribbed for her pleasures.
At lunch I read a story by Sherman Alexie, a writer I pretend to have opinions about and don’t, because I’m not from Seattle, and if you’re not from Seattle, the only thing you know about Sherman Alexie is that he wrote Reservation Blues, which I did not read, because my introduction to women’s studies professor dropped it from the syllabus midsemester.
In his story he talked about working at a 7-11 here in Seattle, and really his story was about bigger things and other places and other narratives and identities, just like my life now is about pretty much everything except working as a university barista. It felt good to think about Sherman Alexie as a cashier. He got to write Sonics Death Watch. All Is Not Lost, you know? But then I realized I might have been reading fiction. And the narrator might have nothing to do with Sherman Alexie, and I won’t know until I read the whole book, or look him up, or write him an email.
So now I feel robotic and dumb, instead of just robotic. Which is hard, because robots, by nature, aren’t dumb.
