I could feel

In the last two years, being single has meant having more sexual partners than in the entirety of the rest of my life. If I had to count the numbers, I wouldn't be able to. It's that many.

In that same span of time, whenever I've been in an intimate setting, I've been completely numb from my upper thighs to my belly button. That's not a metaphor. You could have hit me in the dick with a sledge hammer and I wouldn't have noticed.

But last night, last night I could feel her breath. Her tongue. Her fingers lightly skating along me. I could feel the heat as I entered. Ripples as I slid further inside her.

A baby crying

This woman comes up to me while I'm stocking the shelves and she asks me if there's a baby crying somewhere in the store or if it's just her. It's not just her, I say, there's a baby crying in the store. She says, she thought so. She says, she just wants more than anything to pick the baby up, to calm it down.

Ever seen a baby intubated? I have. Ever seen a baby come out of their mother's body, and someone raises their arm only to have that little blue hand drop as if it had weights attached to it? Those babies came out quietly, no crying, no screaming. But a not screaming, not crying baby, that's not a calm baby, that's not quiet baby, that's a dead baby. And, in a few minutes if nothing changes, if no noise comes out of that baby, it'll be permanent.

My head perks up, my eyes turn to the left, my upper back and neck go rigid as soon as I hear a bump or a crash in the store. When the wailing starts, that's when my body relaxes. The screaming is what allows my eyes to refocus on the task at hand.

Walking dollar signs

Some anglophones, when I tell them about my job, they ask if facing is when we turn the labels French side out. No. It isn't. Nobody does that.

The company I work for is a corporation. It only has one value, making money. That's it. It cares about making money. If I were to actually make sure that the labels weren't just showing the product name, but actually showing on a particular side, that would take me extra time, and cost them extra money. They aren't interested. Ideally, for them, facing will be done so that half the labels are French, and the other half are English. Why? So that anglophones can find their products as easily as francophones. So that they can buy more stuff. So that they can spend more money. The company I work for doesn't care about separation. Culture. Language. Francophones. Anglophones. We are all just walking dollar signs.

Smile

Opening a box, one of my bosses, the one who only ever talks to me to tell me what to do or that I'm doing something wrong, he comes up next to me. I'm stocking the shelf, thump, thump, thump, and his box rips open, and the contents move from box to shelf as if there was a poltergeist in the store. They fly into place. I can't even see his hands. Thump, thump, thump, goes my cans, while he collects his now empty box and leaves.

Our job seems to be about stocking shelves, but it really isn't. If they wanted the shelves stocked, they'd hire twice as many people and have them work half as many hours to get everything shelved in half the time so that customers can buy them, but that isn't what they want. What they want is people in uniform working in the alleys. That's why we stock the shelves in the afternoon and face the product at night. So that we'll be in the alleys. Because my whole job is about getting food to customers. I stock the shelves so that the product is there to be bought, I face the product so that customers can find what they are looking for, and I'm in the alleys eight hours a day, so that when they can't find it, they can ask me where it is.

Most every customer who asks for help has a smile on their face. After getting your attention, they almost always apologize for interrupting you with what you're doing, as if your job wasn't explicitly to help them. And after you help them find what they're looking for, there's usually more that one thanks thrown your way.

Today, looking at my forearms and hands, there's little nicks and cuts, little lines of red, or dead white skin that's hanging off, but no blood. My fingers no longer bleed at work.

Their moving van is a hearse

When I was a kid, I don't remember how, but I knocked over one of my mother's plants. I was alone, but I knew my mother was going to be back soon and I needed to clean up the mess. I righted the pot, and stuffed as much of the dark moist earth as I could back into it. From the closet I got the vacuum cleaner and ran it over what was left. Which is when I smelt the burning smell, the one you smell when you first turn on the heaters every year, followed by flames leaping out of the vacuum cleaner.

I didn't pull the plug, or turn off the machine, I ran to my neighbour's house. In tears I told her that the vacuum cleaner was on fire. She came over, looked at it, no flames. I can't remember what she said or did, but I do remember that by the time she left I had stopped crying.

She and her husband are moving. The FOR SALE sign on their front lawn has a SOLD sticker plastered against the front of it. Over the years, our relationship has mostly consisted of saying hi and when I had forgotten my key, they'd often get a knock on their door to lend me the spare. So, once they move, I know I'll never see them again.

We're all in this together

It was our first class on the first day of basic training to be taught by a commissioned officer. We were all training to be non-coms. The thing about a commissioned officers is that whenever you say something to one, you have to end your sentence with sir. Or, begin with sir if asking a question. It's a pretty simple rule and we were taught it right before that class. But one of the guys, one of the guys could not remember to do it. The first time he gets called on it, he says sorry, and the teacher says, "sorry what?". Even when apologizing for screwing up by not saying sir, he still didn't say, "sorry sir." This quickly led to him getting twenty-five push-ups assigned to him, to which the lieutenant (pronounced left-tenant) says that he expects to see him perform them during the break.

Come break time we're all outside, and he walks off a bit in order to do his push-ups. And one of the guys, he sees him and he says to us that he shouldn't be doing them alone. That we're all in this together and if he has push-ups, then we should all have push-ups. So we all walk out onto the field, and we all drop and do twenty-five.

Four and a half by fifteen minutes

When I tell a friend what I do for a living, which I've only done over the phone, I say, "promise me you'll laugh when I tell you." No one has disappointed me.

It's a four and a half minute walk from my computer to my punch card for work. That's an important number to have if you don't want to arrive earlier than you have to. To walk to the gym, it takes me about fifteen minutes.

That's the size of my world now, four and a half by fifteen minutes.

Stocking shelves

My shifts are from noon to nine on the days that I work. Perfect hours. Noon is too early to get together with friends in the morning, nine is too late to get together with friends at night. Perfect for making sure that I don't have a life outside of work.

But what about the days where I don't work? Well, those days, those days I never know what they are until the last minute. There is no fixed schedule, it differs from week to week. The work week goes from Sunday to Saturday, and they give out the schedule on Fridays. Meaning if I have Sunday off, I only know about it two days in advance, although really only one day because by the time I find out what my schedule is, it's too late to make plans, I'm already at work.

This morning, after waking up but before getting out of bed, I had one of those hazy semi-awake dreams. The ones where I know I'm awake in bed, but there's images happening in my head. The images were of me stocking shelves. The instant coffee jars with the rubber edged lids that are so easy to stack. They're on sale this week, two for five dollars.

Lifers

There's two types of employees at the grocers. Students and lifers. Everyone's either under twenty or over thirty. At the cash, you pay someone who's either still in secondary school or someone's who skipped going to their reunion because they didn't want to say that they make their living as a cashier. There's only one Most Likely To Succeed in every graduating class but nobody thinks their career will involve standing in front of a cash register eight hours a day.

My boss, he's a lifer. Been there twenty years. Twenty years. As he says, that gives him the right to not do any more facing. So, after twenty years he's been able to switch from facing to ordering. He's moved one step up the ladder.

On breaks, you can see the two groups split up. The young smokers go to the right as they leave the building, the lifers to the left. So far I've been hanging out on the left side.

Blood

There's blood on this keyboard. A little red stain gets added every time one of my fingers jabs on a key. My fingers are a little torn from the new job.

All afternoon, I get boxes filled with product, break them open, and put the new stock on the shelves. If the stock has a best by date, I pull all the old out and put the new in the back, otherwise I push the old to the back and put the new out front. Simple.

The tricky part is breaking the boxes. Most of them, you use a box cutter and voilà, stock is ready to go. But some of the boxes have a little symbol of a box cutter with a line through it, some of the boxes have no tape. Those boxes, those boxes you jab your fingers into them, into the dark insides, grip, and you rip them open. But at that moment when your hand goes in blindly, it's like when you were a kid at Halloween parties, putting your hands into a bag of peeled grapes or cold cooked spaghetti, except instead of wincing at the eyeballs or the intestines, you get a sharp intake of breath as a box corner digs into your finger, or your finger hits something solid and the skin that holds your nail to your finger tears.

The evening, after supper, we face. If anyone ever tells you they know what facing is, feel sorry for them. Realize that they've done something you are ecstatic you've never done. Facing.

Ever been to the grocery store, looked down the aisle and noticed that every thing was fully in stock and all the labels were facing out? Well, they aren't fully in stock. After people bought product, an employee went over and faced. They pulled the product from the back of the shelf to the front, and then turned it so it was label out. Ever notice how long an aisle is in those grocery stores. Ever think about how many shelves there are? How many products there are? Every single one of them needs to be faced. Every single one of them.

And that's it. That could be my day every day. No variety. No change. If I want it it's there. And eventually, after working it long enough, my fingers would get used to it. There wouldn't be pain every time I stab my fingers into a box blindly. I wouldn't leave little red splotches on product labels. There wouldn't be any more blood.

He's looking for work

Earlier this summer I was waiting to get picked up at a gas station. I was standing in the shade next to the phone booth when a truck with a trailer pulled up. The trailer had a giant lawnmower, the kind you sit in, and other gardening equipment in it. The guys came out of the truck, sat down on the lawn, and started eating lunch.

This other guy comes out of the dep attached to the gas station, walks up to me and asks me if I'm on my lunch break. I say no, but that no is drawn out with a question mark at the end, noooo? He says, you're not working with them, nodding his head towards the truck. And I tell him I'm not.

Then he walks over to the guys on the lawn and he tells them he's new in town and he's looking for work. They say they're full up at the moment, but they make a few calls and get him an interview with another outfit doing the same kind of work.

There's been a sign for a few days at the local grocers, saying they're looking for employees. I shave, shower, trim my nose hairs, and head over. I do my groceries, and at the cash I ask for an application form. Halfway through filling it out the manager comes up to talk to me. I start tomorrow.

Dynamic situation

All anybody really wants, all anybody really longs for, is a static life. Writers know this. A story begins when you put someone in a dynamic situation. The person in question works to resolve it. When they succeed, when staticness is achieved, well, at that point, the story is over.

Of course, some static situation are more so than others. When your financial policy is borrow money to pay for anything you need, well, one day the credit runs out. That happened to me a few weeks back. Living off credit may sound dynamic to others, but when it's happening to you, it sure feels static. It's like being at a party and pouring drink after drink, logically, before the night began, you would have known that that kind of situation can't continue forever. You'll either throw up or pass out. But once you're in the drink, you just keep pouring and pouring, because you know that as long as you keep drinking, the good times will keep on coming. The party can't end once you've started drinking.

Well I've thrown up. I've passed out. And there's no more credit. Just a bunch of letters with words like owe. And collection agency.

This is what a writer would call a dynamic situation.

Action

Love is an action word. I can't remember where I first heard that, but I've always liked it. It means that what happens in your head isn't happening at all, it's only what happens between you and others that matters. That actions are your relationships. Actions are your life.

"You either move now or later, so why not just move now?"

"You have the choice now to leave or not, but pretty soon you won't have any choice."

"You do realize, right, that you can't live there with your condition being what it is?"

A couple of months ago my grandmother fell and she couldn't get up. Not holding on to the edge of the bed, nor the night stand. She crawled to the stairs, let her legs go down a few of them, and with her legs lower than her body, was able to push herself up. At the top of the stairs. My father related the tale to me as a humourous anecdote. Which he found less funny when I told him that elderly people often suffer from Orthostatic Hypotension, which, when a body is moved from a prone to a standing position, results in a rapid loss of blood pressure leading to weakness, dizziness, and feinting.

Ever since, her children have wanted her to move out of the house and into a residence. I listen to my father on the phone trying to convince her. Standing next to me I hear him say, "mum, you'll be having so much fun there, you'll be too busy to see me. Oh, come over today? Can't there's a bridge tournament. Tomorrow? No good either, getting together with all the friends I met here."

He talks to her everyday on the phone. They all do.

When I've expressed concern over how they treat her, as she jokingly says, she used to be their mother, now she has three fathers, he says I can talk to her if I'd like.

And that's what got me back on my bike, to talk to her. When I got to her place, we sat down in the living room, and I said, "I'd like to talk to you about how you feel about your health, the idea of moving, and how your children are treating you. And I want to make it clear, that I have no opinions on you moving, I just want to make sure that your wishes are being respected in all of this."

And so, we talked.

Fine

Needing to get downtown, I got on my bike for the first time since the accident. The pedals are warped, but usable. The gearbox is fine unless I go into the lowest gear, at which point it ends up in my rear spokes.

The path is the same as I took last time, and when I get to the point where I fell, my mind blanks. I know I slowed down as I approached the area, I get a flash of twisting the front wheel left and right a few times, but that's it, a memory hole for that area. Had there been a car in the street like the bus was there last time, I would have collided with it. Thinking back to those flashes, the front wheel all over the place, I'm lucky I didn't fall again.

After that section, I was fine.

Coming home later that evening, riding through the same area a second time, fine.

My bosses bosses boss

Having lunch with my old workmates, they're talking about work. Telling me how the projects are going. Who's working on what. How the company has fucked them recently. It used to be our big joke, how the company fucked us on a regular basis. Things like how they were planning to take away our chairs to cut costs, which made sense because we spent most of our time bent over our desks anyways.

They're my old workmates, of course, because I quit my job years ago. They were the technical writers that I had to design the online help file for. The way it worked was, I would come up with elements that would make the help file easier to use and more functional, based off of my knowledge of computers and usability, and my boss, a technical writer, my bosses boss, a hardcore programmer, and my bosses bosses boss, a marketer, would veto many of my proposals and force me to implement changes that they wanted, based off of their knowledge of "that's what I like".

Naturally, since they were paying me and it was a help file for their software, I did what they wanted. I put hidden links on the page that could only be found when people randomly moved the cursor around the screen. I made links invisible to the eight percent of their client base who are colour blind. I put main menu drop down boxes that were accessed by hovering over the name of the product, rather than, say, the words Main Menu.

Afterwards, the conversation moved onto them making fun of me for enjoying independent films and music. Calling me a snob. When they asked me if I'd seen the big summer blockbuster, I had to say no. No, I hadn't.