THIS FUTURE SUCKS

The story is simple: I’ve gotta hand out a customer. I’m not gonna tell you what that means, but it’s normal. I think my manager picked me because this woman is nervous and I have horse whisperer energy. It worked, she’s settled, and then she looks right at me and says ‘you have quite a good vocabulary.’

I have no idea how to respond to that. Social tank, no sale, flat affect. Not even sure what I might have said to earn it; my accent drives me up a couple notches in register compared with the locals. I think it’s a sincere compliment, but the unspoken part is loud. She means ‘for someone working here.’

‘I only say,’ [here’s the followup] ‘because I’m a writer.’

My cogs turn. That was what she wanted me to know. I’m at work which means I’m polite enough to pick up the stick and throw it. We have a brief conversation about her work. It comes back to how artists are struggling to make a living. I wish her a good day and go back to sweeping.

It takes me the rest of the day to work out why I’m so pissed off, and I realise it’s because she didn’t ask me a single question. I heard a lot about her work, which I’m not going to tell you, but she left without me mentioning my own writing once. I’ve gotten conditioned not to bring it up at work, that people will look at me like I’m a dickhead, but it would have felt good to be acknowledged as a peer for once. I talk to my teammate for a bit and he makes a big deal of me using the word ‘meticulous.’

We’re not rare for working dayjobs while we put out art. We’re not rare for working next to people who couldn’t create a smell after a curry. We’re not rare for being, y’know, interested in ideas, events, people, expression. We just happen to work here.

It’s so shit. Everything’s so shit. Goddamnit.