Segal's

I worked at Segal's last night for the first time since this summer. My shift was from 6:15 until 12:30. I forgot what that place was like, that one indeterminate smell that's stuck in your nose within about 3 minutes of being in there. I think it might be from the fans. We had to wash and clean and squeegee and soak all the stands where the vegetables sit, Segal's is much cleaner than you would think. When the cooling fans underneath were turned back on, that musty, long-sitting-vegetables smell came surging back.

Handtrucks are the tool of the work. You can have a real swagger with one, they turn so quick and push so easy that it's easy to look really blithe even with sixty pounds of carrots. it's also really easy to crash into things when you have an unwarranted swagger like i do, i blithely, accidentally gashed a large bag of grain once swaggering by. Handtrucks also make the work sort of useless though. When I had first started working there I imagined that I was going to get jacked working there carrying stuff but it was made lamentably easy. I never got muscle-tired at Segal's, only the useless weariness of standing on your feet for 7 hours, it's a really underrated misery. When I worked there over the summer, the real difficulty had been not carting the yogurt but the feminizing, small and petty labor of depositing it in the shelves. Crouching and stacking and stretching out little fingers was the difficult part. Especially in the yogurt section; there, the fridges were covered by these thick plastic curtains sort of like in a carwash that would trudgingly push against you to retake their rightful place.

i feel sick and do not want to write anymore. i don't want to apologize to joanna, i am not a bad person, i don't want to see anyone.