Retail Feet

I haven't written anything other than book reviews, emails, and tweets in three months, and the reason is my day job working with horses. I cannot adequately communicate how hard I have pushed my body in these months. I feel as if I've used every single cell, from scalp to marrow, to work and sweat and breathe and then work some more. 

The physical burden of these months has reminded me of the job I hated the most of any I ever had, selling women's clothes at the mall. I used to cry at night because my feet hurt so much. I cried when I cleaned the dressing room mirrors in the morning, feeling so trapped and aimless in the recycled mall air. I was miserable beyond belief, and part of the reason was that my body was not built for the job. I asked my coworkers what they did about their feet hurting, and they just shrugged. I asked if it drove them as crazy as it drove me that the music tape repeated every 2 1/2 hours, that we heard the same songs in the same order every single day for months, and their answer was along the lines of "what tape?" 

Both these answers boggled me. Hot vines of pain wrapped around my feet by the end of an eight-hour shift; I thought I'd rip the speakers out of the ceiling and hammer them to pieces if I heard "The First Cut Is the Deepest" one more goddamn time. (To this day I shudder when I hear one of the songs from that tape.) The other people in my life at the time mostly worked retail too, and my complaints puzzled them. "Complaints" doesn't really cover it; working retail crushed my spirit, melodramatic as it might sound. Everyone else was like, well, yeah, it's retail. It was like pointing out the brimstone and the demons burning you on the ass with pokers and hearing, well, yeah, it's hell. Get over it. 

My best explanation for this is that I'm not built for retail. It takes a specific constitution to withstand retail: physically, you need the feet for it, and mentally, you need a kind of psychological reef on which repetitive behavior can break without breaking you. I don't have retail feet, and I don't have a retail mind. What I find absurd (Kafka-type absurd, almost-funny-but-horrible) about this is that out there in the world, retail is considered a low bar. Anybody can get a job at the mall. But coping with that job is, for some people, a labor that will destroy them, while others can just shrug indifferently. 

Mine is not the hardest job at the barn. The guys who muck and feed work a lot harder than I do. I feel ashamed that I can't do as much as they can. But I don't have retail feet. When I get home I have to rest, aggressively. It's embarrassing that I can't bounce back, have to treat myself with Epsom salts and excessive couch time, but it's how my body is built. I had to accept it back in my excruciating days at the mall, humiliating as it was when everyone around me met the demands of retail without a flinch, and I have to accept it now. 

Because of owner vacations and COVID, my workload was much heavier across August and September than it was for the first seven months of the year - right at the time when the weather is the most demanding. This summer I've done nine-hour days, walking 10 miles and climbing 500 vertical feet and lifting one 20-lb saddle after another onto the backs of moving 1200-lb animals, in 95F heat. And then went back and did it again the next day. Which means that my rest periods have extended to almost all the days I don't work. Which means that I haven't written anything. 

Since my job as a writer is largely about thinking, the almost-year of this job has been overall good for me. It seemed at first like working at the barn half the week, totally out of my head and into my body, and then working at my computer the other half, totally out of my body and into my head, would be a perfect life. 

But I don't have retail feet. 

Although I haven't produced much of anything new (and I miss it, and I want to, and I'm a literal year behind on finishing just a single essay, and I really want to start a new long project, really bad), I've continued to submit old stuff. That has led to a pretty significant publication coming at the end of this month, God willing. 

Also, a hybrid essay I wrote in I think the first class I took with Higgs, or maybe the second, got published in Wig-Wag. It was rejected twenty-three times before Brad Efford accepted it and then blessed me further by wanting to make very few edits. Now that it's in the world, some of the smartest people I know are telling me it's incredible. I want to be humble about this, but the truth is I know it's incredible. I know that every sentence in it is deliberate, that its threaded-together layers of meaning make it hard to parse but worth the trouble, that it was rejected so often because editors didn't get what it was doing or because their publications weren't daring enough for it. I included a slew of obscure, flashing references to critical theory and a comment on Fred Astaire's hands that the reader won't get unless she already knows the story; deal with it. I don't care that the Sun would never publish an essay like this because it's too weird, too disjointed, too up its own ass; it found the right market, and it's finding an audience (a small but excellent one) because I wrote it exactly the way I wanted to and withstood the consequent rejections. 

If you're a creator, I'm not going to urge you to do the same, because it's not any fun to write and [attempt to] publish this way. But "Bright White American Smile"* is writing only I can do, and I feel wonderfully content with that. 

*This is the title I chose for the essay, but Wig-Wag's format means it didn't appear that way. 

Its publication means I need to update my website, like really bad, and assemble a newsletter to go out when the end-of-month publication happens, if it happens. I've been putting these tasks off for MONTHS. Partly, you know, retail feet; I've been really goddamn tired. But also ugh. I have to figure out what book reviews have appeared since I last updated (March?) and link them all, and then try to fix some of the buggy pages since the last Wordpress update, and then redo my Favorites page and also the home page since it's all **Ceremonials Is Just Now Out in the World!** which is no longer true, and blaaaaah. Website work is usually satisfying to me, but I've put it off so long that it's turned into a regular old chore. 

Other stuff going on: I watched Lost across the last few weeks. I really liked the character work and the wide-open imagination, but I was annoyed as fuck at the dropped threads and hand-waving. I'm left thinking about how men act when they're hit by the thunderbolt, how they move the earth for the women they love, in the same way I've given long thought to male regret. Both ideas underlie a lot of art by men (...all of it???), but they aren't often on the surface. 

I hit the six-month wall, and so did Matt, but it's breaking. I've been cross-stitching in a frenzy, and I made this (pen for scale): 

I'll be participating in a virtual reading through Vroman's on October 26. It's a reschedule of the triple-play ghost-girl-books reading that Gayle, Jennifer, and I originally put together for April. I hope you can come, but if you don't even want to, truly, I understand. I think I've been to one virtual reading in six months. 

And to Think, All This from Jesus vs. Santa

And now I'm over 60,000 words. This is downright surreal.

There's so much I want to tell you about this book. So many details I want to share giddily with Matt while I'm writing. So many aspects which I feel are full of win, from character development to cool vocabulary I've invented. But I know it's not at all the thing to do, both because I'll give it away (on an individual level) and because I'll be opening myself up to thievery (on the wider blog-on-internet level). So I'm having to spin in my own little circle of happiness about what I'm writing instead of spreading the love.

This would all be a lot easier if I wasn't on such a flaming roll, writing thousands of words every day. All I want to think about is the world I've built, and all I want to do is create more inside of it.

Partly for this reason, I'm kind of dry for what to write about here. I thought of writing about this picture, which appeared on Kotaku the other day and spun up all kinds of interesting commentary in my head about gender and pinup art and what women are attracted to. But I didn't think anyone would be interested, so I chucked that idea. I thought of discussing my various writing plans in the near future, but they're all twisted up with my personal life and that was too far in the other direction, away from commentary and toward navel-gazing.

Oh! I know. Over the past few months, I watched the entire berth of South Park available on Netflix. I'd seen most of season one, some of season two, all of season nine (for some reason), and scattered episodes from all the others (the essentials, like the Scientology episode and the Scott Tenorman episode). In all, there were 221 23-minute shows available on instant watch and I'd probably seen a third of them. I loved the series, cheerleaded for it, but still hadn't seen the majority of it. I finished last week, with the last episode of season 15, and even I am genuinely astonished at exactly how good South Park can be. It's subversive to a level that little else in our culture is, it's intelligent to a degree that funny shows virtually never are, and the only adjective I can think of that sums it all up is necessary. America badly needs every effort possible to bring us down a few pegs, whether out of our own self-obsession or out of our strict prudishness about vulgarity and absurdity, and that's possibly South Park's greatest purpose.

One of the complaints I read over and over as I looked up context for the individual shows was that the series picked low-hanging fruit to skewer. This is not an unfair criticism, but the show also bothers to make it well worth your while to watch it skewer the topic in its own especial way. More than just "ha ha, Mormons are so funny," the approach is "let's make a musical about the real story of Mormonism, and the laughs will take care of themselves."

That's the other thing that frankly amazed me. When it wasn't being blatantly absurd (the U.S. military is probably not trying to open a Stargate into Imaginationland), South Park was always factually accurate. The retelling of Great Expectations, the basis of Scientology, various laws of the United States, certain history lessons: the creators unfailingly did their research, and everything was bang-on correct. That makes me respect them even more. A lot of creative types wouldn't bother, and I don't think anyone holds South Park to a particularly high standard of responsibility aside from its own creators.

Just as I was finishing up season 15, I read this article on Slate. If you're too lazy to read it, it lays out reasons why marathoning a TV show is a bad idea. I can't remember when I agreed less with every one of the basic foundations of an article (unless it was just nonsense, like this bullshit). Episodes have their own integrity? It's better to consider TV characters as pals who hang around in our living rooms once a week than actors whose performances we can watch at our leisure? And recaps and commentary are worth reading?? Dude must have been smoking some of the good stuff.

Matt thinks I should write a full-on magazine essay about why marathoning TV is so awesome and worthwhile, so I'm not going to blow my wad about it here. But after absorbing roughly 60 hours of South Park in the last couple of months, I'm here to tell you: in great ravenous gulps is totally the way to watch a series.

Now go watch South Park for yourself. I have writing to do.