It is peculiar to se one of your friends just go. It doesn’t matter how many goodbyes you could say or even how long you knew about them leaving, it still seems sudden and startling like a dog running away or a grandparent passing away. Even though Wally has been planning on going into the Marines for a year and a half, after the first shock from the news, it slowly faded and seemed like it would never come. So much could happen in a single year that who knows if he would even keep his word or be mentally stabled enough to confront such verbal punishment and physical demand. Wally is a nerd like me. My first impression of him while I was started working produce at Meijer was that he was a thirty year old mentally handicapped adult but soon did I figure out that he was my age and relatively brilliant. He was a gamer like I was and not just a casual gamer or someone that just got into them for the new Call of Duty game or Madden but has been playing them for at least a decade. That is dedication to a subculture that I was specifically fond of. He also had this geeky charm about him and would embrace the hell out of it always quoting video games and would constantly be open about having in depth conversations about certain video games. We would break down the game play, the story, the originality, and most importantly, what the developers could of done better. Not only was he obsessed with video games which directly tied me to his side during long eight hour shifts at Meijer but he was also has written poetry so he knew the crucial strength of words and he knew a great amount of philosophy which was a subject I was starting to take great notice too. We would spend hours on topics of pride such as what was better 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons or 3.5. But sometimes we would partake in novelist discussions. He wanted to start one about how we were all controlled by computer engineers. One guy created us as a program to harvest energy. I would talk about my novel and how the government was using technology to rid us like parasites and only keep who they deemed worthy. We both loved science fiction and how it could ambiguously come true. Science fiction was like a prophecy and we thought we could blindly use our intellect to predict the fallacies of the future. We wanted to write the Future Testament and praise technology and redeem the human as a sacrifice to them but we undoubtedly never did because thus conspiracies would look bad to a piece of property owned by the government. But the best conversations we ever had, the ones that have probably changed me from a novelist to a general writer our the ones where we meticulously picked out the pieces to the puzzle of life.
“Why is red red?” Wally said one day.
Then we broke it down. A color is just a word. But he wanted more. He depicted a color being just for one person. Some people see red differently and we only assume it’s red because we say it is. But then I wanted more. It’s a subject I have only touched on in my poetry but it was finely time to express it to the public. There is our perceived reality which is our individual reality. What we say and see and think is actually true and it’s the life you are living now. But then their is the collective reality, the one that tries to blend all our realities into one. We can say whatever we want to for a color because the only judge is yourself but when we finally come down to telling someone a color they can either believe it or retract our answer and fill it in with our reality. It’s an easy way to say if someone is wrong then no one is right.
Then in that same week we started up another conversation on the legalization of drugs. Who is to blame the individual or the drug? My friend Kris who also works at Meijer said it was the drugs because he is a capitalist pig. If it wasn’t for the drugs then people wouldn’t get addicted to it. But my response and Wally’s to was just because someone gets addicted to a drug and ruins their life doesn’t mean that everyone that has taken the drug is inevitably going to do the same. I would say it is the individuals fault because he either is living a life that he doesn’t love or doesn’t know when to stop.
I met Walter Pratt three in a half years ago. I have been at Meijer for almost four years so that equals out to be one fifth of my life. I have seen my co-workers more then my family or friends. Through this uncontrolled direct contact and similar age with proper teamwork, it’s only so clear why, as a team, we got so close. We actually had a dream team that we would chant if somehow we all worked together in the same day. It hardly happened but it was the chance that kept us wanting it to. It never happened because all of our schedules were across the board. I was going to college, Wally was training to be a marine, Kris went away for college, Jared worked full time but would usually call off and Sean was going to college for the 2nd time as well. After such a successful department with back to back record breaking years with sales and profit and two wins at the Fiesta Day boat building contest, its only occurred to me that it was officially time to close the door on the place that has given me a living. Everyone is fading away into their career paths and trickling out slowly from the work we put so much effort into. I have over 4000 hours logged and that doesn’t count the twenty minutes early I showed up for work and the half an hour breaks I took at all, the times that I talked about Meijer or the stories I recalled or the discussions I had on it’s corporate dilemma out of work and in.
It feels like the end of an era and my body and mind are starting to become more nostalgic then usual. The same thing happened when it was the end of my girlfriends first year at college. I lived in here dorm room while I went to Columbia and got to know her floor mates pretty well. It’s getting close and open to people and then as soon as it feels like you finally know someone in this over populated sphere then it’s time for their memories to be formally terminated. I don’t like to dwell on the past because it upsets me when I don’t do it the way I should have. The side effects are beginning to show when I still come into Meijer on the weekends waiting to be called back by prospect employers. Productivity feels at an all time low as our dream team begins to lose dedication because everyone is rumoring of leaving. The efficiency to is plummeting since we are all in the liminal period between decisions. We can hardly care about a part time, hourly wage job anymore when we have to much on our plates to witness the debacles occurring between shifts and team members. It feels like Christmas Day when family tensions is on the breaking point and Judaism and Christianity is waging war at your local movie theaters. Everyone seems to be complaining about the same people while the complainers are hypocritically doing the same things that they complained about half an hour ago. They tell me that the girls are just talking and not working but when I am on the floor they are never to be found.
Even though the horizon is still blurry and I never really thought that I would actually be quitting Meijer, I feel like it’s a perfect time to slip between the cracks and bow graciously to the crowd. The dream team can finally hang up our aprons and call it quits in unison like we always talked about. All the policies seem to be changing and one way that we used to do things as simple as stocking are changing to pinch a penny but take away our creativity and output. They want us to be robots that they own on our scheduled days and I as with everyone else are panicking over this radical paradigm. Meijer always prided itself on fake statements like familyness but this isn’t how I have ever been treated. Yeah, I have been ignored and talked about behind my back but I never got scolded for doing a task they told me to do. This seems like they are just punishing us for the enjoyment. Quitting is the safest bet to make but just like any familiar action leading to a sudden turn, even when these things are planned months in advance, our still saddening. It’s not just leaving the work behind that I hardly cared for but the people are going to be righteously missed. It’s not like we are just quitting but we are all leaving/moving that makes it crushing because the memories will leak through the cracks of amusement and be forgotten like our faces. We will never come back to such a slave ship but our kinship will weave our development together. We changed from adolescent teenagers seeking spending money to adults needing to provide for ourselves. Time is always changing but the stories will remain the same, stuck where they need to be when you are looking for a time you hated but loved in the same moments.
No comments:
Post a Comment