How could I forget how toxic the mall is?\u00a0 The miasma of capitalist nihilism.\u00a0 The poisonous classism of the upper-middle class against the working-class goons who sell them their gewgaws.\u00a0 The screaming children.\u00a0 The way the mall security stares askance at any person of color.\u00a0 The suspicious predominance of Spanish-speakers in the janitorial staff.\u00a0 The crushing desperation of so many of the workers.\u00a0 That shit is living death.\u00a0 How did I forget?<\/p>\n
It is, after all, one of the major reasons I quit that job in the first place.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve grown un-accustomed to living my life with heavy shielding.\u00a0 I like being open, clued in, with one hand on the heartbeat of the world. It\u2019s not safe to be that way in the mall.\u00a0 It\u2019s like being a plague doctor with an immune disorder: you\u2019re tempting Death.<\/p>\n
I work in two different kiosks for the company, in two different malls.\u00a0 The smaller, less prosperous of the malls is easier to manage: I picked out a set of four matching steel rings and borrowed <\/strike>\u201cmodeled\u201d them all day, using them to regulate my in\/out like a gas masks.\u00a0 It worked fine, with minimal effort.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The larger of the two malls, however, was more of a problem: more prosperous, with a more \u201caffluent\u201d (higher pre-tax income, overextended on debts and a lifestyle they can\u2019t pay in the post-crash economy) and psychically toxic clientele, more in need of free therapy in the form of abusing retail employees and jewelry to reinforce their crumbling middle-class racial and gender identities.\u00a0 Keeping that space clear enough for me to work without setting anyone on fire required a daily application of a pentagram banishing rite.\u00a0 Yeah, that\u2019s right, I had to go back to a banishing rite. I hate banishing; I would much rather invoke, conjure, or tune.\u00a0 And it worked.\u00a0 Barely.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve made it through, now.\u00a0 Tuesday was my last shift until I need to work over my next break.\u00a0 And don\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to make rent.\u00a0 I love having a roof over my head.\u00a0 But I need to find a new source of greenbacks: one where I\u2019m not selling and fixing slave-made baubles for petty asshats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How could I forget how toxic the mall is?\u00a0 The miasma of capitalist nihilism.\u00a0 The poisonous classism of the upper-middle class against the working-class goons who sell them their gewgaws.\u00a0 The screaming children.\u00a0 The way the mall security stares askance at any person of color.\u00a0 The suspicious predominance of Spanish-speakers in the janitorial staff.\u00a0 The … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-B","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}