The community kick it around

Already it’s January 4th and already I am wanting every take about this time last year to wash off the stories and podcasts and everywhere else, but hey, here’s mine. Prosody counts. I think.

-

at the grocery store you’re standing on a stool pushing cookies up and your mask is on and probably a beanie because it’s January and the heat keeps breaking but especially where you wprl and all day it’s been like this on the one hand you mostly just feel sad for the hollowed out coworkers slinging cheap wine and trending feta cheese secretly checking their phones stocking shelves or in the back but you feel bad/don’t feel bad/feel bad about not feeling bad for everyone in the store downright peering at their phones in line ashen willing to tell you it all and that’s when you are tasked you are honored with a task or taken to task and it didn’t start with democracy it did not

the woman who at first you feel bad for she asks you on your perch about an item she forgets the next one and says sorry you know i’m just so distracted and you nod it’s been months at a grocery store with spitters and cursers and being a bouncer with no weight behind you keeping Good People from their aforementioned cookies and cheap wine she’s so distracted say yeah I mean that makes sense there’s a lot going on and she comes 6 5 4 3 2 1 peers in your eyes intones You have to Save Democracy the joke would then go Ma’am This Is A Trader Joes and you almost say it but you’re holding the cookies and you say well i guess and she keeps going Us People Like Me My Generation We Fucked It Up It’s Up To You the store radio is probably playing disco which you always like even though everyone hates it and if you don’t get cookies up you’ll run out of your inventory hour she says Save Democracy and you do it you say well listen a bunch of my family is from _____ so honestly I’m not really quite sure what democracy means anymore she says Much More Important People Like You Your Family People from Ireland Germany Poland which is not really at all related to you and you can’t seem to follow I’ll try my best you say you see her for months and you ignore her later that month your pa turns 70 and holds a glass of cheap wine says I guess I’ve been in countries during four coups now and ends it there

you tell the story to a lot of people I used to work at a grocery store One Day I was asked to Save Democracy then A Year goes by when you say it again your brother says They Are Just NPCs and you learn an NPC means non playing character people in your life washing up against you like simulated peddlers, princesses, poor beggers where you click A Yes I Will Take Your Task or B Ignore you say to him I don’t know man I think she is the hero of her own story, her ability to tell me to unfuck it up and he says Oh Oh that’s right i have known all my life what it is to be an NPC with endless tasks which is okay or What It Is if i have to say it i can see the heroes of their queued up save point stories their reactions as journeys honestly other than the main characters with a line in all my lines that’s the way the cookie crumbles