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I renewed the domain.

I let it lapse because I hadn’t updated since August, because I had picked up a job at a different grocery store after the first one’s response to covid was a letdown that was destroying my sanity. I wanted to focus on work in the hopes that this would be better.

It turns out that working in grocery, literally at all, will destroy your sanity. My transportation situation fell apart and it was costing me half of my paycheck to go to a job where customers were abusive and entitled, management didn’t give a shit about us, and I was coming home to my house being trashed by my anxious dog.

I left by mid-March.

I don’t know what it is about grocery stores that makes customers so nasty. I’ve been in retail for about four years, but grocery has been uniquely terrible. Consulting my coworkers, they agree that even before covid this was the case. During covid, I’ve been watching my higher-ups discuss the explosion in profit that the shutdowns provided, planning ahead to profit off of the state store closures which gave us a near-monopoly on alcohol sales, planning ahead for the Superbowl to sell for parties that shouldn’t be happening…

It destroys your soul. Nobody I answered to gave a shit about covid. Or us.

When I was at my employee orientation for my first grocery job they emphasized the narrowness of the profit margin for grocery as an industry. A few days after mother’s day, the beer and wine manager reported a daily sales number higher than I make in a year.

Over triple what I made that year, in fact.

Between March and June, I was home with my dog just about 24/7 except when I needed to run to the store, or taking him to visit my parents for a few days at a time with the rest of my family. They moved away in December and I was maintaining the old house (admittedly, not very well) until I moved to the city.

I hated city living. It was fun in June. By July I was starting to have problems. By August I was in a prolonged mental health crisis. It was nice to be able to walk everywhere, but the constant noise, the sense of having zero privacy, the lack of trees and wildlife, and the fact that there was simply no way to get any kind of relief became exhausting. I moved in October. Not willingly, but I’m glad not to be there anymore. I live out by Lancaster now, at my parents’ new house. We’re revisiting the idea of livestock and looking into chickens. Maybe mushroom farming. Maybe bees.

My dad and brother keep bringing up the possibility of a goat, but I’m really not into the idea.

I do have the rough layout for the crops we’re trying to plant this year. It’s just a matter of making sure I have all my seeds in order and waiting for it to warm up. Maybe getting heating mats. Maybe getting grow lights. With 11 houseplants, a growlight would be a nice to have on principle. If it means more success with vegetable gardening, even better.

Which reminds me of another thing that came up during my employee orientation when I was freshly hired by the first grocery store I worked at: home gardens and small farms are a legitimate competitor that cuts into a grocery store’s profit margin. People who grow food and share their harvests can and do interfere with the deathgrip that centralized food sourcing has on us. Not enough to upset the entire system, but enough to help people ease off.

And I think that’s punk as fuck.