haavi🦐

Yesterday, for the first time in nearly 8 years of working retail, i had called out sick when i felt perfectly fine. The day before had been incredibly stressful, a sunday afternoon in a grocery store for 8 hours is something that could kill someone whose hands have never touched a trashbag or a screwdriver. But the Star Coworker, a 30+ year old man who moves with a frightening speed and speaks in a deadpan nonchalant manner at all times, had hurt his back for the first tine in my presence. He left to an urgent care, leaving me with no help that night but a very small 70 year old woman, and her 16 year old grandson. With the weight of personal drama with old friends of mine weighing on me, i had hurriedly whack-a-moled empty shelves while mentally straining to not be teary-eyed the whole time.

A Monday morning afterwards for this particular Greek-immigrant-owned, white and orange tiled floor, New England based grocery store establishment, is always one of putting Humpty Dumpty back together. Without a delivery between then and Saturday, a Sunday night ends with many shelves left empty (or filled with a substitute), awaiting fresh produce the following morning. Trying to do the job of the top two hands at deck (myself and the aforementioned Star Coworker) had wrung me dry enough, that, when i overslept my alarm that morning, I called out sick, putting on my best impression of a tummy ache, claiming I threw up. A sort of guilt washes over me typing all that up. Being surrounded by an atmosphere of duty to New England's greatest low budget grocery store for 50 hours weekly, for more than half a decade can do that to an underdeveloped 29 year old mind. My mother, noticing my car atill in the driveway, later reassured me that, if I decided it was too much, it's for a good reason.

Did I do anything productive yesterday? No. I had opined online about searching for job openings at UPS "or something", but I never so much as looked at their website or DM'd that one gay furry I follow on twitter who has four Ford Crown Victorias in my city about whether or not applying would be a good idea. But I looked up visiting hours for a local art museum, thinking maybe I'll see something interesting or fun there, and found that they don't open their doors until Wednesday to Sunday, every week, 10am to 5pm, which perfectly places those open hours within time I am undoubtedly either going to, leaving, or at work. I didn't leave the house, I drank two cans of monster energy out of curiosity for their unusual flavor, and removed piles of clothes that don't fit me from my room into a vacant guest room next to mine.

I dipped my toes into Asetto Corsa with my budget racing simulator setup: a Logitech G29, an H-pattern shifter plugged into it, all bolted onto a cheap frame in front of a leftover office chair. A setup that takes up an uncomfortable amount of space in my room, but would be a large ans exhausting hassle to disassemble and stow away. It was the only taste I can get of an extremely expensive hobby I dream of having, amateur motorsports. The whole concept is a framework that, within, I could lose myself, comfortably into pursuing an assured and absolute goal, regardless of my skill level. A 3,000 pound machine that burns gasoline to propel itself up to 150mph will never ask me if I want kids someday, how I want to be remembered, loved, what kind of career I want to have, or expectations I have for a future. All it asks, is to get around Autodromo Piero Taruffi Vallelunga as quickly as possible. And the best part? I don't even have to fix the car if something goes wrong. I can make as many mistakes as I damn well please, even slamming into a concrete barrier at full speed, and there's no aftermath to be dealt with. No heart sinking glance at repair bills, or probably hospital bills as well in that example (lol), just a pure unbridled focus into how awful I am at managing understeer without a handbrake lever to pull.

Eventually, I found myself joining a group discord stream of skating videos. We watched, in awe at the spectacle, of Baker 3 and Fancy Lad's "Is This Skateboarding". Skateboarding is something the youth do, isn't it? The broken bones and bloodied limbs of teenage boys is a common sight to see when the light rumble of plastic wheels upon pavement is heard, and yet, when I was a teenager myself, my only taste of this world was video games. I was too scared of hurting myself. Making mistakes, and embarrassing myself with potential visits to a hospital, large bills paid upon my.. widowed? Does it count as widowed when you're divorced and aren't dating anyone, but your ex-husband died? My single mother wasn't exactly ready to be paying hospital bills for failures in me amusing myself. So skateboarding was so far out of the question for me that such a question was never asked. I had my digital friend, Tony Hawk (and Bam Margera) to satiate the expression of freestyle street skating, and in my young adulthood, my only taste of such a thing is driving a Subaru during a snowstorm. A method of self-centered locomotion that only came into my lap because the failures of American infrastructure demand it. The bridge across the Merrimack river, going past a gas station, with an immediate right turn onto a highway ramp that splits north and south, with the northward ramp leading to my workplace is recontextualized into an exciting 25 second serpentine rally course on snowy mornings. For that brief moment, I feel the same connection Ken Block did decades ago, between rallying motorsport and skateboarding, the lamentation that the artistic freestyling one enjoys while street skating is an exceptionally expensive endeavor when one tries to translate it to the automobile. The youthful spirit of dancing without music.

We don't have nightclubs in this city. We have anti-woke bars, Toronto-named restaurants, neon green dispensaries that sell kratom and ketamine, and recently-legalized casinos that drain what little they can out of the most financially desperate that remain here. Many a gas station and corner store echoes the same pre-recorded repition when a lottery ticket is cashed in for a single dollar, a passionless "congratulations, you're a winner", as one waits to purchase a single beverage or $5 candy bar. The Aviation museum doesn't interest me, as the prospect of flying a plane is something left to either the obscenely wealthy, the overworked commercial pilot, or the bloodthirsty imperialist. The Millyard musem is one I have already visited during a school trip, its stories of rampant 19th century resource and labor exploitation are one I am overtly familiar with. It was the largest cotton mill on Earth at the time, after all, and we all know how cotton was harvested in the 19th century, before the civil war.

With this cynical lens I have of my surroundings, why had I never left? Sure, there was an unusually long period of time after graduating high school where I lacked that sort of agency, but I have saved enough money to keep paying rent for nearly a whole year with no income at this point, and I have never thought of trying to explore things outside of this 50-hour-per-week cycle. Something I keep hearing in favor of this stagnation is Job Security. Even with rumors abound of something afoot when the CEO is ousted and replaced by hi sisters, the people of New England are still intensely loyal to the supermarket that refuses to progress itself beyond the year 1994 (for better and worse). Financial risk-taking is something that was hammered out of me in the multi-year wake of my father's death. Even as I became self-sufficient, it feels like a waste to just let go of this opportunity to only pay $600 a month, even with no savings goal in sight. It's the sort of fortune that many people in the world would kill for, and some even have been killed for it, if pro-military propaganda is to be believed. And yet, I feel guilt in wanting more. More than just money, it isn't even that much that I have, in the grand scheme of things, but there's this paralyzing guilt in trying something different. People being proud of me, telling me I do a good job, all this praise for normalcy, is another plank in the mental barrier of even thinking of something else, built upon years of wasting away in a room in the back of someone else's property in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the wilderness when my mother and I couch surfed in the late 2010s.

There's this internet famous anime from 2007 that I believe anyone reading this is overwhelmingly familiar with. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I have a strange admiration for the titular character, not out of old-school waifuism in the slightest, but because her character arc is realizing the key to finding fulfillment is something she has to take in her own hands, and she even has a comical unawareness in her agency for the outlandish things she wants to experience. In the first arc, she is intensely annoying to those around her, her directionless ambition, boundless in enthusiasm, but so aimless she is like a bull in a china shop, is something the narrator of the light novel, one we only know by the nickname "Kyon", finds himself dutifully managing to minimize the casualties of her selfish antics. Eventually, he finds himself embroiled in the supernatural happenings that surround her, as her wish upon a shooting star from years ago has granted her an unwitting omnipotence of summoning a time traveler, an esper, and an alien cyborg to her unofficial after school club.

Sat in the attic of a rented colonial era home in the outskirts of Concord, New Hampshire, huddled in front of a $50 LCD TV on the floor (because the ceiling was too low for proper furniture), with my PS3 playing each episode for 10 minutes before needing a refresh to continue playing the episode on kissanime in its web browser, I was enamored by how eerily familiar this TV animation felt. Even as I see more thematically deep TV anime in the years since,with more emotionally moving and more mature subject matter, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya still stands out to me. She felt like seeing an old friend. If there was a term like "waifu" except for an anime character you only wanted to hang out with, that's the word I would have used for her. In that time my mother and I were couch surfing, I hadn't seen my high school friends in person for a very long time, even as we kept daily contact through multiplayer games and instant messaging sites like Skype and Discord.

It was shortly after discovering this show that I started working this shit retail job, and my projection of myself onto its themes was something as simple as "I have money to buy video games with now". But in recent weeks, I think it can run deeper for me. Maybe I should explore my options like she did in episode one. The Real episode one, not the ridiculous film the SOS Brigade made on a shoestring budget that introduced the IP to the non-light-novel-reading public in 2007. Or maybe my memory in the years since I last watched has muddied enough that I'm looking for a simpler way for to explain how I'm starting to realize I have more agency in my life than I thought I had, and my awkward social stumblings are a symptom of holding myself back for so much longer than my peers. I usually kept to myself for much of my youth in fear of the many faux pas i have committed that led me into shaming myself into silence. Those little mistakes I made socializing with others back then still weigh on me harder than they really should. I still remember shooting down a girl that wanted to go with me to the 8th grade dance because I thought being seen with an awkward girl who was way taller than me would ruin my social standing somehow. I have this bad, lifelong habit where when I make a mistake with something, I give up on it forever, even when it's just hanging out with a group of people.

Maybe the biggest mistake I have ever made was avoiding even the slightest chance of making any mistakes whatsoever.

A few days ago, I had driven about 100 miles out to a non-profit theater in western Massachusetts to see Jaws (1975) to see a 4k remaster made for its 50th anniversary (shoutout to Iris for the invite! I'd love to do that again sometime. Maybe my tenure at work makes my schedule more flexible than I thought...). Something people always say about Jaws is how scary it is, and how it was The First Blockbuster, but not many mention its deep-rooted New England identity, and upon reflection of how I had such a blindspot, I womdered if I have such a New Englander identity myself. Is my birthplace and home something that's ingrained itself into my values, my interests, and whatever else can define who I am? The can of Narragansett brand beer Quinn is seen drinking isn't something I would have recognized until fairly recently, nor were the coastal cottages turned small businesses that lined the streets of Amity Island that likely still look like that today.


As I stepped out into the parking lot of the cinema, the mountainous forests in the distance were intensely familiar, but the small town before me, with the oddly specific speed limit in its treets of 25 miles per hour were something that felt unfamiliar. Were these two locations a truer New England Experience than the one I lived with? People seemed closer out here, more in touch with humanity than my own home. The people on the sidewalks weren't too poor to afford a car, stumbling to the nearest 7-11 for barely-legal pills, or a few pints of $1.50 Natty Daddy beers, dumping used opioid needles in the street, or lugging their laundry to a dilapidated laundromat, but lazily milling about, empty-handed to cafés, sub shops, or even back to the cultural landmark that was the theater I had just stepped out of... But it was still the same region of the United States I have always been in, for nearly 30 years. Was I too sheltered as a child to consider these My People?



Well, let's start at the beginning, with the history of a city I called my home during my entire schoolgoing childhood. This entire paragraph is written with barely more than a minute of research, so bear with me for any large omittances; During the early nineteenth century, the Merrimack river, after a few decades of colonial settlement, was slowly, but surely, converted into a major hub of New England's textile mill production during the Industrial Revolution. This area was colloquially referred to as "The Manchester of America", had the largest cotton mill in the world, and was even officially incorporated as "Manchester" in 1846. After the civil war, supplies of raw cotton went dry (wow, I wonder why that happened?), but by then, the many mills had diversified into various refineries, factories, and assemnly plants for paper, cigars, rifles, and, obviously, still clothing and thread made of other materials.

The above paragraph feels relevant, because, as a child, I was always fascinated by mass-produced products of all kinds. Mechanical devices, electronics, tools, clothes, if I ever lost any of my personal belongings, another copy was sure to exist out there somewhere, its shape and purpose already familiar to me, despite my hands never touching it, my eyes never laid upon the example. Many others my age would point to The Simpsons, Dragonball Z, or Spongebob as their favorite TV programming at that age, but mine was How It's Made. I can never replace the loss of my father, but his beloved 1991 IROC-Z Camaro, 1981 Corvette, or 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee, his DVD collection, his dozens of pocket knives, sunglasses, leatherbound multitool, his favorite brand of cigarettes (something in a white box with a gold triangle... Winston? Marlboro? I don't smoke, I wouldn't know for sure), even if bound for the landfill in the past 15 years I've spent without ever hearing his voice again, were still out there, copied perfectly.

I wouldn't go as far to say that art & culture is suppressed in this city, but it isn't exactly largely supported either. It merely exists, because great art can be born from anywhere, from anyone, and needs the appropriate amount of capital in this world to be born. I can only name 3 cultural exports off the top of my head; Toby Fox, Adam Sandler, and the film Mystery Team (2009). None of these things feel central to me, unless you mean Central High School. Yes, that's how lacking in creativity this place feels. The biggest high school in the area is called Central High School, it's named that because it's in the center of town. There's another one called "West High School". Guess where that one is.


The sections of this place are so clear, it's visibly a slow expansion from the banks of the Merrimack river, each one further out a clear mark of eras of American history; the area surrounding Canal Street, named as such as it was the former site of a canal, is full of former industrial mills comverted to various universities, apartments, restaurants, cafés, offices, etc. All that remains is a pharmaceutical plant with its smokestacks (well, steam, probably) billowing next to Queen City Avenue as unruly motorists cut each other off at 50+ mph in a 30mph zone on the bridge next to the highway onramp that leads to Boston. The hydroelectric dams upstream still power this and the various metalworking and auto-repair shops that lie a few miles east of the Merrimack, and the surrounding ghettos in that area are where I spent my childhood.



Freshly fired from his job as a car dealer at a Dodge dealership for temporarily losing his license for a traffic violation, my father reluctantly became an office worker for a short time too early in my childhood for me to remember more specific details than that. Maybe the office job was one of a frined of his, or he was a janitor, maybe my mother was the janitor, I'm unsure, but I remember playing with a LEGO set of a battleship in what pathetically counts as a high-rise building in a state with a population this low and oft-forgotten. No matter which of the three dozen+ floored buildings it was, it certainly was less than 30 floors up, I doubt any of them exceed that number. It is from the window of this building, and from the tops of the rolling hills of the ghettos and suburbs that I can see the beautiful mountainous forests of this region, its many evergreen flora, and the slight burnt-firewood smell of the petrichor here that have been an ever-present background for my entire life.


I wrote all of this without an outline, a smattering of what comes to mind about my origins, how it affects a sense of identity for myself, in order to see what would spill out in the paragraphs above, and I think what's lacking in this is something that feels truly human. But what do I even mean in this self-critique... I think I just didn't interact much with other people around here when I was younger. The New Englander was a character on a screen, an amalgamation of Stephen King's protagonists, the old man who would Tell You The Story, Tonight, On New Hampshire Chronicle, the Scout from Team Fortress 2, because many of my classmates were children of immigrants who hadn't yet let their culture become fully subsumed by the homogeneity of capital; the cowboy hats, Ford Toddler Annihalators, and pop country music that I see endlessly in the suburbs today. I saw Greeks, Bosnians, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and a few from the Caribbean islands, but perhaps my note of these ethnicities was because the baseline of White American wasn't something worth remembering. It wasn't *their* ancestors' hands that were torn apart at the looms in the 19th century at large, after all.


This upbringing definitely had an effect on my political ideals, what's core to it is that a free flow of immigration, health, and self-autonomy is to never be alienable in policy. My mother was never one concerned with politics, somehow, bafflingly, as someone who was nearly a casualty in the US invasion of Panama in 1989, but my father had a srong root left-of-center. How far, I can only be as sure as my 14 year old self, but I knew for sure he had an unrelenting hatred of Rush Limbaugh and the Bush Administration. He was a host of a podcast in the late 2000s that had his full, legal name attached to it, something like, [his full name]'s Countdown To Reality, but all I have ever heard of it was an excerpt he played of it to me, that professed how much he loved me. What eventually killed my father wasn't some tragic accident or dramatic encounter, but the thousand cuts of the negligence of a capitalist society and what was likely undiagnosed ADHD. The direct cause? Sleep apnea. Embarrasing. My father was a bodybuilder, he may have had asthma as well, but after a falling out with my mother, he fell into a deep depression, became morbidly obese, and put off a lot of small steps in managing his health; not committing to quitting smoking, losing wieght, or, perhaps most importantly, obtaining a sleep mask for sleep apnea. He simply took a nap on December 7th of 2010, and snored so heavily he stopped breathing. I entered the room my mother left in our apartment to him to say goodnight, and he was cold and stiff. Nothing has felt completely real to me ever since, but sometimes I have moments of what feels like lucidity; usually after plans, obligations, or errands are fimished, and I am not at home. I stop and stare into space for a moment before repressing whatever it is I am about to feel and head home, head under the sand so that I may upkeep a routine that keeps my mouth fed, and the roof over my head.