I've gone from managing a bar inventory worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to presiding over a spreadsheet containing 10-30 delivery and pick up food orders a day, making calls to confirm specific details and other mundane stuff like that I haven't done since I was a teenager. Originally we were trying to maintain a bit of normalcy by having that shift split in four hour blocks but I wound up lobbying for it to just be a full day's shift because I found it really hard to A) stay focused once I'd get excited about leaving or B) come in feeling upbeat halfway through the day.

But now that just means I'm basically the only full-time employee there, even our general manager is only there Sunday and Tuesday and the AGM only comes in to help seal up our meal prep deliveries for an hour or so. Our chef-owner can be a kinetic wreck of a man on a good day (think Gordon Ramsay) so having him pace around the building, on and off the phone looking for a hundred silver linings is pretty bad for my anxiety. Luckily he's also our delivery driver, so days like today with lots of orders he'll be gone for most of it.

But like the subject line says, what's really starting to get to me is how little I'm actually doing outside of work this week, and I'm not doing all that much at work. The shift is 12-8, so I'll usually wake up around 9 and just lay in bed reading more terrible news until about 10, get up and get ready for work, get in an Uber and A) get asked a dozen questions about why nobody else is taking Ubers or B) exchange a grim nod and dig into my Instagram feed. Around 7:30PM I'll crack a beer for "happy hour" and start closing up the restaurant, turn off all the lights and just sit there in the dark drinking for an hour or so.

By the time I get home, I'm just so emotionally defeated from thinking of all my coworkers out of work, all the service people not even "lucky" enough to continue to earn some kind of paycheck, staring out the window at an empty street that's usually full of foot traffic all day and night...I just sit at my desk and scroll Youtube like it was Netflix until eventually I just turn to my COVID-19 playlist I made on Spotify and lay down until I fall asleep. And then I usually dream about bodies being dumped out of 4th floor hospital windows and other delightful pablum like that. Last night I fell asleep to a Vice documentary about Chris Benoit, the wrestler that unexpectedly strangled his wife and son in a double murder suicide, which also happened to spend about ten minutes discussing Eddie Guerrero's unexpected death from heart failure at age 38. It seemed like a light, breezy watch at the time.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz