I forgot to remember this. in Book Title.

I have a prosebox still. I never would’ve remembered if I hadn’t just been thinking about Matt. God, Matt- I know I’m the fucking lamest. It was so cool to see you and we haven’t even talked since you left. I have some shitty excuses about being busy but they’re not even worth saying cause it’s goddamned inexcusable to leave a person hanging for so long. Anyway, you’ve been on my mind a ton and I’m sure I’ll swallow down my misanthropy and choke back my anxiety and call you on the phone any day now.
I haven’t been writing anything but lists of things I have to pay for and tasks I need to complete for work. I got promoted again at my thrift shop job and now I run the front of the house and I make pretty good money for it. I’m writing a lot of run on sentences. I haven’t written in so long that my fingers don’t want to let me stop. My body knows my brain too well…I may just wander off.

I deal with a lot of weird shit at my thrift shop job and I’ve been looking for an outlet for my thoughts. I don’t know who to talk to about all the boring shit I want to say. For instance, I have a lot of homeless people come in and change their skanky clothes in my dressing room. They’ll leave the old clothes in the stall for someone to discover later. Typically, an angry customer will bring us some piss stained jeans and demand a discount and yell at me that our standards are too low if we’re trying to sell people clothes that are still wet with piss.

There’s just a constant communication breakdown. I had a (seemingly) schizophrenic lady in a while ago who stood in a clothing aisle and spoke loudly to herself about her abusive father. Her speech was peppered by Tourette’s-like explosions of vulgarity. I am so accustomed to situations similar to this one that I mostly disregarded the woman so long as she didn’t seem to be physically accosting anyone. She stood in the same spot for nearly an hour before she left the store empty handed. Upon inspection, she had been standing there pissing. Urine was puddling and running in streams beneath the clothing aisles.

And of course, there’s the schizophrenic homeless people. They’ll come in, change their clothes in a dressing room stall, and then use it for a toilet. They like to stack their old filthy clothes on top of their freshly deposited shit so you don’t notice the shit until you’re actually touching it.

Other places people like to shit at my thrift store: especially large vases or pots (makeshift toilet, I get it), the fabric department (makeshift toilet paper, I get that one too), between the lamps & golf clubs (this one is a mystery to me), and of course- in the bathroom in front of the toilet, behind the toilet, against the left or right stall wall, on the floor, in the corner, in a trashcan beside the toilet or generously smeared like a mural across most surfaces. Also in the sink.

Places people rarely shit at my thrift store: Inside of a toilet.

I don’t clean up much shit personally, but I still find it offensive. I honestly can’t understand how a person without the mental capacity to shit into a proper waste receptacle is allowed in public unsupervised. I would like to stress at this time that the majority of the shitting culprits are actually unsupervised children, not retarded adults.

Which brings me to that. Daily, groups of women will come in with groups of four to six children apiece. This is sometimes as many as twenty preteen children. The women will go left to look at women’s clothing together. The children will fan out in all directions. When I check the toy aisle, there will inevitably be a little girl rubbing red playdoh into her blonde hair, another boy eating some of the purple. Any toy in it’s original packaging has been removed and tossed onto the floor. There will be piles of trash, half eaten suckers, and a couple of kids beating each other with plastic swords. Surrounding the children are always angry, bewildered customers.

If I check the furniture department, I most often find the older kids racing bicycles and scooters through the narrow aisles. Sometimes customers will complain that the boys have been throwing golf balls and other sports equipment at them. The older girls like to play house with our furniture and rearrange things. They will pull household knickknacks and appliances from across the store to build elaborate sets. This shit pisses me off especially. What a fucking mess.

There will be some tamer kids in the book and video departments, just making tall stacks of the things they’d like to have. And some younger kids in the kitchenware and glass aisles, breaking shit and getting cut and screaming bloody fuckin murder. Typically, an angry mother will bring us some blood stained little brat and demand a discount and yell at me that our standards are too low if we’re trying to sell people glass that’s already broken.

The kids are all just a diversion, though. The women will encourage their kids to be horrible so we are too busy dealing with intervention and clean up to find time to catch them shoving expensive jewelry into expensive handbags they’ve stolen from us.

I didn’t realize that right off. I just figured they were horrible people who didn’t give a shit about their children. Later, it became pretty obvious that they come in several days a week for several hours per visit and purchase nothing. Now I have a pretty good system. When they hit the door, I head to the toys and meet them there. I tell them gently that they may stay and play so long as they promise not to open any packages and clean up before they leave. Also, to be respectful of other shoppers and keep the aisle clear. (I used to tell them, ‘You can’t play here unsupervised. Go stay with your parents.’ That backfired. The mothers would literally load every child into a cart and push them all together and leave them sitting in a big clusterfuck of screaming children and cart blockage. The screaming was every bit as horrible and distracting as the destructive behavior.)

Then I send this big ass dude who works in the back straight to furniture to tell all the older kids to get off the bikes and scooters and act like they’ve got some sense. It’s a store, not a zoo. That didn’t work when I did it personally, but it started working when I sent an huge guy instead.

I leave the kids in books and videos alone. Who are they hurting? It’s not like its a huge pain in my ass to put a stack of books back on the shelf. And the really young kids who break glass? I just watch them. They usually aren’t old enough to talk. If I find their mom and ask her to keep an eye on the kid, it’ll be in a cart screaming at the top of it’s lungs for an hour. So I just supervise their kids for them so they won’t get hurt. Its the lesser of two evils. Besides, I like little kids. They’re fuckin cute. It’s not their fault their mums ‘re all cunts.

I find drugs in my thrift store a lot. I found a bag of mushrooms. Pipes off all varieties, for all sorts of dope. Pills. Syringes. Weed, of course. I catch people smoking weed and cigs in the dressing rooms sometimes. People nod out on the couches daily. Some of it is probably just honest sleeping, though.

I saw a guy hit his teen aged son in the face in a dressing room last week. The kid’s cheek was bright red and he was crying. That guy was screaming at him, “Do you need another one? Do we need to go home?” It really shook me up. I found the kid later and sort of patted him on the shoulder, asked if he was okay. We had a brief exchange. It’s been heavy on my mind. I see fucked up looking kid’s a lot- kids wearing sandals in a blizzard, with snot caked onto their little cheeks and hair in knots. Kids who look like they don’t eat, or bathe. Kids who look scared and lost and I can’t help but wonder, Is this asshole really this kid’s parent? Kids with half their face bruised purple. Kids with half their teeth rotten. Kids looking half dead already.

Kids taking shits between the lamps and the golf clubs and they don’t know any fuckin better cause nobody pays any attention to them.

It’s a vicious cycle. My thrift store is chronically understaffed. It’s understaffed by design, meant to rely heavily on work performed by people who’ve been sentenced to complete community service. I’m really the boss of a skeleton crew. I’m really a community service manager.