The summer right before I came back to school I started working at UPS loading trucks and tossing boxes. It was a pretty good gig at first. After that first paycheck though, I realized that I was standing in the back of a truck loading boxes. It was bullshit.
This wasn’t what I imagined post-graduation to look like. I’m not sure what I thought, but this wasn’t it. The only to deal with this situation was high-potency marijuana. Lots of it.
That right there was pretty much my whole paycheck. But it couldn’t be helped. Either quit the job and sit around sober as fuck trying to figure out the rest of my life, or continue smoking weed and chucking these boxes. To be honest, it didn’t seem like I had a choice.
Weed does something to you when you go chronic. Everything is like a routine. Get high, lift boxes, get high, lift boxes. Not a terrible station if you think about the alternatives. You burn some calories, take home some gas money, sit on the back porch and get stoned silly; afterwards watch cartoons.
This is in no way depressing. But then there’s always that inkling that you should be doing something that kind of ruins it all. This creeping thought of, “I’m going to be 23 soon. Then what?”
A UPS center is oddly similar to a penitentiary–and not just because of the predominantly Black workforce. The whole set-up is like a prison. White guards overseeing productivity from the rafters.
We were all high. There was no question about it. Rolling up to the parking lot would give you a nice whiff of all the pre-work activity happening before our shifts began. It was like the outside of a Grateful Dead venue.
Either free your mind or become a robot. As long as you understand the system, you can plan for a way to get out and move on.
For the time being, we ride out this high grooving to the music in our brain. The happy rhythm we work up in our heads for someday slowly fades away. Summer ends and the weed connect dries up, and it doesn’t matter why. You have or you have not. The boxes still go, but what was once effortlessly tossed into perfect stacks along the walls of the truck now seem heavy and infinite.
The fog is lifted and you look around and see men in chains. Guys doing pull-ups on the rafters. Shirts off sweating in the stuffy summer heat.
Collect your last paycheck. Tomorrow is another day.