At the warehouse club I work for, I recently stepped down from my position in the bakery and moved outside. To push shopping carts. Full-time. Just gathering the carts strewn about and left behind by customers. The perfect job for a dumb asshole. And I love it. While in the bakery, I thought about suicide constantly. It was a combination of the people I had to work/deal with and the amount of work laid out for me each day putting me in such a non-stop terrible head space.

Now, I’m outside, hustling buggies in what is fast turning into a snowy, frigid Chicago winter. Wrestle with enough daily torment brought on by the repetition of physical labor + the bite of irreconcilable and bitter persons and it’s possible to find perspective in the oddest of places. What I feel now, while working in the lot is comparable to the solace I’d attain washing dishes during downtime in a few of the restaurants I’d worked at. There’s a certain claim I can lay to declaring a personal victory had by getting through a day of work without being bothered by an authority figure. I can thank my father, mostly, for being a piece of shit and filling me up with a lifetime of dislike and mistrust for those in a position of power (over me). Like keeping up with the flow of dirty plates, silverware, glasses, and utensils — so long as there are shopping carts available to the members, management steers clear. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve felt pent-up anger and the thoughts of killing myself dissipate. After three years, I’ve started becoming a bit more social with employees. Some, I’ve never spoken a word to during my entire period of employment at the warehouse. It’s way shortsighted of me to feel as if the depression and mental illness I suffer and have had nearly paralyze my well-being a few times as both an adolescent and adult has been miraculously lifted simply by switching jobs within the company I work for. It does help, though. In my dour states of mind while performing jobs I have hated, I always used my ugly view of the world, and hatred of humanity likewise following, to say, and think: “Anything good, or possessing the possibility of goodness is ruined by people.”

Tonight, helped along by my weeks-long buoyant spiritedness, I helped a former co-worker in the department I used to work in load her car up with purchases — out of kindness and stimulated by thinking I should give positivity a shake, attempt dropping some hatreds, and re-up with this person on new and neutral ground. I told her to go pull her vehicle up, that I’d be waiting for her with the cart. Wheeling up to her parked van, she opened the giant hatch in the back. She asked me the sort of frivolous question a person does just because they feel the need to speak when in the presence of another person; like small talk is supposed to make lack of comfort turn into warm buttery camaraderie. With my hands plunged in the cart to fish out her frozen chicken fingers, I looked up to face her while she asked the inane question. Then, lurching to toss the bag of food into her car, I muttered my response straight into INSTANT blackness. The black faded with white speckles, then opening up to the two inch thick reality of the van’s hatch she’d failed to lift so it held above my 6’2” frame.

Specifically: my fucking head.

“Ooh. Sorry,” she croaked.

The impact, through a ski mask and two layers of hoods, was enough to break skin and swell up nice and purple-y.

I still feel pretty good though. Pretty contented. The jolting smack of trauma to the head probably left me dumber than I was already, also. Could be what I needed. A slight drain of IQ to tweak my depression into drooling catatonia.

In fact, I just launched Netflix and came across THE HARD WAY starring Michael J. Fox and James Woods, and said, “Why the fuck not?”

Play.