Member-only story
Girlie — Part 4 of 4
The one-word letter
Of the previous four jobs I had over the last three years back then, three of them were in retail. Two of those jobs were at bookstores.
When I was a little kid I used to love to play store. I would gather a bunch of toys and arrange them neatly (merchandise them) then try to rope one of my siblings into pretending to be a customer so that I could pretend to sell them something. That’s how mentally sick I was.
My childhood play was a foreshadowing of what was to come as an adult. Retail came naturally to me. I was good at it. And retail jobs were usually easy to come by and very easy to quit. I’ve worked way too many retail jobs in my life than I care to admit.
The new job I got in Southern California was at a large clothing store. Clothing! Yuck! How boring! I wear clothes according to my own personal taste and need for comfort. Most everyone else wears clothes according to the dictates of fashion. They wear exactly what everyone else is wearing and they have to change their wardrobes constantly to keep up with fashion. I find the very concept of fashion to be abhorrent. It’s a matter of handing over one’s own power of choice to the collective herd mind and the corporate powers that run that mind.
