The following is part of a serialized story, Everyone Thinks I Dream of Chocolate. You can find the first chapter here.
Eight hours is a long time to be doing anything. An eight hour shift at Lou’s primarily involved doing the following:
- Make chocolate
- Help customers
- Stand
There is more to it but that is the jist. Doing this for an hour or even a couple of hours is not a big deal, but doing it for 8 hours can seem like a lifetime.
The most immediate exhaustion comes from physical endurance. Craning my neck, cramping my hands, stiffening my back. It might not look like much for those who spend mere seconds passing by. Those who have lived it know that it is the equivalent of a monk practicing martial arts. The discomfort that the body feels is exponential as time goes on, not proportional. Patience and resilience are key.
Sitting down for my half-hour lunch break was not much of a relief. It wasn’t enough time to rest the muscles that had tightened all over my body into a tense pain. Rather, it was more of impending doom, knowing that I still had time left on the clock before I had to stand again, get into a position, and get back to the assembly line.
However, that didn’t mean that I didn’t try to find ways to find relief. I worked seven and a half hours. I tried to take lunch as late as possible, about 3 to 4 o’clock. That way, The other half of the shift would seem short by comparison.
My other big moment of relief was my bathroom breaks. The job had no official break times other than lunch. I did drink a lot of fluids, however. I drank 2 or 3 cups of coffee in the morning and after that, either water or soda depending on how tired I was that day.
I also tend to take a shit every day around noon. Right before or after the lunch rush, I will feel out the atmosphere. The Mill tends to be rather empty, the only noise coming from the radio playing a station on the PA or one of the other shop owners like Tara walking through the Mill.
It is like a sixth sense, knowing that the needs of the people are settling while my need to take a shit builds within me. I tell Rick I’m going to use the bathroom, take off my apron, and walk out through the wooden gate of the L-shaped counter that wraps around the grilled cheese store.
There is a bathroom in the eatery which I can walk to in about 15 seconds but I take a full minute to walk over to the West Side and use their bathroom. While the eatery bathroom is cramped and claustrophobic, this bathroom is spacious. The ceiling goes about 12 feet high. There is a handicapped bathroom that lets me shit in peace but on days where this is occupied, I don’t mind using the other one. What matters more is the size of the bathroom itself, big enough so that I can have someone in the other stall, at the urinals, or the sinks without feeling weird about it.
On an average shift, I would say I spent at least an hour a day in bathrooms. I’m a quick shitter by nature but on average, I think most people need to take 10, 20, sometimes even 30 minutes on the can popping out a brown hoagie. I decided that if those with slow bowels could have the privilege, so could I.
That still left about 6 and a half hours of my day.
The other big source of exhaustion was the mental component. After you learn the basics of making all the different types of products, the job itself is not too hard. Much of it is muscle memory. That may solve the issue of overcoming the skillcap, but this leaves newfound space in your brain to think about other things, forcing you to confront two truths regarding the job:
- The job is incredibly painful in the long term
- The job is incredibly boring
After overcoming the initial skill floor, I had a new problem to solve: if I wasn’t thinking about one of these truths, I was thinking about the other.
As time went on, however, I found a way to deal with this. As a school student, I spent much of my time dreaming. By high school, my sleep schedule was already so bad that I spent every other period asleep on my desk.
I would put my head down on my desk and used my folded arms as a blindfold. The voice of my teacher’s lectures became meaningless droning. Like how some people use a fan for white noise, I used the lectures whose content I had no interest in nor had the mental capacity to pay attention or comprehend.
Instead, I dreamt. Sometimes, they were regular dreams, where my mind fell deep into the various pockets of my subconscious, experiencing events, people, and symbols remixed into a medley of strange and entertaining occurrences.
Other times, I was awake, yet, the visions would continue. The images and events I experienced felt more real than the “real world.” Occasionally, I could acknowledge the voice of my teachers, acting as sonic anchors that reminded me of the various subjective layers of reality that I was wedged between.
At the chocolate shop, I began using this method again, willingly hypnotizing myself into trance states. I would check the time between my “trips” and have a half-hour past when I felt like I had spent hours living my other lives. It became an effective way to speed up the relativity of my job’s quantum state, even if it wasn’t the most efficient. After all, I could spend many days living several lives in my mental realities before a single shift was over.
It wasn’t something I did consciously at first. It was as if my brain needed some sort of stimulation and it called upon an old psychic skill that I didn’t even really understand as a kid. It wasn’t until much later that I talked to Christian that I understood the implications of what I was doing. By that point, I was starting to live waking nightmares, both in and out of that dream state. After all, dreams tend to be reflections of thoughts both conscious and subconscious. The brain collects ideas like sponges indiscriminately soak in bacteria off the sink.
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11. Split Priorities
Danger Wonka 