Next, the falling freight elevator door halves my perched sunglasses. There’s a new dent in my forehead and no way to mask those widows’ peaks. Worse, though, two hours’ work down the drain in a shades-split second.

The calculation comes as I line up how much the glasses cost with how much I’m paid to process $1350 purses that I wouldn’t let your mom walk around with, especially if was paying her.

For weird reasons, I’m working retail again. Immersed in the real world, the macrocosm of anxious downtown with its hoary bums, pretty Orange Julius employees and that guy at Arby’s who I swear has the worst fucking attitude of anyone on the planet, except it’s not directed at you and me–no, we’re in on it somehow, so we get six packets of horse sauce even if we only want one.

After many months of self-flagellation about not finishing a particularly large painting of barbarian cats, I decided to punish myself with work. If I’m not going to make art, I may as well suffer. If you’re putting off anything and feel bad about it, there’s really no better way to learn to appreciate your time.

So when a drinking buddy phoned me up with his ridiculous, anachronistic proposition, I looked down at that nothing-but-ginch-pinching muffin top and said what the hell. And that’s the story of how I’m opening boxes at a high-end clothing boutique in the centre of the city, hanging $150 boys’ sweat pants and $11,000 fur coats on racks, pinning security tags through their seams and accounting for their numbers being correct.

So far the count is good. With a boxcutter, the five-year-old weapon of mass destruction that handed the world over to bin Laden’s goals, I perform surgery on the bellies of endless imports. There are four of us back there, and besides various girls, lunch is mostly what we think about all morning. To be fair, everyone also gets excited when something is especially ridiculously priced. For example, a $100 day timer made me smile, 50 of them resulting in an outright grin. To buy them all, if this was my only source of employment, I would have to work for roughly two years. Sleeves up, then.

As the day passes, we listen to reggae, TV on the Radio, Sloan and, unfortunately, sometimes CKUA, who I must report still fear rock and roll, even though its underground has honestly rarely been better. Across the city, music keeps tens of thousands of us drones sane as customers connive and bitch and smack their lips about how they’re always right. But bubbling retail is absolutely stewing this rich, oil-heated province. Despite and actually because of paying us goobers so badly, profits are acceptable in high-end clothing boutiques, Swedish furniture emporiums, and pretty much any chain that has its head screwed on right. The reality of minimum wage going up is once again going to crucify small-business owners, but it’s hard to argue against, hearing all those stories of $18-an-hour dishwashers in Fort Mac. I don’t feel I deserve that working in the back room, even though some days I made $1500 doing other, more creative things. Lucky.

But the shipping-receiving room has made me humble again, and I’m happy about that. So when I’m at WEM that night to buy a new pair of shades–two hours’ work–and the gum-chewing girl does not look up at me once, as if I’m going to get mad. My girlfriend is being needlessly worked on at MAC for an hour and I wander the mall, eying slutty mannequins in Alexa, laughing really hard as Chewie gives Han shit for blowing up the Probot on an HMV screen. Walking by, most of the till-manners look totally bored and slightly sad and I feel like thanking them all for enduring their asshole regional managers and, ironically, their coworkers.

Looking at the six-point tactics of successful selling (engage, close, etc.) on a poster in the backroom, I came to remember that retail, capitalism itself, is nothing but a war to its suntanned generals. And in the words of Ron Sexsmith, I feel for the soldier.