geometry and other past failures
Andrew Bertaina I had hit rock bottom, down where the fish all have lanterns on their heads like coal miners, far below where even the largest whales can go. I was thirty-two, living with an ornery cat, working at a small bookstore at the edge of a narrow beach town where people took their children to mini-golf, eat ice cream and run from the small Atlantic waves before eating overpriced meals in frigid restaurants blasting AC so hard you could practically see the earth warming. A place where thinking hadn’t gone to die, so much as it had never taken root. I worked at a bookstore just outside the city sprawl, shepherding crates of beach reads in and out of the store according to the whims of a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet dictated everything I did, and it was based on a computer program in an office building far far away. It was not the sort of life I had dreamed of, but I suppose that didn’t make my life unique. Disappointment was, like gut bacteria, omnipresent. The bookstore was managed by an elderly woman, Marge, who wore spectacles and who probably had political views I’d find offensive. But then, I was rather taken with her. She treated me like a wayward son, asking after my interests and carefully monitoring my mental health, encouraging me to drink more water or love more carefully. She was the sort of parent I’d always hoped my properly liberal parents could have been. This sort of human complexity cropped up all the time and didn’t bother me in the slightest.