Pat

Convenience Stories: Chapter 7

This is a short chapter, so today you’re getting two. I have been traveling a lot lately, hence the uneven release schedule, although I am pleased to report that the state of Arizona uses the same Scientific Games PlayCentral HDs kiosks we have in Pennsylvania. So if I ever have to move out west, I will still be able to work.

I woke up the next morning to the sound of my phone bleeping incessantly. Pat was trying hard to press my buttons. I guess she thought that since she was ten years younger than me and had visible tattoos that I was old or slow or something. 

We matched on a dating app a year ago but never did meet up, and if I go to bed without silencing my phone’s notifications, there is a good chance that she’ll wake me up at 5:30 a.m. the next morning. She also has some sort of sixth sense that alerts her when I’m talking to another woman. It’s rather unnerving.

I cleared the notifications on my phone, got out of bed and went to work, ended the day troubleshooting a comms issue at the Walmart in North Versailles. I had about 30 minutes left in my shift, so I just walked around a bit. Looked at shoes (I was surprised that I liked some of them), and the DVDs in the bargain bin (which were all pretty terrible). 

Pat texted me:

—What are you doing?

—Walking around walmart

—Lame

—Yeah, I know

—Can I get wasted and stay over at your house?

—Lol

—SERIOUSLY

—No, probably not

—Why? What the fuck?

—I don’t know you

That shut her up for a bit.

According to her bio, Pat worked as an “abortion witch,” which I guess was supposed to sound edgy. This woman spent a lot of time trying to be edgy.

—Steal me something from walmart

—Definitely

—Like what?

—What do you want?

In the late 1960s, when the left splintered into a thousand psychedelically damaged pieces, a feminist group called the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (get it?) adopted the witch as symbolic of powerful, independent women who were at war with the patriarchy. In the years since, the practice of witchcraft has become recognized as a tool of resistance, both in the radical milieu and on TikTok. And while I have great respect for all that, I have little respect for people who adopt the language of radicalism without doing anything in the least bit radical. At this level, flouting bourgeois values is itself a little bourgeois, if not downright elitist.