Clean!
Archived from May 03, 2024:
Happy new year, friends. I know it’s May and I am not accepting comments about that fact, thank you.
It is not a new observation to say that life is extremely strange. For something we all do, every day, all the time, it can be unbelievably hard to grasp when you look too hard at it. We are immersed, and when that breaks, the absurdity comes through. We make dinner, we shower, we clean, and the days pass one by one by one. The rhythm, in it’s consistency, is as absorbing as it is unrelenting.
As I think most of you know, I had been working at the same brewery for over 4 years. This ended a few months ago. Over the years, I had all kinds of jobs there. I worked in the taproom, I helped brew the beer and I worked as a sales manager. When I was the assistant brewer, it pretty quickly became clear that about 70% of the job is actually cleaning. I really did enjoy it; as inclined as I am to some of the more cerebral things in life, I get a certain peace from manual labour. Kegs needed cleaning, the mash tun needed cleaning, the drains, the sinks, the floor, the fermenters, the brite tanks, all of it. Because tanks and fermenters are giant steel vessels, we kept track of their status on a numbered white board. Clean for clean and well…unclean for unclean. Due to life continuing to happen, I stopped brewing and moved into my first corporate job, but I stayed working on the weekends because I enjoyed my job so much. A few weeks after I had gone down to just 2 or 3 shifts a month, I was walking past the brewer’s white board and saw “CLEAN!” in his handwriting, not mine. While I had been brewing, because of the kind of person I am, I always wrote clean with an exclamation mark, and after a few weeks, I noticed the brewer had started doing the same. It is small, insignificant, even silly, but it still made me grin to see it. To see he was still doing it after I was no longer working in the back made me smile even more. This went on for a year or so, until the brewery was sold and a new brewer started.
"CLEAN."
It all hit me at once, my immersion broke. How much time had passed, how much had changed, how much I had changed. A single line was missing and I felt it in my heart. I know it was just a job, and a lot of people won’t come to care about their workplace so much but it was a place that had seen me through some pretty overwhelming times. It had seen me through years of university, the loss of a well loved home and a pandemic. We were a small team who had held the place together through lock downs and frantic front line cleaning. I had poured a lot, possibly too much, of myself into it and suddenly I actually realised that place no longer existed.
I don’t want to get into why I left, here. That feels inappropriate, and even for a personal project, unprofessional, but it can be very hard to watch something change. I’ve always been a person that finds it pretty hard not to care about things, and that does mean I’m not a big fan of one of the few consistent things in life: change. It’s inevitable and it’s constant and far too often I let it break my heart. I want to hold things close and tight, but that can only last for so long. Things dissolve, morph and squirm; people and places change and age. I am trying to come to terms with the time and the change that comes with it. The changes in myself, the iterations that exist only in the past now, and looking out to the versions of myself I will have to meet one day.
This work has been tiresome, often exhausting, frequently feels fruitless and a convenient excuse to let this project fizzle away. I do not want to change into the kind of person that stops creating, I do not want to let the exhaustion win. I want to come to terms with change, to see it as inspiration rather than loss, a chance to learn rather than fall into grief. So here I am in your inbox, tail between my legs, feeling the shame of having abandoned something for so long. I have a thousand half baked thoughts floating through my head, and truly don’t know where to go next.
In truth, I’ve been spending more time reading than I have been writing, so I might take the easy route for a bit and just talk about what I’ve been reading. How does that sound, friends?
Thank you, especially now, for still being here friends. I am baffled that it is May, and as the spring rain drizzles on Toronto, I am seeking the energy and inspiration to carry this forward.
