The Jeans Store

The sheer ephemeral, transient, fleeting impermanence of everything

Photo by William Christen on Unsplash

This week on The Crow I’m sending you a little rollercoaster of a “snow globe” that races through the highs and lows of this strange dream-like existence. I hope you enjoy it.

(If you’re wondering what I’m talking about when I say “snow globes” then feel free to take a look at the wonderful

Kimberly Warner

and I chatting here, just scroll down to the image and press on the arrow to watch. You’ll find a few more expressions chiselled from that conversation and elbowed into this piece too).

For those who like to listen I’ve recorded an audio, just press the arrow below and sit back and relax. And for those that prefer to read, just roll your eyes over that Latin alphabet below :)

1.

Every morning when I walk to work I see a woman working in a jeans store. I see her folding and sliding jeans onto wooden shelves over and over, day after day. She has this faraway look in her eyes as she folds the jeans, as if she were somewhere else instead of where she was, folding and sliding jeans onto wooden shelves.

Sometimes, when I’m walking past in the mornings on my way to work and I see this women and it occurs to me that she and I are the crowning glory of an endless trail of ancestors who have journeyed through the ages. Ancestors who have emerged from the great sea of potential, forever mutating on the crescent of an ever flowing wave of change, seeking out those rare niches to prolong life and even flourish with dignity and grace along the way.

I think about the millions of dawns and millions of early mornings that have drifted into millions of long, long afternoons and the millions of evenings that slowly fell into millions of moonlit nights. And I think about these ancestors having finally arrived in this here and this now, today, and how they’ve become this woman, folding jeans and sliding them onto wooden shelves and also me, walking past on my way to work, where I too will perform my pitiful tasks, over and over, again and again.

And when I walk past and see her folding those jeans and sliding them onto shelves I can sometimes hardly look as my heart aches and my mind makes excuses and then gives up and also aches, because I cannot explain to the ancestors, who struggled through so much to deliver us to this here and this now, this today, that we, the crowning glory of all those aeons and all that effort and all that potential to become oh so many gorgeous things, I cannot explain that we, like cogs in a machine, have taken the incomprehensible privilege of life and have used it to fold and slide jeans onto wooden shelves.

As I walk past on my way to my office and I glance at this woman I think that once upon a time it was the living who felt compassion for the dead, but now in this capsized world, it is the dead that look with melancholic sorrow upon we living as they watch us squander our youth, and our beauty, and our dignity, and our whimsy and our wildness and our spontaneity and our glorious potential to flourish with songlike grace and instead we spend our time folding jeans and sliding them onto wooden shelves, over and over and over, again and again and again.

I feel drained by these thoughts. Before the morning has even got its boots on to march itself through another day in this seemingly endless string of days that reach from the distant past into the far future, here I am, on another in a chain of insignificant mornings, thinking about a women folding jeans and feeling drained and I wonder if those ancestors ever felt like this, as they walked around on some morning on their way to do whatever they were doing. I doubt they did. I doubt they felt like this. I really doubt it.

2.

I arrive at my work, and I walk through the main entrance to the lift, up 5 floors, then through more doors and along a corridor to a overly bright fluorescent lit office with a vague aroma of coffee and deodorant and I sit at my desk and I turn on my screen.

My fellow Team Members are all there at their desks staring into their screens as if they were peering through the shimmer like the living dead, pummeling away at their keyboards and doing the various tasks they’re supposed to be doing. I sip my coffee and open emails that pertain to various projects and then make the required changes to the projects according to the emails and then schedule future changes and check on historical revisions and send emails pertaining to those changes.

The morning slowly drifts along making its way toward the afternoon, while clouds of meaningless conversations occasionally soak me with inane chitter chatter and now and then someone asks a question and I, or someone else, offers an answer and randomly people get up from their desks and leave the room then return later to resume their work.

While I’m sitting there performing my tasks it occurs to me that this office is an organic clock composed of human components, and although they are seemingly reliant upon one another, they are also completely interchangeable with almost any other human component, which causes a certain disharmony, a perpetual low-key tension that hums through the emotional register of the Team Members, none of whom fully trust one another, none of whom fully open up to one another, intuitively aware of the deeply feudal nature of their predicament, yet also strangely oblivious, living in a peculiar hypnotic dream-like non-reality they call Life.

And I think of the woman in the jeans shop folding her jeans and I wonder if she is maybe better off out of this particular dream. Maybe, I think, folding jeans isn’t so bad. Maybe I’d like to fold jeans too. Instead of this strangely lonely and atomised office environment where each Team Member is ensconced in their separate envelopes.

While I’m thinking about this woman from the jeans shop one of those strangely fluttering moments happens when the field of human consciousness seems to ripple just enough to reach into our dream-like office souls, and a fleeting recognition of one another’s vitality rises from the detachment and the pummeling of keyboards slows, and everyone glances about as if they’ve just been revived from unconsciousness.

I look over my screen and see various Team Members looking around a little bewildered when one of them decides to reanimate a conversation that had been stumbling about the room all morning and says, to no one in particular, “I’ll tell you what I think,” and I think, please don’t tell me what you think, but he leans back in his chair and raises his arms and laces his fingers behind his head and continues anyway, “I think that in the future, when historians write about today, they’ll describe this Billionaire administration in a kinder light than we imagine they will,” and at first I think he might be right because history is a fiction after all, so who knows what preposterous spin they’ll add to all this insanity? But then he continues, “I think this administration might well be remembered quite affectionately.”

I sigh deeply and look up to the heavens, but my view is blocked by overly bright florescent strip lighting.

As I’m wondering why people are so keen to reveal their petty cruelties another Team Member leans forward in her chair and says, “Yes, that’s quite possible, it’s happened before, when people made so much fuss at the time, but later came to realise that whatever was done was actually necessary.”

I look down at my keyboard with all its useless letters that could have been used to speak and think such different words and ideas than the ones being uttered around me.

Then a third Team Member chimes in with, “Exactly, if you think about it all the terrible things of the past could be seen as a necessary evil, if you look at it in the right way, I mean all that terrible stuff did bring us the life we have today, didn’t it?”

Before I can even finish processing this banal moral simplicity another Team Member catches alight in this spreading wildfire of desolate revelations and says, “I think this Billionaire administration are scaring the shit out of the people who need the shit scared out of them.”

And I just stare at my screen and say absolutely nothing, my heart beating in a panic rhythm as a fountain of thoughts erupts in my mind: Is this how fascism takes root, this flourishing of banality, this petrifying of empathy where feeling is closed and hearts shuts down? Is this what happens when we eliminate our spontaneity and whimsy and dignity and mutuality and end up flailing around like anxious, nervous, vicious, little zombies in this heartless, feudal overly bright florescent landscape, desperate to be owned, desperate to be controlled, desperate to give up all possibilities for glory and transform Life into some pre-death waiting room?

Then I hear myself, half-shouting to nobody in particular, “For fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you people?”

My Team Members then give each other knowing glances and say nothing and return to pummeling their keyboards and staring at their screens and I get up, unable to breathe and I scamper down the corridor and leap down 5 flights of stairs and rush out of the main exit to take huge gulps of air as if I’ve just burst through the surface of the cold dark ocean and haven’t taken a truly fresh breath in months.

3.

After my panic attack I start walking home unable to return to the office, as if my body has had enough and decided to take my mind away from the source of the stress. As I take my usual route I walk past the jeans shop and there is the woman, folding and sliding jeans onto wooden shelves.

Suddenly she looks over and catches my eye and stops folding her jeans and seems to hesitate for a moment, then puts down the pair of jeans in her hands, walks to the door of the shop and beckons me over.

I am fragile and alienated but she seems so light on her feet, her eyes sparkling and bright and I can’t understand how she’s brimming with such a forceful vitality that I’ve never noticed before.

“Hello,” she says and I say “Hello,” in reply, shaking my head a little in gentle confusion.

“You look terrible,” she says smiling and I nod because she’s right, I do look terrible, and then she says, “I see you, walking past,” and she points up and down the road where I usually walk and I nod again. “I suppose you’re going back and forth to work?”, she says as she leans against the door frame and looks closely at me and I nod again and she says, “Listen, please don’t get offended, I realise I don’t know you at all, except as that guy who walks past every day, gawking,” she widens her eyes and dampens her expression like a demented staring zombie, “but to be completely frank, you seem to be struggling, you know, not doing so well,” and she stops and raises her eyebrows and waits and because I don’t know what’s happening and why the jeans woman is suddenly speaking to me and how she seems to know anything about me, I just stand there looking bewildered.

She smiles and steps back into the shop and waits and watches to see what I do and I find myself crossing the threshold and entering the shop, and she smiles and points to a chair, and I sit and she looks at me as if deciding and then says “Tea?” and I nod again and she says “there’s only chamomile,” and then she returns a few minutes later with a cup of steaming, funky plant tea which she places beside me and I sit there exhausted, feeling like a truly lost soul.

Then she says, “You feel like that because you are a lost soul,” and I am suddenly vacuumed into a breathless silence and she laughs and says, “I can read minds,” And I say “Can you?” and she says, “No, of course I can’t, but I can see you clearly, my gawking friend,” and she sits beside me and says nothing and I sip my tea and feel her warm, compassionate energy engulfing me and then the tears start rolling down my cheeks.

4.

I am standing in the jeans shop folding jeans. She is beside me reciting one of her poetic incantations that conjure glorious life from the sea of nothing.

She says, “A gentle breeze is flowing through the wild poppy petals so they become a kaleidoscope of butterflies shimmering across the meadow and I am stopped in my tracks,” and she leans forward and stares toward an imaginary meadow. “I am alone and I breathe in and hold my breath and feel my heart beating full pelt at the sheer ephemeral, transient, fleeting impermanence of everything and I too am a gentle breeze flowing through life like a shimmer of butterflies as I become everywhere and everything and nowhere and nothing.”

I laugh, a bubbling joy emerging unbidden through me. Then I fold the left jean leg across the right jean leg in the manner she’s shown me and then the folded leg cuffs up to the pocket and the waistband down to the fold and she says “It’s your turn,” but I shake my head and ask her to tell me one more.

I have been in the jeans shop for 3 months and now it is time for her to leave. But I am ready. She has taught me everything I need to know. The value of the folding. The care that must be taken with every action because every action has its own unique consequence. She has shown me what I should do in my role as The Guardian. She taught me how to keep an open eye and pay attention to others and to myself so that I am always ready when the time comes to invite another to cross that threshold and enter the sanctity of this place. And she has taught me that this human world is a manifestation of the inner mind so when we are fearful and malicious and hostile the world will become such.

“OK, hold on,” she says and closes her eyes and blows like an athlete about to compete, shakes her limbs and says, “In the translucent turquoise arctic ocean beneath a sheet of glacial ice, a Greenland shark slowly, oh so slowly, rises toward the blue, oh so opal blue surface ice, that glows like the northern lights with icebergs like clouds floating by, where colonies of seals fly as if they were swallows in the shallows and I lurk in the cold, oh so cold water and reach out and take hold of the dorsal fin of that ancient mariner and I am gently ferried toward the fresh Arctic air that preserves, if only for a flicker, my evanescent, scarcely perceptible flame of life in this infinite oneness of time and space.”

I beam at her and smile the smile of the long lost but now found. When I first entered this bewitching little jeans store I was broken in the tumbling, aggressive turmoil of darkness and forgetfulness, but under her patient care and embrace I began to remember what it was to be a human being. I stepped away from the organic clockwork and rediscovered spontaneity and whimsy and dignity and mutuality and once more felt the glorious potential to flourish with song-like grace as a human.

So now I stand in the window and fold jeans over and over, again and again, and I wait patiently until another lost soul struggling in the hypnotic, dream-like, non-reality wanders by and then I’ll beckon to them as if I were reaching into the river and pulling them back onto the bank and I’ll graciously catch their tears as they roll down because struggling with this madness is the most sane response of all, but struggling alone is impossible.

And together we will come to remember how to take care of the small and gentle things because there is so much that is precious in this life. Then eventually I too will move on and a new Guardian will arrive in the jeans store to rejoice in the incomprehensible privilege of being alive.

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