essential kerry it did not occur to me until filling out some paperwork yesterday that i am once again, a little over a year later, an "essential worker." i felt essential before, in a sense, but i don't feel essential now. i knew names and faces and had some ideas and some strategies and i could go home and feel like i'd done something. and some mornings i'd come home from a 10 hour shift and take off my work clothes--my "pandemic" clothes--in the laundry room and no one else was awake yet and i would finally cry, all these tears i wanted to cry throughout the whole night. i would leave the shelter feeling drenched in Feelings and History and Pain and Rage and Illness and Hormones. and i'd wring myself out like a rag and then go to bed around 9am and get up 8 hours later and do it again. now we just doodle around in the candyman van, feeling inessential and helpless. we make jokes like that because we do nothing else. go to WaWa for coffee. swing by 321 broad for snacks we could pass out. ignore rules that don't make sense and make up the ones that should exist. it is not a job that should exist because it is a problem that should not exist but here it is and here i am. 210817 what's it to you? who go blather from