dp argyle

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Coming out (2026)

- riding a bike

- shirtless

- late 40s

- massive back tattoo of the virgin mary

- full sleeves with icons of the saints

- wearing a dinner plate sized brass amulet

- amulet had a fist-sized green jewel

1 Unsure what exactly Zampano meant by this.2

I struggle to make fandom friends on Tumblr, and sometimes I worry that it is because people in their 20s think they can't be friends with someone in their 40s. That I'm uncool, weird, cringe, intimidating, or just too different from them.

But things don't change as much with age as most think. Older people still are silly, awkward, overwhelmed, enthusiastic, confused, playful, irresponsible, obsessive, dumb, cool, horny, and all these other things young people think we stop feeling or being as we get older. We're just humans. I am really great friends with someone on here more than 20 years younger than me because we have so much in common! You can't tell that we're different ages when we chat.

And also—you can be friends with people who you do NOT have much in common with! Because fundamentally, you always have humanity in common.

Years ago, there was this lady in my community who was maybe 30 years older than me and who I knew was far more conservative than me. I dismissed her as someone I didn't want to spend any time with because she was obviously too different than me. But, I was forced to spend some time with her (long story), and guess what? I became really good friends with her! Because I found out I was wrong about all those things that made her different than me? NO! I was right about that—she was just as annoyingly conservative as I had suspected. BUT that wasn't the whole of her person. She was so much richer than that. There were lots of things I didn't know about her. A few of those things were commonalities, but overall, we still didn't have much in common—but that didn't matter. We could still be kind to each other, help each other, respect each other, even enjoy each other's company if we stuck to topics where we didn't clash too badly. I feel really bad for judging her, and I'm so glad I gave her a chance.

Before nearly drowning.