WREN PHELPS

bloom smack swarm

 

March 2020

This morning, I woke up to a message from my boss letting everyone know that the café is closing until further notice. He included a link to the state unemployment page and instructions on how to file. The website is slow due to high traffic, so I open this word doc instead. While writing, I have another tab open with an aquarium’s jellyfish livestream. The jellies float around the edges of the frame to the sort of music that plays in youtube videos titled “Relaxing Music to Sleep to | 8 HOURS | Meditation, relaxation, insomnia.” The jellies don’t know there’s music playing. They don’t know much of anything, really, or if they do, there’s no way of knowing it. These are moon jellies, one of the most common species. They look like little UFOs or lampshades you would find in your grandmother’s house.  

Jellyfish have always been one of my favorite sea creatures, and the exhibit where I tend to linger on trips to the aquarium. I find the movement of their strands and tentacles mesmerizing. Something about it reminds me of clouds unfurling across a summer sky. My partner and I went to the aquarium on one of our very first dates, and I told them that if I could be any sea creature, I would be a jellyfish: no heart, no brain, no problems.

Groups of jellies are variously called a bloom, a smack, or a swarm. Three words with different connotations, all functioning as both nouns and verbs. Bloom denotes growth, flowers, springtime, new life. Smack: a satisfying if unpleasant onomatopoeia, less serious sounding than a slap. A movement of the lips. Swarm: Flies, birds, contagion, locusts, apocalypse.  

On one of my last days of teaching before I dropped out of grad school, I took suggestions from students on documentaries we should watch. I had run out of steam and lesson plans. One student requested a doc on youtube called “Jellyfish invade Japan.” It was about how overfishing and climate change had resulted in an explosion of inedible jellyfish in Japan’s fishing grounds, killing valuable fish, damaging equipment, and overwhelming fishermen. These jellies are unappealing shades of beige and pink, not graceful with their ungainly tentacles. It’s not entirely their fault, though – out there in nature they don’t have any forgiving aquarium lighting to illuminate them. Something about the way they reproduced made it extremely difficult to get rid of them, and the documentary was not very hopeful about the outlook.  

On day two of layoff, I discover that 2,000 jellyfish polyps (the life stage where jellies are attached to the ocean floor) were launched into space in 1991. They reproduced into 60,000 jellies but were unable to adjust to life on earth when brought back. This strikes me as both profoundly sad and an opportunity for an overburdened metaphor for what human development does to nature. 

I don’t know the exact circumstances of the jellyfish launch, either the why or how. What was the purpose of sending these sea creatures out there? Did they get shot out of a cannon into the void? Was there a sci-fi spacecraft shaped like a fish tank floating around the Milky Way? I imagine little jellies bobbing along between the space junk. Is our atmosphere more or less cluttered with waste than our oceans? Probably less, the oceans being finite and space stretching out forever.  

My grandfather worked for the EPA, Atlantic Ecology Division for his entire career. As a child, I remember hearing a family legend about how he was stung by a Portuguese man-of-war in Puerto Rico. I don’t remember the story’s conclusion or where on his body it stung him, but the encounter left him scarred.

The Portuguese man-of-war is not actually a jellyfish, I’ve discovered on wikipedia. Jellies are single organisms; the man-of-war is a colony of polyps with different purposes such as defense, digestion, and reproduction. Its poisonous tentacles drag prey up to its digestive bits which then liquefy the captured fish. The man-of-war commonly has a sort-of symbiotic relationship: the Portuguese man-of-war fish, which hangs around in its tentacles, avoiding the poisonous ones and snacking on the smaller ones. The presence of this fish can lure others into thinking the tentacles are safe. The stinging tentacles look similar to those on other large jellies, like a dangling mess of intestines; the less dangerous tentacles look like strings of beads. In youtube comments, people joke about how the man-of-war’s bladder resembles a floating plastic bag.

Some octopi carry around amputated man-of-war tentacles to use as weapons. Some captured octopi sneak out of their tanks at night to feast on their neighbors in aquariums. I wonder what they think of the empty aquariums right now. They are by nature shy, solitary creatures. What do they usually think of the staring crowds and screaming kids? Perhaps this is a nice reprieve. 

The jellies, as we’ve established, don’t think of anything. They float. They eat. They reproduce. Sentient bits of lace, beading, fabric remnants. Unfurling and tangling with no regard for us.  

I watch the number of viewers on the livestream tick up and down. 617 watching now. 613. 611. Six hundred odd people out there in the world with jellyfish trance music playing in one of their other tabs. The governor is holding another press conference today. I wonder if she will address how the virus will affect prisoners, people without access to unemployment, homeless people. Other states have started housing the homeless in hotels and motels. In California, activist groups are seizing vacant houses for the unhoused.

This word doc is the middle tab between the jelly livestream and the news livestream. In the news tab, journalists question the president about his response to the virus. I hate the way his mouth moves. This is nothing original. Now I have the audio from both tabs playing over each other. The trance music doesn’t do much to alleviate my rage at the president, the administration, this whole fucking joke of a country. The doctor onscreen smirks as he states that he cannot, by law, reveal anything about commercial practices when someone asks a question about progress towards a treatment. I want to smash in the skull of a drug company CEO and feed him bit by bit to a Portuguese man-of-war. I want to watch the jelly liquify him, leaving a bulging sac of skin.  

Some jellies can live forever. They revert into their polyp state when threatened and spawn genetically identical jellies who can do the same, over and over. “Jellyfish were here long before we were, and they’ll probably be here long after we’re gone,” states the narrator of one of the jellyfish videos I watched after the governor’s covid briefing. People quarantined in their homes keep tweeting and posting and echoing that emissions are down, pollution is down, native species are returning to their habitats. They think this means that we are the virus. But the virus is capitalism and it always has been. We’ve been sick with it for a long time, and it’s evolving again, twisting itself into new shapes. Order take-out! Support our staff! We’ll leave your food by the door! A local vegan restaurant floods its social media with calls to support local businesses in this crisis. They’re donating a portion of gift card sales to a staff relief fund. A few weeks ago, I walked over one of their bold-printed, compostable paper bags littered in the middle of the bike path.

I’ve heard time and again that the best cure is prevention. Cleaner air, cleaner water, fewer carcinogens in the products we use every day. I wish we could shrink back into ourselves like the jellies, reattach to the ocean floor and sprout again into a world without capitalism, where human life was more important than profit.

 

August 2020 

In the beginning of lockdown, I told myself I was going to write every day. That lasted for roughly the first week. Then I told myself I would get reading done; that petered out shortly after the writing. Instead, I spent my time obsessively refreshing social media feeds, watching press conferences, playing video games, and trying to find a decent quality rip of HBO’s “The Soprano’s.”  Over the next four months, I migrated from the bed to the couch and back again. Occasionally I did the grocery shopping, or my partner dragged me to do something outside when they sensed I was going stir crazy, pacing the perimeter of our five rooms and walking up and down a flight of stairs wrapped in a blanket.

Now, our state is on Phase Three of reopening. Case counts are predictably ticking back up, and the governor is calling for greater mask compliance so we don’t have to go back into a stricter lockdown. I returned to work a month ago; my last shift is in a couple days. Shortly after we reopened, I knew that if I kept working in the food industry in these new circumstances, I would harm myself. I already feel like I’m losing my mind chirping, “Have a good day! Be safe!” at unmasked people as I hand them their coffee on the sidewalk. My choices currently are to either keep working until my mental health deteriorates enough that I have to be hospitalized or stop working and financially fuck myself. I am lucky to even have this choice. If it were not for my partner’s father’s open invitation for us to live with him, I would not have it.

On my last shift at work, less than a minute before closing, someone called to ask if they could place an order for pickup. The person who took the call said no. After we locked up, a young unmasked woman in a pink bachelorette sash appeared outside the door and yanked at the handle over and over again. She and others in her party kept gesturing to their phones while our phone line rang and rang. After a few minutes they gave up and stumbled off, probably to another bar. One of the reasons this job was a good gig is that the owners and upper management don’t mindlessly conform to the policy that the customer is always right. They trust and stand with their staff in most conflicts. They wouldn’t berate staff for not taking an order when we were still open for thirty seconds. Yet still, this is not enough

It’s difficult to explain service work to those outside the industry. Anyone who has worked in service knows that there are people out there who trip on power dynamics, who take out all their frustrations on workers who can only be polite in response. These interactions are baked into the industry. There are no restaurants, no coffee shops, no cafés without this exchange of power. Service staff see people at their worst. I, for one, have seen more adult tantrums than I can stomach. Working in this industry challenges my belief in the possibility of a better world beyond capitalism. Most of the time, I believe that if we struggle together, we can work towards a more equitable world, even if we don’t fully achieve it in our lifetimes. I believe that we can still catch glimmers of that future in moments of mutual aid even while living under oppressive systems.

But then I work a shift at a popular coffee chain in 2016. I am depressed, newly out of an abusive relationship, and worried about my current girlfriend’s rapidly declining mental health. The Pulse shooting just happened and I drive past Confederate flags and Trump signs on the way to work every day. A woman in the drive-thru is giving us a hard time about her order. She reaches the window, still complaining, and I hand over her coffee accompanied with an admittedly venomous, overly enunciated “Have a wonderful day.” She looks directly into my eyes, drops the drink out of her window so that it splashes all over her car and the building, and speeds off.

But then it’s the second week of reopening in the middle of a global pandemic. One of the first customers of the day changes her drink order a couple times in the middle of its preparation and we are accommodating. I place the drink on the counter and call it out. The woman picks it up and says, “You have a terrible attitude problem here. All of you have just terrible attitudes. You should really work on that.” She leaves while we all stand there speechless.

You could argue that these stories are just individual incidents, one person having a bad day that interacted with my bad day, and that I should toughen up and not take it so personally. But there are so many more stories like this, both my own and those of people I know, and the people they know, and so on. And then there are the other variations – the strangers who tell you about their dying father when you ask how they are, the old men with their pet names and innuendo, the shit smeared all over the restroom. None of these stories, by themselves, can condemn an entire industry or ruin a worker’s mental wellbeing. But they accumulate like so many stains on a cleaning rag. At the end of your shift, you can gather all the rags, throw them in the washing machine, and clean away the night’s work. But after being stained and washed over and over again the rags wear thin until they can’t clean anything.

Front of house staff from a nearby seafood restaurant order drinks from us regularly. They always tip ridiculously well and gossip for a few minutes while we prepare their order. The last time I make their drinks, one of them gets eight shots of espresso. They’ve been open for outdoor dining since the governor approved it. Our workplaces are in the tiny Italian section of the city, known for its restaurants. The main street that runs through the area is closed down on weekend nights so that restaurants can increase their capacity by placing tables in the street. A picture of one of these nights is circulating local Facebook pages. Groups of five or six sit at tables unmasked; in the background, a crowd of between thirty and forty people stands in a loose sort of line with no social distancing and very few masks. Scattered throughout the picture are two or three servers, all in black except for their blue surgical masks. Small, alone, vulnerable. The sky is streaked pink and orange in the background.

 

September 2020

I think of the fish who nibble away at the Portuguese man-of-war’s less deadly tentacles, how they flirt with death to feed themselves. I think of the stickers someone put up downtown: two panels, one with a group of small fish fleeing from a bigger fish captioned “DON’T PANIC.” The second, with the small fish gathered in the shape of an even larger fish chasing the big fish: “ORGANIZE.” Right before I decided to quit, I spoke on the phone with someone I know who is active in labor organizing. I recently joined a union that she organizes with, and she told me that activity in our local chapter has dwindled in recent years. People are burning out. We talked about the steps of organizing my workplace and some possible demands, like reducing the number of customers in the shop at a time and not allowing them to use the restroom. We talked about how staff getting sick is an inevitability. She offered to set up an organizing training session for me and I agreed.

This conversation took place on one of my days off. Later that day, like all the other days since going back, I thought about walking into work the next day and dread twisted in my gut. My thoughts cycled between “No one should have to endanger themselves to pay bills during an international pandemic,” and “Why can’t I push through this fear like everyone else can,” and “I don’t know that everyone else isn’t as afraid as I am,” and “I can’t keep doing this,” and “I don’t have a choice,” until they reached their inevitable end in “I wish I were dead.” Once my brain gets to this place it tends to get stuck for a while, so variations on that sentiment circled around until I finally fell asleep that night. I woke up the next day, got dressed, tied on my clunky nonslip sneakers, and sat on the stairs waiting for a ride from my manager. On the way in, he put on an acapella metal band and laughing together at their self-seriousness helped dissipate the nerves a bit.

One night, on the way home, we started talking about homeschooling. He has a baby who is still a few years out from preschool and he and his wife are considering homeschooling her given the current state of everything. He knows I was homeschooled and asks what my experience was like. I answer with the same formula about self-reliance and independence that I always use, but I also tell him about how all my science textbooks treated young earth creationism as indisputable fact. We talk a bit about that and how isolated and steeped in religion my upbringing was. He says something about how normal I seem despite all this, and I think about how much effort I put into looking normal every day and how much it drained me even before the pandemic.

Now, I’m unemployed and two weeks out from a psychiatric appointment where I’ll hopefully receive the resources to get well enough to work again. I didn’t attempt to organize my workplace; I didn’t ask for accommodations from my boss. I just gave my two weeks and showed up until they were over. I don’t want to kill myself as much since quitting, which is nice, but the thought still lurks in dark corners ready to bloom again if I return to work without something shifting. There are things about myself that I am trying to accept, like: It’s probable that I can never work in food service again and that I just can’t work full time. There’s a possibility that I have an undiagnosed neurodivergent condition, but I won’t know for sure unless my doctor agrees to give me a referral to a neuropsychologist. All this exists alongside the larger dehumanizing truths of capitalism and how it permeates the medical industry all the way from psychiatric gatekeeping to vaccine development. I am learning not to think of myself as a burden and unlearning the idea that my value lies in my productivity. I no longer want to be a jellyfish with no thoughts or feelings, but I do envy the way they adapt to their surroundings, floating on the tides.

“Be water” is an organizing principle that spread from Hong Kong to the uprising currently happening in America. The saying urges protestors to flow, to adapt, to follow the path of least resistance. I want to jump into the stream and take part in the fight, to join those currently working to erode structures of oppression. But my brain doesn’t have the structure necessary to prevent a flood of sensory and emotional overwhelm, and I have barely avoided submersion for years. Maybe a diagnosis of some sort will offer a flotation device, maybe not. Until then, I will keep doing what I can to survive and to help in whatever small ways are available to me. I will study the jellies and hope that their gentle movements will offer solace from my racing brain. I will watch the ocean crash into the shore, observe the grooves the waves have carved over centuries, and stay on this earth for one more day, one more week, one more year.

Wren Phelps lives near the ocean after a brief detour to Lake Michigan. Their work has previously appeared in Entropy, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere.