On The Beautiful Futility Of Writing

By July Westhale

When I was in high school, I worked full-time at a bait and tackle shop in my rundown, Sacramento Valley orchard town of Winters. It was my first steady job, and I was saving up to buy my friend’s piece-of-shit Volkswagen, which was currently hoisted up on cinder blocks and missing an engine, as far as I could tell. But it was red, and I knew enough about ’72 Bugs to know that they sounded like jet planes when you got in them, and that the speaker system was pretty decent.

My schedule was damn good for a high schooler: I had the 3:30 am-noon shift, which allowed me to have my days free during the summer and to work during my free period during the school year. I was usually in bed before my parents came home and out of the house before anyone woke up, and I’d get off by the time my friends were just waking up.

Often, it felt like I lived in a town occupied by no one.

But despite what you may be thinking — oohh, all that existential solitude — there’s nothing romantic about working in a bait shop. When I wasn’t filling up rusting pails with live minnows or getting pints of squirming meal-worms from the back fridge, I was dusting the taxidermied heads of game that the town folks had caught. I was selling porno mags to people I knew, and bullets and kegs to people I didn’t, usually at the…