Most of the small jobs I’ve found and lost in the last several years have been a rough go at the onset, yet my first month at Whole Foods has been delightful. I enjoy working in the health and beauty section, the commute is short, my coworkers are friendly, and the environment is about as lax as that of a retail organization with shift work can be. Alas, I have recently realized even WF is not Lotusland.

Wait, you cry, a huge private corporation founded by the guy who blocked the public option from Obamacare, owned by an even huger corporation led by a guy who recently rode a phallus-shaped space ship to the edge of space then thanked the little people for paying, is not paradise? You’re right, I own this.

Everyone has a trigger and mine is sleep, so I was stunned to learn there will be regular 6:00 AM all-hands meetings at my store as well as quarterly inventory counts that extend until midnight. Both of those times are firmly within my sleep range, though I prefer staying up late to rising early given a choice.

I am not being given a choice.

I hope both events don’t happen on the same day.

Decades ago, I chastised a friend of mine, who happens to be (still) a bit of a mogul in Maine, for scheduling 6 AM staff meetings, pointing out that this eliminated potential employees who relied on public transportation or were solely responsible for child or elder care. I do not imagine this was an outlier in Maine, a beautiful state with the whitest population in the US (94.31% in 2021), many of whom believe the forest industry beats the government at conservation, and a majority of whom keep re-electing Senator Susan Collins, one of the people most responsible for Team Mitch, the group of jurists formerly known as the Supreme Court.

Also not Lotusland.

California is asymptotic to Lotusland, so perhaps I have an excuse to be gobsmacked by encountering such a policy at a business here. I once thought Canada was true Lotusland, perhaps excepting its weather, then I read Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree. Western Canada, it turns out, is pretty much exactly like the US: hypercapitalistic, armed to the teeth, and white-male dominated.

Perhaps to achieve my own personal Lotusland, I simply need to retire. I can’t honestly claim that most of my retired friends spend their time indulging in pleasure and luxury rather than dealing with practical concerns, as Wikipedia defines LL, but at least one does, so hope lives.