I have a job. The job is a summer job. I don’t have a full time job because I’m a college student. The job is working on a farm. I am a farmhand. My boss tells me to shovel dirt in a specific direction and I do it. Sometimes I hoe around Swiss Chard. Other things too. Most of the tasks are pretty monotonous and can several hours to complete. Different workers have their own way of dealing with this. The Skidmore grad chain smokes. The middle-aged Vietnamese man takes piss breaks. I listen to things on my iPod. I’d never listened to an audiobook at work, nor had I read a Cormac McCarthy novel, so I decided I’d kill two birds with one stone and give Blood Meridian a try. It took about three days of work to get through the story. When I started it, I was shoveling mulch from bigger piles into smaller piles. When I finished it, I was sitting down in a field my boss calls “The Plain.”

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