The scene starts out black. Forceful, bright MIDI grand piano chords play. The scene fades in. A tattered pair of old sneakers are walking down a sidewalk “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” the lyrics tell you as the MIDI instruments break into a full MIDI arrangement. The camera pedestals upward from the ankles of your tan work pants (Levis, of course) as you walk hurriedly towards your destination. From your Levi pocket, that your right hand is stuffed into, runs a white chord (your Samsung Galaxy S3 stock headphones, of course) that droops across the baggy green work polo you’re wearing. The small red logo on the shirt reads the same as your destination that lay ahead– Budwey’s.
As you get closer to work on an overcast and cool fall day, you begin to dread your first task– clocking in and taking off your headphones. You remember that the timeclock in the back is slow a couple of minutes, so your walking relaxes a little bit. You just have to hear some more of this fucking sick album before you clock in to your stock boy shift at the job your older brother got you three years ago. But hey, work’s work.
The album keeps jamming on in all soulful glory as you enter the front doors of work. You have to slow down just a little bit as the automatic doors struggle to open after years of missed maintenance. As you make it through the smell of wet cigarettes and past the display of somehow already rotting pumpkins, into the dim, yellowish lighting of Budwey’s, you receive no greeting other than a fleeting and uninterested glance from the middle aged woman at the lotto ticket counter.
“Man, this album is already great,” you think to yourself. “It sounds like Alicia Keys meets Maroon 5 meets Calvin Harris. I think this really sounds great like Calvin Harris. It’s so soulful! And there’s acoustic guitar sometimes. It’s so alternative.”
You’re walking down the bread aisle as track 4 is hitting it’s soulful peak. “10 more days… man I can really feel that,” you think to yourself, as you walk slowly, yet uncomfortably close behind an elderly woman in front of you. You finally rush around her as she gets by the PB&J display in the middle of the aisle. There’s a loaf of bread on the ground. You don’t really notice it until your foot glances the likely stale loaf. You look up towards the break room door. Mike is in the way. Oh, fucking Mike. He’s been manager here for 27 years and he just saw you nudge that bread. He just looks at you and shakes his head. You keep walking and mumble that you’re not clocked in yet, or whatever.
As you punch your card on the archaic clock-in device (score, 5:03, not too bad!) you take out your pack of Markets and make your way out back to the picnic table. Various co-workers of different shapes and ages litter the bench beneath the grayish fall skies. You don’t remember, or care to remember, any of their names, however you sit down anyway. You faintly hear one of them complain about an impending trip to the DMV; while George (or was it some other shitty name?) scratches away at a lottery ticket with a straight up depressed look on his face. Eventually, your eyes settle on the cigarette butts and dead, brown leaves on the crumbling asphalt underneath your worn down Asics; the fact that you’re on the clock barely even in the back of your mind.
“Maybe it might be time for a better day,” your headphones tell you in the soulful tone that only an Avicii song can contain. Maybe it might be. Just maybe.
Grade: N/A