No thoughts, only dough

Balancing mental and manual labor.

In late June, my brain turned to mush. One culprit was the heat. Another was a family emergency that prompted me to rush home to my hometown, Kansas City. I had been juggling so many things that when that life earthquake hit, everything dropped to the ground. I was forced to examine what I had been so focused on keeping in the air, and to recognize how tired my arms were. Or I should say, moving away from this metaphor, my brain.

As a freelance writer and editor, mental work is my bread and butter. Since I’m not particularly specialized, I can’t really turn my brain off. I’ve become a professional magpie, collecting and compiling shiny objects for future stories, whether for Tone Madison, the Capitol Punishments Substack, freelance work for other outlets, or my dabbling in fiction. I try to read or watch things for fun and give it a rest, but often my magpie brain will start cawing. Before I know it, I’m turning over, kneading, wrestling that kernel of an idea into something writable, and hopefully, saleable. 

But for a few weeks, ideas and information were not sticking, just getting lost somewhere in a fog. I clearly needed to rest my mind, but I also had to make a living. By pure luck, I got a part-time job at a bakery.

Now, I’m not someone who romanticizes manual labor or the working class, but I also refuse to disparage those jobs as “skill-less.” That mentality has ruined what could and should be a gratifying sector of the job market; bosses believe that workers in these fields are interchangeable and therefore disposable, which in their mind justifies inhumane working conditions for little pay. If you consider yourself a mental laborer, and you read that description and think, “Hey, that kind of sounds like what’s happening at my job,” well, bad working conditions trickle up. Why do you think there’s been such a push for tech workers and business majors? So those sectors could treat those workers as disposable, just like how industries treat manual laborers.

The key to a good or bad manual (or mental) labor job is not the work itself, but the boss. My first job in high school was in the kitchen of Minsky’s, a local Kansas City pizza chain, which is still in business, making the best pizza in town. We had good managers who believed in hard work, yes, but also in treating their workers with dignity. It’s a pretty low bar to say that workplaces should have reasonable production goals, regular breaks, and free access to bathrooms and drinking water. But, as they say, the bar is in hell. I don’t believe in hell, but I would like to believe that we will face the full consequences of our actions. For me, that would mean the Amazon C-suite suits would have to feel every full bladder or adult diaper from their monstrous bathroom policies, as well as every swollen foot, aching muscle, and repetitive motion injury induced by their refusal to treat workers as human beings. I want every C-suite from the meatpackers to have to stand on the cutting lines and do the same motion at high speed, feel every horrific injury, and their cartilage wearing down until that joint is just bone on bone. I want them to know what it’s like to give literal skin, blood, and bone to a job that does not pay enough for them to live in dignity, much less retire when their body is too worn out.

I got this bakery job through a friend, who assured me that it’s a good job. The owner’s nice, has reasonable expectations, and even makes us a nice salad lunch every day. Yes, of course the work is strenuous—it’s a kitchen with ovens going in the summer. But each baking process is broken down into simple, repetitive tasks. Most only take an hour or two. On any given day, I could scoop chilled cookie dough into dozens of uniform little balls on baking sheets, and/or run dozens of discs of pie dough through a pizza dough roller until they’re flat and circular, and/or put blocks of butter through a shredder and put them in the freezer. The only mental energy I have to expel is for small talk, and focusing on doing tasks quickly and with consistent quality. No thoughts. Just quickly and carefully shaping quiche crusts while a video of a French woman scolding a cat for taking a bite out of her family-sized quiche replays in my head. “Ma quiche!”

When former Tone Madison managing editor Oona Mackesey-Green announced she was leaving to pursue a career as a carpenter/poet a couple years ago, I was intrigued. Now I think she’s a genius. I can’t imagine any art form that would suffer more from overwork than poetry, and I can’t think of a manual labor job that matches the precision of poetry better than carpentry. Every writer I’ve told about my new baking job stares off into the middle distance and softly says, “That sounds really nice.” The writers are longing to turn off their magpie brains and get their hands dirty.

I believe there’s also a longing for the immediacy of creating an object. So much is being written—good, bad, and middling—and so much other content is being thrown at us, whether we want it or not. Other than a handful of people who respond directly to my work, it’s hard to know if it’s reaching anyone, if it’s having an impact, or if I’m just another voice in the cacophony of our current media hellscape. 

I know the power of little treats. I know that blissful feeling of taking a bite out of something that is exactly what you needed at that moment. I hope my writing is making the world a better place, but I can’t say for certain. I know that my small contribution to putting together a baked good does, for one person, at one brief moment.