500 Word Experiment and No Artificial Light

The 500 Word Experiment

I like the phrase freewrite.

I’ve been using that recently. In thinking about what I will be writing about. Often, most of the time I have something specific in mind, that I want to share. Even right now, there are several things that I am thinking about, that I would like to write about. And yet, I’ve noticed that when I just… freewrite, the writing… well, things come up that I wouldn’t have expected, sometimes, and the way I write about them is natural, as a flow of thought, and that’s often even more interesting than me just writing about a specific topic.

It’s good to just have a topic in mind, and something to write a whole piece around. There doesn’t have to be any specific way that you go about writing things for your blog, anyways. You still can do whatever you want.

I was having a good time trying to meet that 500 word cutoff, for a while. Did I even make it a week with that? It’s not my style. I’m simply too meandering and loquacious. I simply have too much to unload, in most cases, that I sit down at the computer, or with my pen and paper, and start going crazy. 500 words is a sneeze.

However, the 500 word experiment was very interesting. I hacked and slashed some of my pieces to death, to near death. I didn’t allow anything to die, and that’s why I ended up mostly being unable to reach the 500 word cutoff. There’s only so much you can say in 500 words. But, if you can say something in 500 words, but you’re saying the same thing in 700, or 1000, then you should really consider cutting that down, think carefully about those extra 300 or 500 words.

That’s how I felt about the experiment. I did feel that everything I posted benefitted from at least some degree of serious pruning, and often, even ruthless cutting helped the piece. But when pushing it to the limit, you see what is too much, when you’ve overcut and done damage, what can’t be cut away. Where to draw the line.

I really thought about Hemingway when writing like this, and editing in such a manner. I do use a lot of fluff. Even in that sentence, I realized it as I wrote it. I do use a lot of fluff. Now, do you see the fluff there? It immediately stands out. And I’m in the habit of using immediately as a filler word, as I just did again. Immediately can often be cut.

I just like to add words, and in conversation we do add a lot of words and use a lot of filler, and especially in a piece like what I’m writing now, a freewrite, where I’m writing as I’m thinking, that’s fine, even important. For the tone and voice. But there are cases where you don’t want that, and where it would be better not to have it. The point is that you are choosing to be terse, or fluffy, loose with your wordage and writing, intentionally. As Hemingway chose.

The fluff in that sentence was the do. Why do we need do in that sentence? We don’t need it. But if I were speaking, I would probably add the do, and say, “I do use a lot of fluff.”

How many words have we got here?

577, so far.

New Experiment: No (BAD) Artificial Light

The 500 word experiment was fun and useful. This is why we like to do experiments. They show you things. And, they are fun. Usually. I don’t know what experiment I’ve done that wasn’t fun.

I’m currently on a new one, that y’all don’t even know about yet, which is that I’m trying my best to avoid artificial light at night. I am shocked that it took me so long to get around to this one.

I’ve known that blue light was bad for the eyes, and screentime is a problem for the circadian rhythm, tricking your body into thinking it’s still daytime, throwing off your cortisol production. But I wasn’t taking it that seriously. Well, Rachel offhandedly made a comment about artificial light being a problem, the other week, and it stuck with me. It sat in my brain, it hit me at the right time. It was something I had been meaning to research.

I only had to read about three articles full of facts and data, to sufficiently shock and horrify me, and outrage me, and put me on the right and true path. I could share that data with you, possibly in another post. I’m freewriting, not writing an inspirational piece or anything here. You might not need all that data anyways, but data is what gets me to take action. Data, fact, reports, they are all what move me. And they are what convinced me of the bane on our existence that is artificial light.

Now, fire is also artificial light. I had to Google that after my first night by the candle. I spent the night thinking, “Is this artificial light?” Having an internal debate. The answer is yes, but it’s nothing like LED light, or light from screens. I am tempted to look some things up here — I won’t do it. But fire is low on the spectrum, the wavelengths are longer, and carry less energy. (Something like this.) It is not so intense on your eyes. I just read that firelight mimics sunlight, which is telling your brain that it’s time to wind down. So at least if you are burning a candle until 3 am, binging on Harry Potter and The Goblet Of Fire, your body and mind are basically already primed to go to bed whenever you decide that it’s best if you finally put the book down now, or you become so absolutely exhausted that you’re dropping the book on yourself or rereading the same page seven times in a row.

Candles are fun. We all know that, right? We are all in agreement of this fact. So, having more reasons to use candles is always great. I think that half of me is adhering to my no artificial light policy (I’m excluding candles from inclusion in my artificial light definition, here, because it’s really not a bad one) because it gives me an excuse to use candles.

It’s a good thing to be doing, a no artificial light (after sunset) policy, because it is like a soft ban on lots of bad things. Things that you aren’t supposed to be doing at night, that keep you up late. Phone, computer, gaming, TV. Even just getting up to shennanigans in your room, even reading, it will be easier to stay up later when you bask in your artificial light glow in your room, in your kitchen. However, when that sun goes down, FIRE UP THE CANDLES. It’s creepin’ time. There’s not much you can do then, or you have to really want it. You have to want it so badly that you’ll do it under conditions of severe low light, and possibly risk an injury, and experience frustration.

That’s how the reading has been. My candle barely casts enough light to illuminate the pages. It’s probably terrible for my eyes, having to squint so hard, but my eyes are already so terrible that at this point… they can get worse. I mean, if it comes to it, I’ll use a magnifying glass if I have to. We’ll cross that bridge when it comes. But this reading, you would be amazed to see all the various positions that I have come up with, the seatings and arrangements, the tactical candle placements, the ingenious schemes to angle the book so that it receives more light.

It took me three nights to come up with my second best idea, which was to place the candle in a drawer in my desk. I have an old wooden desk, and it sits right next to my bed. Reading from bed is more comfortable, especially at night, although I like to also sit at the desk and read. I have been starting at the desk, and then moving to the bed. Sometimes I’ll switch between them, and actually I have been doing that, to give my body a break from being stuck in a single position for too long. So, sitting at the desk could be tiring, as I have to prop the book up in my hands, on my elbows. That has to be done to ensure enough light hits the page.

The angle of the light is very important, and unfortunately most of my candle light is shooting straight up, and is wasted. So, wherever my book is in relation to the candle, it must be above the candle. I have to get that light. That’s why, after two nights, my genius was not to raise the book up, but to lower the candle, by putting it in an open drawer. That makes it lower than the surface of the desk, putting it on the right level for me and my book. It also allowed me to read from the bed, while sitting propped up against the pillows, because my bed height is slightly lower than the desk height.

I thought that this was a good lesson in how time can reveal solutions and solve your problems. You do not immediately see all the improvements, you do not strike on all the best methods at once. You inevitably get tired of the problem, you get so tired of the problem, and you constantly scheme ways to solve it, until you do.

It took me about five nights before I found the best, most comfortable solution yet. It was also, however, the most fraught with risk, as I found out. By placing the candle at the side of my hip, directly on my bed with me in my bed, I was able to have the light so close, and receive a majority of the beaming photons, wonderfully lighting up the pages of my book. They would shoot right up into the book, that I could hold in a natural position, right on my lap, as I lay there in the bed, and I could see every word, on both pages, clearly, from a perfectly comfortable position. How wonderful!

Yet, the problem as you can imagine, is that I am laying down, sharing my bed with a precariously placed flame, and a basin of hot, liquid wax.

It was some night where I was reading the Order of the Phoenix, deep into the trials and tribulations, and I just wanted it to be over, I wanted to get through it, but the book was defeating me, all 900-something pages of it. This was no Chamber of Secrets, this was no Prisoner of Azkaban. I was pushing it up to my limit, playing with fire, literally (yes I had to write that)…! And I was falling asleep at the wheel, and the third or fourth time I nodded off on the page, I was jolted awake, feeling my side suddenly become wet and hot, and saw that the candle flame was now sideways, and the hot wax was spilling out everywhere. That’ll wake you up.

You know what? I just remembered. I wasn’t falling asleep. I remember that, I was just deeply engrossed, and forgot about the candle, and adjusted myself. I know I wasn’t falling asleep, because I remember what I did afterward: I took off my pajama pants, now covered in hot wax, I changed my undies (had a little hot wax on ’em too), and then I promptly sat down at my desk and kept reading. When I went back to bed, I checked to see if the wax had cooled, and it had. There was a hard, waxy patch now on the side of my comforter and bedsheet.

That patch lasted for about five days, by the way. I just washed the sheets today.

One week of no artificial light: Results

I was just tempted to let that be the last line, but I should tell you about the big reason to avoid bad artificial light, which is quality of sleep. And I have found that since I’ve started doing this no artificial light thing, I have really been getting great sleep, and I have been enjoying these evening, reading-by-candlelight sessions. It’s got me waking up at the crack of dawn again. I find that even if I stay up late, as I have been, because I have been gripped by a sickness of Harry Potter fever, it’s not as punishing to stay up reading by candlelight, than by browsing the internet on the laptop, watching YouTube or whatever it is that I’m doing with that thing.

It also removes all temptation, and pressure. Maybe I’m pressured to take care of some business? Do it tomorrow. Have to message someone? Nope. Check email, bank accounts, Google something that I absolutely need to get to the bottom of, such as “Is fire artificial light?” It can wait. (It took all of my self-control not to look this one up, that first candlelit night.)

It makes it easier to say no to all of these things because of the clear rule. When the goes down, artificial light is BANNED. That’s it. Simple.

I would recommend anyone to try this out.

(Shoutout to Parker for discovering the unscented $1.99 candles hidden on the very bottom rack in the candle aisle at Kroger, that comes with no plastic except the tiny sticker, that looks exactly like a large glass of milk, and makes this foray into candlelight living much more economically bearable.)

The Realness of Imaginary Things

July 1st, 2025

(Note: Yes, I’ve been reading Harry Potter. You might have expected a Trash Quest Pt. 4 post today, but I‘m too stuck in Potter world. I finished the fourth book last night. I read the first six when I was in elementary school, but not the last, so I don’t actually know how it all ends. As a 29 year old man, I have to tell y’all… I am enthralled.)

Slipping… into fantasy. Into a fantastical world, realer than the world, the “real” world I’m inhabiting now. But how much fantasy exists in our “real” world?

Money? Fantasy. Nations? Fantasy. Laws? Fantasy.

You can’t hold a law in your hands. You can’t touch a nation. $20 has no power outside of certain human minds. We operate in a fantasy world.

What is Spongebob? Is Spongebob real? Does Spongebob Squarepants exist? Did he ever exist? Outside of our imaginations, in the physical world, no. But does that make him any less real?

Fantasy is reality. Reality is fantasy. This is the premise of Don Quixote. Who is to say he’s not a knight? But himself?

You are what you think you are. What does it matter if no one else agrees? It’s your reality. You are a knight. You are a spaceman, a diva, a Messiah. It’s your reality.

Imagination and imaginary worlds are real. Bilbo Baggins is real. Voldemort is real. When you close your eyes and imagine yourself frolicking in the waves on the beach, that’s real.

It’s really happening. It happened.

I was reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last night, and Fred yawned, and I saw him yawning, as I read, in my mind’s eye, and it made me yawn, in “real” life.

That’s how real it is.

I was there in the graveyard, watching Voldemort torture Harry, hearing the laughter of the Death Eaters, their dark hoods shaking back and forth as they laughed, watching Harry run, battle. I was there.

Is a dream real? For that moment, is it really happening? Are we in a dream now?

What is fantasy? What is not? What is reality?

Illusion is a great word. I have always loved that word, because it’s fun to say, and because of what it means.

An illusion. It’s nothing but an illusion. It’s just an illusion. And when the illusion breaks, and you’ve returned to reality once more, you’ve been disillusioned. You are seeing clearly again.

But, what if you never gave up on the illusion? Or, what if you accepted a dual reality? Then, it is never really an illusion.

It is just reality.

I guess this is coming from how immersed I’ve been in Harry Potter.

Reading JK Rowling’s writing, about how she has always had a tendency to slip in and out of imaginary worlds. They are real worlds, the characters are real people, Hogwarts a real place.

A real place, in a person’s mind, accessible to only them. And yet, they can take you there, through language.

This is the magic and the power of the writer. Of the storyteller.

What an incredible power we have.

Trash Quest Pt. 2

Note: This post is 683 words, excluding this note. It’s not 500 but it’s the best I could do. It started at 1000. I refuse to cut any more!!!!!!!

After writing up my morning post about my trash quest, I opened up my bag of collected trash and plastics. It was time to see what I had. I haven’t thrown anything away, except for a broken, metal door hinge. I regret throwing it away.

I examined my trash, and found a few things. There was paper of various kinds, mostly paper from mail. That’s recycleable. Easy. It’s not compostable because it contains small amounts of plastic film that act as a window, to see the sender’s address.

I had a poster from Gibson Garage that was not laminated, and so recycleable as paper.

Then, there was plastic. Strange hard items, rigid plastic like trays and containers, and then a lot of plastic film/bags. The plastic film I found could be recycled at a few grocery stores near me. The Publix was the closest, so I took my bag of plastic and set off to investigate.

Now, I was successful. They did accept plastic bags and plastic wrap at a recycling bin at Publix. That was most of my plastic. Great. But then…

When you see it, when your eyes are opened, to the scale and scope of the problem, you cannot unsee it. It’s like being in The Matrix.

I walked into the Publix. I wanted to see what I could buy, without acquiring any plastic.

The answer was, nothing.

Nothing at all.

I was supposed to be in a place for buying food. I was in a grocery store.

Yet, all I saw was plastic.

A sea of single-use plastics: shrink wrap, bags, rigid containers, stickers—everything encased in plastic.

This is the problem, people.

Now, that was bad. That was horrifying, even. But what was worse?

On my walk back home, I picked up 9 plastic bottles.

I picked up other pieces of trash as well. Wrappers, food containers. With each piece of plastic litter, my rage was rising. And then?

The literal icing on the cake, was an actual cake.

I saw it up ahead in the road. Two plastic bags, fluttering in the street.

I approached. One bag had half of a cake in it, in a rigid plastic container. The other bag had a bundle of bananas.

Hundreds of ants were swarming the cake. I decided to dump it, let the ants feast. I took the bananas with me to put in my compost hole.

I took the stickers off the bananas. They’re plastic, and won’t degrade. The cake I was disgusted with, and I threw that plastic away. I should have gone farther and cleaned it, and added the rigid plastic container to my collection. I threw the bananas in my compost hole.

This pissed me off. I was getting angry. I found two cans and two bottles on the last minute of my walk.

Now I was really fired up. I wasn’t done. I knew that our trash can itself would be full of recycleable and compostable trash. Why? Because of our roommate.

The dude chugs Dr. Pepper like his life depends on it. Like it’s his Holy Elixir of Everlasting Life. And he throws all of those cans in the trash.

I talked to him about it. I’m not angry with him is because he’s absent-minded. He doesn’t realize what he’s doing.

The biggest reason why we should not allow these permanent items out in the world, in the size and scope that they are: Even if they can be meticulously recycled, there will be people who don’t do that, or things that go wrong. And they will end up in the environment.

I pulled four Dr. Pepper cans out of the trash. Then, there was mailing waste. That could be recycled. Paper towel waste, and two chunks of bell peppers: compostable.

Parker and I haven’t been using paper towels for months. We just use rags instead. But the other roommate bought some recently.

This is the trash quest I am on. The size and scope of the problem is huge, y’all. But we have to do it. We have to solve this.

Writing Update

What’s up y’all.

I want to write a post here to let you all know what’s up with me and writing. I know I haven’t posted anything on here in a while. I haven’t been up to date at all. It hasn’t really been that kind of a period for me. I have done a lot of writing, but not much has made it to the blog.

It has been an interesting and developmental phase for me. I spent a lot of time, going through cycles, when I was not holding down a job, doing a lot of editing work, and then when working, almost no editing, but still a lot of creative writing. And now I’m in a place where I have multiple ideas or drafts, works that need to be finished, and I really want to finish them, and I have finished the second major revision of my Japan memoir, which I want to call Kumamoto Days. It’s a reference to Orwell’s Burmese Days and I like the sound of it and I think it captures everything that the memoir is about.

I have compiled all or most of all of the Japan writings that I did here on this blog, and have put them together into a single work, and have been meticulously editing and improving them to try and have something publishable. Dr. Joseph Chaney had the great idea to do this, and it has really improved me as a writer, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how books are written, and the editing process, and what it takes to actually make something as good as it can be. That has been a big deal and has taken now quite a long time. I’ve been doing the editing for almost two years now, which is crazy. I did not imagine at all that it would take so long, but I kept finding ways to improve it, so I have had to keep editing. But I think we are nearly at the end of the road with that. I will start reaching out to agents and trying to get it published. But in the meantime, I can put up a downloadable PDF of the whole thing, and you can have it in digital form. I just want to review it one more time and get a bit more feedback, before I do that. So I just want to let you know now that that’s coming.

This is my plan. I have other works incoming. I want to focus on one thing at a time. But finally, after a long period of editing and working on this dang thing, I’m nearing at least the next stage of the project, which is the publishing part, and it seems like I can’t have any idea how that will take, because it’s not up to me, unless I self-publish it. All I really want is to have it in a physical form and look over and see it sitting on my bookshelf. That’s all I want at this point. And for you guys to have that too.

Witches and Warlocks

February 18th, 2025

I can do some brain dumping for you. Let’s see what comes out.

This is for your entertainment. So it better be entertaining.

Jaz told me today that her family is full of witches and warlocks. Her exact words were, “My family is full of witches and warlocks.” That was absolutely an incredible thing and I immediately had to go and write it down. Jaz has Jamacian ancestry, or perhaps Haitian, I must confirm this, but Carribbean at least, we can say, and so she was not joking. She said, “I’m not joking.” She knows about voodoo, and she said she used to practice, and knows about the techniques, for hexing and cursing and etc.. That she comes from a line of practitioners. And she told me a story of putting a dead trout in her roommate’s air vents, to get her worthless roommate to understand what it was like to have a stinky house, because she would never take out the trash or do the dishes. She served her roommate up with a problem so unbearable that she would be forced to actually deal with it. If I had been consulting with Jaz this whole time, or if Jaz had lived in 805B, I don’t think Wisdom would have lasted two months. Jaz knows about being petty. But the main thing, that was so incredible, was that she said this statement, after mentioning some things about voodoo, in full seriousness, in the year 2025, and that was what was so incredible. To say, “My family is full of witches and warlocks.” In seriousness, and mean it, and I know that you mean it, and are serious about it. What an incredible thing to say.

I’ll tell you about the mug. I just went and took a sip out of it, and was reminded about my mug, and I need to tell you this because I need to give you some good things, to compensate for you reading my rant.

I bought a mug from the store, a cute lime-green mug, in the classic coffee mug shape, with an interesting series of purple and pinkish-brown lines across the middle of the mug, and also in the middle of the handle. When I rang it up, it was listed in our system as the “gradient mug”, to which I told Juanito, and who said, being a smart boy that he is, “What! That’s no gradient! You call that a gradient?” I actually think, from my web dev days, that it is a gradient, and that Juanito is just plain wrong, but I’m not going to do any Googling to confirm this. I’m just going to assume that I’m right, and that it has something of a gradient on it. This mug caught my eye from the moment I saw it, I was immediately charmed by it, and it is an unusual item to be in our merchandise roster. We have many more interesting items, things way more exotic, but something about this simple yet unique mug stood out to me. In the color scheme and the gradient. My brain did not really attach words to use to describe the mug, or why I should like it, as it goes with things that strike you in a visual way, you just like them because you like how they look, but when I was considering buying it, because it was now 50% off, having survived about a month and still, sat there on the shelf, I admiring it from behind the counter every once in a while, I was considering buying it now, only $8.65, and I of course first consulted with every single other employee, my trusted advisors, to gauge their reactions and also because I was curious what they thought about this strange mug, and I asked them to rate it out of 100, to which Juanito replied, something sarcastic, I can’t remember exactly, he said something that was not out of 100, and then someone gave it a 40, I think that was Jessica, and then I think it was Katerina, who said it was ugly, but kind of cute, and that I needed to buy it, and that’s when I knew I needed to buy it, and she was right. Katerina has phenomenal judgment and especially because, when she described the mug as being cute and ugly, I felt that she had a similar understanding of what was special about this mug, she saw it in the same way that I did, and I also felt that it was like that, cute, but ugly. Because the colors, as someone said, green and purple, they didn’t really go together well in this way, they could not have been the most obvious choice, and yet somehow, it worked. It was actually working. It was wonky enough to be interesting, and ugly, and yet cute. So, I bought it then, immediately ringing it up, and then drinking coffee out of it, and that was about the first thing that happened that morning. I spent the first thirty minutes of that day in such a jubilant mood, and having purchased the mug, and so happy to be working again with a team who was in good spirits, that I had to ride that out for as long as possible, as it was also very necessary for my mental health and spirit (this was now four days ago, I would say), and I just walked around with my mug, after the successful purchase, and enjoyed my coffee, and chatted with everyone and made many jokes and said stupid things. I went over to Queen sometime later, after having done some work, and was holding my mug again, so charmed and happy to have this wonderful new mug, that I had now been able to buy, and had already said to her soon after I had bought it, that even if somehow my mug disappeared or I broke it, and I was only able to use it for this single day, it had already brought me so much needed joy and excitement that it was worth the purchase, and then about an hour later or so, I was again sipping coffee from this mug, and she was sitting down at one of the cafe tables taking her break, and I walked over just to talk to her, and was talking, and she said, “Enjoying your new mug?” And I was absolutely enjoying it, should could obviously tell, and then I realized that me holding the mug then, in that moment, and sipping on my coffee, and wearing the Starbucks apron, I felt so absolutely relaxed, like I was in my living room, or a hotel, in my slippers and a robe, which my apron was giving me the feeling of having like a lounge robe on, and I realized that I had felt exactly that way, which I told her. And we had a good laugh about that. Somehow, through this assortment of cues, the new mug, just the act of holding a mug of coffee, and my feeling, and then the apron was truly somehow making me feel that I was in a robe, or some pajamas, made me feel that I was just chillin’ in my living room, enjoying a cup of coffee and reading the paper. It was a great feeling, and Queen asked me if I was going to keep the mug here at the store, and I joked that if I did, and it made me feel this way every day, Stacy Hamilton was going to hate it to the maximum. And, remembering how comfortable Charlie would look, holding his cappucino that he had made first thing after showing up and clocking in, and how much she hated that, and how Charlie lasted only two weeks (RIP Charlie), I decided that I should just take the mug home. And the advantage there is that, I have a little piece of my store at home, a small link to my Starbucks world, that I can enjoy and reflect on.

I think this is a good story too because it makes me feel the positive side to acquiring an item. I feel that we know that we make purchases that we shouldn’t make, but here is an example of a purchase that does good. You really can buy material things and they can bring you happiness, and function as well, because I haven’t really had a good coffee mug, that I loved. I bought a pig mug from Goodwill for $1, that is a large mug in the shape of a pig, that is cute and special, but I realized the problem with it as soon as I first tried to enjoy a cup of coffee out of it, which is that there is no easy way to drink from it, because the shape is weird, and so that completely ruins your drinking experience.

That’s the mug story.

My friend Mister Ethan Beller of Atlanta, Georgia recently called me and praised my outstanding guitar riff that he had seen me play on Instagram. He had recently seen this video I had posted, of me playing Creeping Death, and was very impressed, and said “100 out of 10 guitar riff, Steven san.” I said, I know, and then I realized that he thought that that was my riff, and I said, do you think that’s my riff, and he was like, yes, and I had to laugh so hard, because he definitely thought that that was all my work, not even one riff but the three main parts of the whole song, and he had no idea that that incredible guitar music was from one of the greatest metal and Metallica songs of all time, that is Metallica’s Creeping Death. But I thought it was also amazing because it goes to show that good music is good music, and he wasn’t swayed by thinking it was special just because it was Metallica or because other people said it was an amazing song. He thought it was mine, and he recognized it as being incredible. And he said, “I guess I should listen to some Metallica.” And I was like, yes, you absolutely should. I’m thinking about this because I’m sitting down to practice this legendary, masterful work on the guitar once again. It is 214 beats per minute, and James Hetfield plays with only downstrokes, which means that the song is played at 214 bpm and only with downstroking, which if you don’t know about BPMs and downstroking, let me tell you that it is not very easy to do. At least, not until you can do it. Then you can do it easily. I was struggling with 160 bpm, then it was easy, then 170 bpm, and now that’s a cakewalk, and now 180 bpm, which is doable. And that’s how it goes. But how long until 214 bpm? Let’s see what I can do tonight.

180 is possible with mostly no mistakes. 185 is not possible, doable with many mistakes and some collapses. So there ya go.

Today a cute girl came into the store, her name was Katie. Katie had mobile ordered, and we knew she was coming to get a Penguin Cookie, which is a sugar cookie with a cute penguin face on it, that we had in the winter, and we didn’t have them any more, and we were going to have to break the news to her. So, I was standing out in the lobby area, not having anything particularly to do, but needed to get farther and farther away from Andrew, in this moment desiring freedom, now needing to get so far away that I have to leave from behind the counter, because even that is too close, and Katie walked in to get her goodies, amongst which is the Penguin Cookie, and as she stepped up to the counter, I approached her and told her that we had good news and bad news, yada yada. At this same time, Andrew approaches, because he cannot ever let anyone do anything by themselves, and must intrude on all affairs, particularly me, and my affairs, because as Jessica would say, he’s in love with me, and so Katie is now somewhat flanked, and Katie is looking at both of us, but mostly looking at me, as I am the lead and initiated this interaction. So, Katie asked if we had cake pops, and went with the birthday cake pop. And when we had gone over to the register, which, I don’t know why we even did, because she didn’t have to make any transaction, and I said, “You like the Penguin Cookie, huh?” And she said she did, and that she had been getting them since high school, and she figured we wouldn’t have it, but she saw that it wasn’t marked out on the app, so she thought she would try and go for it. Andrew of course had followed us over to the register and was now standing very close. The Penguin Cookie was nostalgic for Katie, and I thought that was cute, and also shocking that Starbucks has had the Penguin Cookie for that long, and then she got her birthday cake pop and left, and I was standing there at the register, thinking about how Katie had loved her Penguin Cookie, this little Christmas cookie that she had some attachment to, and then I thought, why could she order the Penguin Cookie? She shouldn’t have been able to order it anymore through the app, because it was seasonal, and it has been phased out, and we don’t have it anymore. So, I went into our POS system, into the seasonal items, and found the Penguin Cookie button, and saw that it was not marked out as being unavailable, and I went to mark it out, and it was then marked unavailable. So at least, if Katie ever looks, or if anyone else looks, they will not have to be disappointed. I then tried to mark out the other seasonal items that were not listed as unavailable, but the system told me I couldn’t do that, because they were unavailable already. These are the small technical glitches that happen in the POS system, of which there are many. But I was able to mark that Penguin Cookie out. I felt that I had done something useful then. For Katie and the Penguin Cookie lovers.

They say that one of the best ways to make friends with people is to see them regularly. Any time you regularly see someone, you will have a higher likelihood of becoming their friend. People who live in apartment complexes make friends with people on their floors, etc. Well, that’s definitely 100% true. I have so many friends now through my job at this Cummins Station Starbucks, only because I see these people every day (most of my coworkers) or every other day, or every week (the regulars). And in almost every case our friendship and closeness and familiarity that we now have, where we know things about each other and have some idea of what is going on in each other’s lives, is only because we’ve seen each other repeatedly. It’s not because we have had any kind of special connection, although there are always going to be people that other people bond with. Everyone has their special friends. It’s interesting to see what baristas, what members of our team have befriended what regulars, and what customers, and who has positive interactions with who, and in what way, and what they bond over. One person I think about in particular right now is a woman named Katharine, who has a small dog, Lambo. Katharine is a regular and is in the store usually at least once a week, and I see her walking all over downtown Nashville with her extremely cute Pomeranian fluffball. This dog is one of the cutest dogs in existence, and is an extremely special dog. Katharine knows this and you know that this dog is living like royalty, or better. It is obvious. You could almost say that Lambo owns Katharine, actually. It really feels that way. Lambo is the king. Well, I remember that Katherine and I had a funny interaction from the very beginning, that we were sharing laughs, I can’t remember exactly what was said, but I remember that from the beginning, that she was funny. And that was about six months ago, when we first opened. Well, here we are all this time later, and when I come in on my off days, if Katherine comes in she’ll sit by me, and we’ll talk about life, or if we’re slow, I’ll chat with her over the counter while she sits there with her incredible dog, and talk about guitars, or her pilates class, or Starbucks, or the weather. And every time we talk, or every other time we talk, we learn something new about each other. But, the friendship, a friendship like this, is not based on anything but pure social joy. There is nothing transactional about it, it is just pure friendship. Nobody wants anything but to have a laugh and a good conversation. That’s very wholesome.

I have a similar relationship with many of the people from the Gibson Garage. I learn about them, learn a little more each week, acquire a new fact, and add it to the list of facts and stories I’ve learned about them. Just yesterday, Whitney came in, and I knew that she had been wanting to buy a new guitar, we had been talking about this for a few weeks now, and she was excited to tell me that she had bought her new guitar, her first Gibson, and it was a light-blue Gibson Les Paul, and of course she had to show me a picture, and I was like, oh my god that’s a beautiful guitar, outstanding.

This is the joy of working in a coffee shop like this. You can get so many stories and learn so many things about people, and the happenings of the world. For example, about world happenings, two days a lady came in, asking when we had opened, because she came here every year with her husband, because he goes to a yearly conference here in Nashville, and she hadn’t seen us here before. I told her that we had opened in August, and I asked her what the conference was (we get many conference attendees because we are right downtown by the Music City Center, I think that’s what it’s called, that hosts large conferences, with like, 30,000 people, and they all stay at the hotels right in the area) and she said it was a healthcare conference, and she told me that security was really tight this year, because of, you know, the shooting, she looked at me, and I said yes I did know about it, and she said that she knew people in the conference and she was usually allowed to enter and talk to people and mingle and hang out, but that this year they weren’t letting guests in, and they had metal detectors and etc. So she had to find other things to do. And I thought that was a good example of hearing about world affairs and the happenings of the world, and we could say as well an example of how the news is real, and that there are really events happening, and changes resulting from them, and here was an example of someone impacted by an event that had happened recently, that we all knew about. Because Luigi Mangionne killed Brian Thompson, this healthcare guy’s wife couldn’t go to her husband’s conference anymore. That’s what I mean.

You can learn a lot about someone, more than you ever wanted to know about some people, when you have even 15 minutes of free time to talk to them. They can open up, and they can tell you their entire life story, or you can read about them on Wikipedia, if they’re famous, or something like that, you can read about them in the news, or whatever. But when you meet someone over the register, over the counter at the coffee shop, you don’t have a lot of time. You have only thirty seconds, even. If there’s no one in line, or you particularly want to talk, you can manage to have more of a conversation. You could talk for even 3 or 5 minutes. But eventually, something is going to happen, someone is going to walk in, someone is going to ask me a question, or their order is going to be ready and they will be called, and feel the need to go get it, and you will be pulled apart. And then, if you see them again, if they come back, you can talk again, and then if they keep coming back and are a regular, then you can do this, over and over, and then each time, or every few times, you learn something new, in your conversation, they reveal something, and you accumulate facts and knowledge about this person, and you get to know them a little bit better. And in this way, over the course of weeks and months, the person is slowly revealed, and continues to be revealed, and you learn more and more about who they are. But still, it happens slowly, it can be just a trickle of information, and you never see them in their element, really, you only know them from the coffee shop, only know what they’re like and how they act within the confines of the coffee shop, and don’t know anything about their entire life outside of the shop. You only know about it from what they tell you. And similarly, they only know me as being the Starbucks employee. They don’t know about my entire life outside of it, they don’t know what I look like outside of the uniform, they haven’t been there for any moment of my life away from the Starbucks store. They only know me in this role.

Some little information that I learned today about Jared – he is a salaried employee. Jared works for the Gibson Garage as a Sales Pro, and is a younger guy, probably about my age, from Florida, also been in Nashville for a year, and is extremely good at guitar, has played for like 17 years. See, I know about this guy. I have now had many of these small interactions with him, learning something each time. And today, we had another one, and I learned a new thing, that Jared is a salaried employee. That’s a small fact, a small single fact, but I didn’t know that about him, and now I know.

One of the most recent times I was in the Gibson Garage, Jared showed me the fancy, expensive, real Gibson Explorers, and let me rock out. I was really impressed with and loving the Lizy Hale Explorerbird, that just felt and played amazing, and sounded incredible. So heavy. He had asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to play, and I had been playing the Epiphone Explorers, and liked those, and had been too shy/not bothering to ask anyone to unlock the expensive ones for me, and let me try those out. So he took me over there and let me crack in to ’em. And now that I’m thinking about this, I actually have this story somewhat wrong, because this is what happened. HENRY was the one to ask me what I wanted to play, and took me over to the Gibson Explorers and let me crack in, and he showed me an incredible thing when he took the guitar down for me, which was this: that all the expensive guitars have a “lock” on them, that prevents you from taking them off of the rack without help from a Gibson Garage employee, but he showed me a trick, which is that the lock is actually kind of useless, and only requires you to twist the twisty-part with your fingers, to get it to unlock, and the special key that they have for the lock is basically just for show. But, this whole time that lock had prevented me from taking anything down, because you know, as like most people probably do, you see that something is locked, and you think, well, it must be locked, and I can’t get through a lock, so I’m not even going to try. But this lock was extremely easily foiled, if you just tried. With two fingers, you can defy these locks. I thought that was amazing, and Henry was very happy to show me that. Henry and I are cool, I should say, and I’m sure he’s not just going around and showing everyone how to foil these little guitar locks.

Seeing how easily these locks could be defied, but how effective they actually were at stopping me, just because they were there, made me think about something that I had heard before, that I don’t know if is true or not, but I had heard this once, that elephants kept in captivity were, when young, bound with chains, so they couldn’t actually escape when they tried, but then when they grew up, the elephants would be tied with rope instead, which they could actually escape if they tried, but when they had tried to escape the chains they found that they couldn’t, and so they stopped trying to escape at all. I felt like the same thing had happened with me and these locks. And if I was an elephant, and another elephant came along and showed me how easy it was to break my rope, I would have been just as shocked.