How to Win the Love of Your Barista, Part 3

Pumpkin chocolate-chip scone OMG! My eyes could well have popped straight out of my head, but I wanted to play it cool.

"Is the pumpkin chocolate-chip scone as good as it looks?" I asked.

"Definitely. And it's high in protein and fat-free and low in sugar and is actually good for you, just as long as you are gullible and don't ask any questions," she replied.

Dear sweet Jesus she is joking with me. How do I possibly respond?

I bought a scone, and thanked her, and then I ate it. It was really good.

Items of Great Importance

I am in New Mexico right now. It's my mom's birthday today.

Now, perhaps you are selfish and so you are saying, "Yes yes happy birthday Ben's mom now please tell me about the green chile."

You could stand to be more polite, O Selfish One--sing "Happy Birthday" now!--but: I have an empty cooler in the car. When I return to Colorado that cooler will be full with a full sack of this year's Limitar chile.

If you work very hard to get into my good graces, perhaps I can be persuaded to share some.

Sabbatical

As you read this, I'm on a little road trip. I spent the first couple of days in Moab, UT, with plans to move next into southwest Colorado. Perhaps I'm there right now. Tomorrow I'll be heading into New Mexico to spend a few days with friends and family.

I've been planning the trip for a little while now. "Planning" being kind of a euphemism in this case--I knew which day I'd leave and that my first destination would be Moab. Beyond that, things were kind of ephemeral. I usually like it that way. It works for me.

Last week, as the trip impended, I was writing on my whiteboard things that absolutely had to happen before I left and one of them was "backup my laptop," and it hit me for the first time that instead of bringing my computer with me, perhaps I could completely take a sabbatical from the thing for the duration of the trip. No email, no writing, nothing. I'd just leave it at home. (Not that I would disconnect completely. I'd still bring my smartphone. Because I don't much plan ahead of time, Google's magic proves pretty invaluable.)

I spend hours a day in front of the computer. A week or so completely away from it sounded really delightful.

So I wrote on my whiteboard all the pieces I would need to write and schedule for publication to make it work. I tried to pull it off, but I didn't even come close. I'd have needed to hatch the plan a lot earlier in the process to have succeeded.

But no matter. The seed's been planted. A sabbatical from the computer. It sounds luxurious. I'm going to pick a time when doing so would feel delightful, relaxing, expansive. And I'm going to make it happen.

What the Marching Band Got Me Thinking

This past weekend I had occasion to go to a college football game, which I do about never. I find big-time college football--meaning the whole complex of sport, media and advertisers--pretty much immoral. It's a billion-dollar industry, and the one actually indispensable part--the players--doesn't get paid. And don't give me any bullshit about traditions of amateurism, or how a college scholarship is value enough. These kids are putting their health--literally, their futures--on the line, and everyone in the game makes a shit ton of money except them. It's disgusting.

But last weekend was Family Weekend at Colorado State, and my mom and my sister and her husband came up to visit my nephew. They decided to check out the CSU-Air Force football game and invited me along. I said sure. I'm willing to put principle aside to spend time with my family.

At halftime, the marching band took to the field. They were dressed exactly how you'd expect a marching band to be dressed, and they got into indecipherable formations (maybe Space Invaders or Galaxians?) and they did a medley of 70s disco-funk. It was fun and it made me laugh.

I had planned on watching the band and then going to get a bite to eat, but when I stood up to head down the stairs, my sister pointed out that perhaps it wasn't the best time--the aisles were full of people doing the very same thing. I had assumed that most people had no interest in the band and would head to the snackbars as soon as halftime started. My assumption was wrong.

Given the seriousness of the tailgaters we'd seen as we'd walked in, and given the multitudes in CSU green, it was clear that most people in the stands took their college football pretty seriously. If they weren't hitting the snackbars until the band was done, that meant they saw watching the band as part of the entertainment of college football, not something divorced from it. You watch the marching band at halftime because that's what you do.

It's an interesting moment when you realize you are intersecting with a subculture that you are completely disconnected from. The marching band halftime performance is pretty much a tradition in amateur football. On Saturdays across the country, bands of snappily dressed young people carrying march-specific musical instruments (all hail the sousaphone!) get into careful formations and play jaunty marching band music for the entertainment of the crowds. And if you don't attend these games, you would never, ever see it.

My imagination began to play. Given the energy put into the endeavor, there really ought to be people who are obsessed with marching bands. People who travel the country attending football games, who watch with only passing interest while waiting expectantly for the clock to count down to the end of the first half when the real entertainment begins.

And among those obsessives, there should be one who takes it so seriously that he blogs about it. Who writes reviews. Who totally fails to see anything ridiculous about either the object of his obsession or the obsession itself. When faced with a performance inferior to his lofty standards, his reviews take on that strangely aggrieved tone you sometimes hear from critics, as though a perceived lack of quality is an insult aimed at him personally.

I imagined him sitting in a seat not far away from me, literally shaking with rage and contempt at all the philistines nearby. How can all these idiots actually be enjoying this? The formation doesn't even appear to be anything, and some of the euphoniums are sharp, and you call that an arrangement of "Staying Alive?"

It's okay, Marching Band Critic Guy. Here, talk to this person in the next section. He critiques stadium food, and he's simply outraged by the nachos.

The King in the Desert

We sought parley with the King in the Desert and so I was sent to Moab, to the land where the sweeping rocks themselves are the jewels of his crown.

"When the Last Quarter moon reaches its zenith, we shall meet under the Arch. You know the one," came His Highness's message.

"Oh goddammit but what about all the goddamn tourists," I said, but not to him. Our return message said only, "Thus it shall be, Sire."

Be Like Water

Earlier this week, I was thinking about Jerry's stated aim that we develop a "state of ease" with the things we do, and a memory from my time in Spain popped into my head.

In English, we talk of being fluent in something. In Spanish (Castilian, anyway), the idiomatic translation is con soltura. The English sentence, "I speak fluently," translates to, "Hablo con soltura." I've always liked the phrase. I understood it via what it evoked: soltura always conjured for me an ease of motion, kind of like someone comfortably grooving to music.

When this memory popped up, I sought a literal translation; Google Translate offered "looseness." So then "hablo con soltura" means literally, "I speak with looseness" or "I speak with ease."

As I thought more about it, I realized I didn't really know what "fluent" meant. I mean, I understand the word just fine. Obviously, I know when and how to use it. But most (all?) words like that, words that encapsulate a kind of complicated abstract concept, have an underlying implicit metaphor. And in the case of fluent, I couldn't figure out what it was.

So I went to the OED. Perhaps this should have been obvious, but fluent comes from the Latin word meaning to flow. (The same root gives us fluid.) Thus fluent means flowing, ready to flow, fluid.

Thus, through the Spanish phrase, con soltura, I find myself connecting the two languages: when you are doing something fluently, doing something con soltura, you are doing it with ease. You are doing it the way water flows.

"Do it easier" is an admonition Jerry often gives. I understand it better now.

Be like water.

The Long Path to Winning the Love of Your Barista, Part 1

her dreadlocks and her tattoos and the two gemstones flat against the skin at the end of her comely eyebrow so that I asked her to my eternal chagrin, where's the party? and she was like, what? and I was like, the bling. On your face. And I pointed. And she was like, oh, you mean my piercing? and suddenly I was very old.

So I have been very tactical in my approach to earning her passionate love. It is best not to fuck with the barista's patience. We forget this, I think, but she is a purveyor of mind-altering drugs and for the caffeine addicts among us she is the shining golden path to a shitty morning turning better, and so they are ready to suck her teat, metaphorically, like frightened babes, which is why she's hit on 8,000 times a day by fawning addicts hungering for their fix.

Her special magic is that she is brightly pleasant to everyone, which of course makes neanderthals like, yes, myself think that she's expressing some just-above-liminal flirtation instead of just being nice because she's nice to people.

So I have been casually and intermittently visiting her every so often. No pattern to my visits, no specific times. Indeed, often when I visit her she isn't even there and so presumably only feels it by the echos that my presence leaves in her very world which sorry I'm getting a little carried away I'm really pretty attracted to her.

Casualties

I went hunting through my old hard drives looking for a certain picture, and while doing so I came across another picture, wholly unexpected.

It was a picture of her and me together. Her and me together in a golden light, smiling.

I do not remember this as a bright time, you understand. I remember anguish and anger. I remember unhappiness. I remember darkness. You remember that time too, I bet: when the Ant People and the Water Nomads banded together to attack the purification plant. The picture is from the days just before their assault.

Also, we kind of fought a lot.

In the picture, bathed in a golden light, her and me in uniform (we knew of them massing, you remember) and we are with our arms around each other and the smiles on our faces are broad and pure.

It is hard to remember now that we were so fully in love.

The assault came as we knew it would and though we defeated them (as we knew we would), the casualties were not light and each of us survived uninjured but neither she nor I nor we survived unscathed. The Ant People returned underground, and the Water Nomads fled, routed, and our platoon split. Some sealed the tunnels as best we could, some gave chase, some stayed to tend to the damage. I went out, way out. She stayed behind. I came back, but from where I'd gone there was no coming back.