I Made A Mess

I'm struggling to write about coffee, the environment, convenience's costs, and simple solutions. Since I've made a mess of it, but want you to know one idea, I'm just saying it here in big blue letters:

Carry a ceramic mug and stop using disposable paper coffee cups.

How difficult is that really?

There's no good reason to ever use a disposable coffee cup. No matter what you want to believe, they're likely not recyclable, so just stop. I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out another way. Get to it.

I'm going back to writing. I've got good coffee in my ceramic mug and eventually I'll clean up the mess I've made. Maybe we all will.

Sliced Bread

After a cup of coffee and Morning Pages, I came up from my basement office, showered, shaved, dressed for work. Breakfast I keep pretty light. A piece of toast with butter. This morning, I grabbed the bread from the fridge and thought about sliced bread.

You know the old saying, right? The best thing since sliced bread. A bit of searching reminds me that machine-sliced bread came about in 1928. Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the machine. The saying came later.

I grew up with sliced bread. It didn't occurr to me to slice bread for a sandwich. Ridiculous, that. We had a weird, cheap bread knife, its serrated edge like a dull bow saw that tore the hell out of even the hard Italian bread we brought home for spaghetti dinners. Thank goodness for sliced bread.

This morning, I took the loaf from the fridge. The community center at which I work gets donations of bread, likely day-old. There's more than we can give away, so I grab a loaf each week. This morning I set the loaf on a cutting board and took hold of the good bread knife my wife gave me years ago. Its edge is fine and sharp enough to cut bread (and tomatoes) clean and thin as I like.

This morning I cut a thick slice — I was hungry — popped it in the toaster, wiped the knife clean and put it away, and uncovered the butter dish. Slicing bread was a moment's work. Using the knife was a joy like using any good tool. I waited for the toaster and thought about how slicing my own bread is just so much better than sliced bread.

Convenience is such a myth.

Isn't It Romantic?

Alan Jacobs is a good thinker. In this post he's describing the decline of baseball's enjoyment as the game becomes much more efficient and business like. This is Moneyball, pure and simple. Jacobs isn't demanding that Major League Baseball go backward, and he doesn't use this word, but I bet he'd be okay with a lot less business and a return to romance.

I was reminded of this New York Times piece by Tim Wu, "The Tyranny Of Convenience" in which he questions the notion that convenience is even a good thing. I like that he uses the word tyranny in that title. Again, we sacrifice romance for convenience, profit, and efficiency. In the process, more often than we might like to admit, we lose.

Romance? Really? That's what we're after?

I know, I know. It sounds hokey, but consider for a moment the best things in our lives and they will all have to do with romance and romantic notions. All our higher order ideals are romantic, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality. Jacobs is admitting that players, owners, and the league itself are all within their rights to want more money, but there's nothing romantic about that idea. Wu understands the desire and need for convenience, but the romantic idea it would free us from drudgery and lead to utopia is belied by the convenience of email, texting, and Slack. No romance there and certainly no utopia.

Yesterday I wrote about my desire to be a writer. Not a teacher who writes or an anything else that also rights, but a writer. There might not be money in it and the process will be inconvenient as hell for my family. But I'll tell you one thing: it's romantic as all get out and I'm in love with that.