The mess doesn't distract from the decor; the mess is the decor

On spitting out sunflower seeds, marking up books, and lowbrow morning coffee.

I make myself the biggest bowl of pasta I’ve ever seen. 

I wish it wasn’t true, but it is: No matter how expensive the bolognese or how many hours it’s been bubbling on the stove, it always tastes a little too much like Chef Boyardee.

I take a big, indulgent bite regardless. I think about how Mrs. Meyer’s Tomato Vine is the best hand soap scent that exists.

I think about how repetition can make any unnatural motion feel natural, like how eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells becomes a mindless habit.

I think about a friend who told me about a toxic therapist she used to see. The therapist told her she was overwhelming to listen to and that she probably overwhelmed other people in her life. I think about all the therapists in the world getting paid to give bad advice and how I almost studied to become one in college. Instead, I became a writer, and I give people bad advice for free.

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I never used to mark up my books. I wanted to keep them pristine. It’s fitting that I started using a pen to underline my favorite passages around the same time I started testing the boundaries of my independence. Marking up a book is the same kind of practice as certain types of intentional, measured hedonism. It’s an announcement; a practice in self-governance: This is my book, and I can do with it as I please. It’s the knowledge that nothing in life is too precious to be used up.

One of my favorite passages from Dwight Garner’s “The Upstairs Delicatessen” beautifully illustrates a topic as messy as the underline I drew beneath it:

“I knew Waterhouse was my sort of lunch companion when he took up a special annoyance of mine: waiters who whisk things off as if paid by the crumb. Near the end of your meal, he writes, ‘If the cloth does not look as lived in as Spencer Tracy’s face, then the lunch has been a failure. It should bear the honorable scars of battle—wine stains, soup stains, olive oil stains, spilled coffee, cigar burns—and be strewn with campaign debris in the way of bread crumbs, spilled salt, wine corks, toothpicks, sugar cubes, chocolate mint wrappers, cigarette packets and what have you.’ Here Waterhouse is in league with Shirley Hazzard, who described a table after lunch as resembling ‘a beach from which the tide had ebbed,’ and with Sally Mann, in her memoir Hold Still, who wrote about a meal with the painter Cy Twombly after which there was a ‘newspaper-covered table nacreous with oyster shells.’

‘The waiter who obliterates this impressive detritus is as a vandal wrecking the Albert Memorial,’ Waterhouse wrote. That paragraph should be posted in restaurant kitchens, above the photograph of the current Times restaurant critic. It’s a rule that holds in bars—especially dive bars. If you’ve been at a table for a few hours with friends, it’s gratifying to see the empties arranged around you like a crenellated embattlement. Your space feels occupied; better, you know what you’ve consumed.”

The mess doesn't distract from the decor; the mess is the decor.

In the same book, I read about Gray’s Papaya and can almost taste it. “A tour of New York City that neglects Gray’s Papaya is not a tour of New York City,” Garner writes. 

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I try to remember the layout of the grocery store I frequented when I lived on the Upper West Side. Cash registers on the right, narrow aisles to the back left, bakery and deli to the far right, and so much cheese.

There used to be a garbage bin on the corner of Spring and Mott that I loved to photograph whenever I was in SoHo. I guess I found the trash pile picturesque. While searching my camera roll to find it, I realized I must find most trash piles picturesque. I have quite a few photos of overflowing garbage bins.

Garbage bin hidden by a pile of trash on the corner of Spring and Mott.

Garbage bin on the corner of Canal and Ludlow. Manhattan has the best garbage bins.

Garbage bins after the Kilby Block Party in Salt Lake City.

Very full yard waste bin in my neighborhood.

While visiting New York City last month, I discovered — to my dismay — that the garbage can on the corner of Spring and Mott had disappeared. I didn’t make it up to West Side Market, either, but I did pay homage to a few other mainstays. At McNally Jackson, after much debate, I bought the book that reminded me the most of myself. The consumption of art just might be the most selfish practice of all.

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My mother-in-law gifted me a bag of coffee beans from the same café in Florence where I met Jeff Goldblum two Halloweens ago. He was wearing a bright blue mohair cardigan and taking his two young children Trick-or-Treating around the town square. I love to tell this story. 

Coffee is the reason I get out of bed (says everyone, always). When I don’t have time to make a pour-over in the morning, I visit my favorite coffee drive-thru on my way to work. I know I will look back fondly on this, the ultimate blessing of living just two blocks from a Java Joe’s. The espresso is often a bit burnt but comes out fast, and you get to talk face-to-face with a human instead of a robot or lit-up menu board without having to get out of your car. Americano or a pistachio latte with a toasted Asiago bagel. On my busiest days, I allow myself these simple pleasures. 

Java Joe’s was recently voted “best coffee shop” by the readers of our local newspaper, which caused quite a fuss on social media. “Wow. This is such a Utah reaction,” one commenter wrote. “Gotta have coffee fast, no ambiance, no pleasure, just efficiency. OK. Whatever.”

This is the problem with social media today, I think, and perhaps the problem in general. Everybody’s always upset, and no one dares to understand nuance anymore.

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In other news, happy November 1st! I updated the Highway Noise Radio playlist for November. It’s quite the eclectic mix, from Sinéad O'Connor to Current Joys to Brutalismus 3000. A variety of genres to span all types of autumn leaf-crunching moods.