Wow.

There's nothing special to you about eating a good meal with good company? To me it's one of the best things in life.

I've been told that I should sign up for door dash or start delivering pounds of coffee to peoples houses while I'm shut down. I didn't open up the shop to make filthy lucre. If that's what I was in it for I could fine many ways to make more money with less work doing something else.

I don't want to stand behind a machine passing off drinks to an app slave all day. I won't wear a mask for 10 hours a day, just to have the privileged of at most three minutes business like human contact while you go in the one door and exit the other moving through tapped off squares on the floor.

My shop is a part of the neighborhood. It's the place where friendships, relationships, new businesses and public service projects are born.

It's friends who haven't seen each other in months having a chance encounter and kicking it for an hour on the picnic table.

It's really too many things to list and I'm sure it's things to people I barely know that they find important that I have no idea of.

Food is sacrament. You need it to live. Maybe this means nothing to you. Maybe food, it's enjoyment, the realization people have worked hard from soil to your cup to try and make it special just for you is of no importance, a cup at 7/11, McDonalds, or from Door Dash is as good as another.

I've noticed restaurants that start emphasizing app delivery get shitty within about six months. Their margins go down but the volume goes up. Your work harder for a little bit more money and a lot less fun. The owner touches less of what goes out the door, because the're too busy to be involved with all aspects as much as they used to be. The owner definitely has less contact with customers, cares less because it's hard to care when your main feed back is mostly the angry stares of app slaves who care for naught but time. Work isn't fun, if you can hire your way out of production you do. prices almost always go up in those first six months while quality goes down. Within a year I generally don't dine there anymore. There is a Thai place a block from my house, we used to ear there once a week, it's dead to me now but always has deliveries streaming in and out.

I don't want to live in app food world, just like I don't want to live in a cooperate food world. I haven't eaten in a Chilies type restaurant in over a decade. I have a weakness for McDonalds breakfast, I might get it once a month. I've ordered food by app exactly once in my life. If I'm going to sit at home I can make my self something to eat. If I go out I want my food to be intentional, made by someone who meant to be at this place at this time making the food they want to make, rockin whatever tunes they wanted to rock, in an environment they thought would be conducive to the experience.

Maybe I'm shallow, but eating other peoples food while I enjoy the company of the people I love and find interesting is close to one of my favorite things in life.

It's possible I am not understanding your snark. If I am understanding it than your life sounds pretty fucking sad to me but we are different people who value different things. I hope the world still NEEDS to share good food with good company.

Engaged.

Something I didn't say last time about that one app that I should have:

You're an exceptionally talented, exceptionally interesting young man. But you reveal nothing about yourself until you've been directly questioned. Then you're cautiously enthusiastic about the stuff you're, like, really good at.

You know what's sexy as all hell? Enthusiasm. The unbridled confidence to not just believe but to know that the stuff you think is cool IS cool and that anybody would be delighted to get a glimpse into this awesome world you live in. Passion and enthusiasm is what makes things interesting; being the vessel of that passion and enthusiasm is what makes you interesting.

You're a great communicator. Every interaction you have with a girl should take the form of "you're going to think this is cool because X." If you can make someone feel the awesome you do they will view you as awesome through simple transference.

The more bravely and confidently you handle this, the less awkward it will be. "Uhm, yeah, I know we've, like, been friends for a long time but, uh, I kind of, er, want, like, more. I think. Uhm." is going to be terrible even if she feels the same. "I'm having a really hard time not thinking about you and I'll hate myself forever if I don't try for more" will plant a seed even if she shoots you down.

And if she shoots you down? Don't be awkward, don't be weird, but don't for a minute pretend you're going to let things go back to what they were. People think that relationships are like glass - you have to break them to make them something else. They aren't. She might turn you down this time but if you believe in yourself and let her see it, you'll get another chance. And maybe another. And eventually she'll succumb.

I knew my wife for nine years before we started dating. Shit, I was her second husband.