Greetings from somewhere east of the Great Divide. The desert has long since given way to rolling prairie and the emptiness feels a little less deliberate, a little more desolate and I’m coming up empty-handed.
I’m thinking about the endless variety of choice available in the U.S. Before coming back, I made a list of things I was hoping to re-experience - favorite foods, old haunts, etc. Of course, once I got here, I wanted to try all the new stuff that has sprouted up since my last visit. Thus, at every turn I faced the eternal dilemma - something new or something familiar? Three weeks seems like there would be time enough for both, but…
So far on this trip I’ve made it a point to sample as many indie coffee shops as I can. That may sound a little ridiculous and it is, but the indie coffee boom has been happening in slow motion while I’ve been away.
When I last came back to my hometown, there were exactly four places to get coffee, not counting diners and restaurants: Starbucks, the other Starbucks, the off-brand Starbucks in the off-brand Barnes & Nobles called Hastings, and Dunkin’ Donuts. Now, things are different. Things are better. There are lots more choices, some of them are even locally owned.
(And I don’t really know why that matters except that it does. Every time I travel, I try to note where and when I’m giving my money to the big corporations that rule us all. Even being aware of the issue and being as vigilant as possible, it’s close to 100%.)
But then again, my God, the number of choices. Walking through Walmart or Target is an assault on the eyes1. Like, okay, I’ve been trying to find Tiger’s Milk bars this entire trip. For those unfamiliar, Tiger’s Milk bars were a protein bar before protein bars were a thing. In the 80s and 90s they were marketed as a health food, an alternative to a candy bar. Should be easy to find, right?
Malcolm Gladwell2 did a foundational TED talk about the power of choice. In it he relates the example of Howard Moskowitz attempts to make the perfect spaghetti sauce and how that led to the realization that people want a very limited set of choices; that unlimited choice led to decision fatigue and FOMO. People started to feel like they were making the wrong choice.
And, look, not finding Tiger’s Milk bars is not the worst thing in the world. I get that. But it irritated me that I couldn’t tell if the product was not in stock or if I just couldn’t find it for all the visual noise being thrown at me in the health food aisle of freaking Target. In the eternal choice between new and familiar I really wanted familiar, dang it. But, it turns out that Tiger’s Milk bars are no longer being produced. I have to find something new. Ugh.
About 15 years ago, I spent some time in Toronto, Canada. Beautiful city, lovely, people, delicious food. But mainly I remember everyone getting stoned. Toronto was the first place I had ever been where people didn’t try to hide that they were getting high. People talked about it openly and found spots out of the wind to light up. I couldn’t get over it.
Now, the places I’ve been traveling in the U.S. have all legalized weed to one extent or another. It is odd. I’ve taken to counting the dispensaries in the towns we pass through on the highway and while visiting. I stopped at approximately 420 stores, hehehe.
How much choice do you need in your edibles? Lots, apparently.
The phrase “you can’t go home again” has become something of a cliche. It’s a shortcut for wrapping up all the myriad ideas about change and growth and absence that encompass leaving home and returning. It actually originates as the title of a 1940 posthumous novel from Thomas Wolfe, or so Wikipedia tells me:
Wolfe took the title from a conversation with the writer Ella Winter, who remarked to Wolfe: "Don't you know you can't go home again?"
And
The title is reinforced in the denouement of the novel in which Webber realizes: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
Since Tiger’s Milk bars are no longer a thing but books are, I decided that I’d find a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s novel and read it. The caveat being that I couldn’t just order a copy off of Amazon, I’d need to find a copy in some dusty used bookstore somewhere.
Two and a half weeks and several bookstores later, no luck3. My quest has proved fruitless and I’m out of time. I suppose I’ll just be getting it off of Amazon after all.
Oh, and as for the protein bars, I just bought some bananas instead.
It’s not like we didn’t have Walmart or K-Mart or other shops like that when I lived in the States. Hell, I remember both my hometown and my university town getting their first Target stores. We were ecstatic. We could finally get all those tings we “needed.”
Love him or hate him, the fact remains that some of his work is foundational to modern thinking.
You know what I did find? More than two dozen copies of The Bonfire of the Vanities, a 1987 novel by an entirely different Tom Wolfe. So much for choices, eh?
Wilco; Weed; Wolfe, you can't go home again. You are having funnnnn in the US.
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Also, the banner for Also is nice.
So crazy I literally made a tiktok about abundance of choice last night. This girl suggested the idea of making a ' dopamine menu' of things to do in your free time so you're not paralyzed by open endedness. Also nice new banner!