I’ll mind my own business when you un-busy my mind.

I work from a lot of coffee shops these days; consultant life. It affords time to practice judging - then perhaps - tolerating the unwashed masses. Before we get into it, we first need to lament black coffee’s losing real estate battle against the “milk-alt maple lavender carame-latte” crowd. However, we celebrate the barista who calls to the back of the line and offers black coffee drinkers a shortcut to the front of his/her “each one of these fucking drinks takes 15 minutes to make” workload.

Anyway. From my many coffee shop perches, I have seen a lot of interpersonal greetings: the stranger-greeting-stranger, friend-greeting-friend, acquaintance-greeting-acquaintance, etc. There are a variety. I “get” sticking to the trite stuff when it’s stranger-on-stranger, but what strikes me, recently, is how so many stop completely at the platitude, particularly when there is some element of familiarity involved:

“Oh, hi. Long time no see. You look great. Bye.”

Me as a bystander….. whe… who… why…. what’s their history? Why haven’t they seen each other in a long time? She looks great compared to what/when? Was that other girl just a relative expert on the state of everyone’s “look?” That’s the “conversational” equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug; likely crumbs from some meal you ate long ago but don’t want to think about now. Good for you, you cleaned up after yourself.

The point? It’s just something we feel compelled to do. Why? Why do we rearrange the same furniture within the same room? We walk by a section of bare floor and decide in the moment that it should be covered with something on-hand, only to reveal another patch of floor that we’ll deal with after a few months of not caring, or after our nightly 4-pack of Guinness and a timely Pintrest ad.

I don’t have a solution to this un-problem, and I’m not saying it needs one. Although…

…maybe we can fill “conversation” with fewer milk crate + gas-pipe bookshelves from Pinterest, and fill it with enough space to swing a bat; when you need to wreck a bitch, or bring someone home.