Ode to Food Service

When you write for a living, things can get cloudy. Sometime around two-thirty, your head starts to spin, your eyes become flushed with spidery red rivers of fatigue. You speak so often in your head, your own voice becomes a stranger: a hermit, an oddity, a clumsy tool, a scar.

But when you have A Stupid Job you are forced to shake things up inside you. Forced to come back down to the planet, with four feet on the ground. Beaver's Stupid Job involves slinging people coffee and tree bark baguettes. Despite the long stretch between three and six PM when the only creatures to come by are lost soldiers seeking nips, Beaver looks forward to the making of these sandwiches, to the grinding of the coffee, to the smell of the wet bark shaved into fine and lengthwise pieces.

You have to get out of the cabin to appreciate coming back to it. This applies to snack-snacks, to love bugs, to habits, to work. Staying on the straight and narrow is too safe a place to be.