Lament for Casual Banter
One of the things I miss the most about working in cafes is shooting the shit. This was the ability to fill thirty seconds to a minute with vanilla conversation that maybe made a person’s day 5–10% better. Some customers didn’t like to talk, others liked to talk too much, but there was a golden middle ground of pleasant, Sorkin-esque banter that I always hoped for.
I’m thinking of one customer in particular when I worked in in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Young guy, wore a long wool coat in the fall, tall with a boy-ish face who reportedly worked for Amazon in the “flying things” department. For a while I thought he meant Blue Origin, but later I learned it was drones. This kind of playful ambiguity makes conversation that much more fun. The most entertaining interactions, in my experience, were the ones that left me wondering what exactly just happened.
So this guy, we can call him Ben, came in when we were having a generally pointless but continuously entertaining debate as to how attractive Ethan Hawke is (or was). This question came from a disagreement between myself and my partner, Chey, after watching the movie Before Sunrise (1995). I thought that Ethan Hawke was a generally charming and good looking guy, thus I ranked him an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. Chey, on the other hand, ranked him a “6 at best” because of how smarmy and self-absorbed he was in the film.
So, I surveyed the clientele of the café and learned people fell pretty evenly onto either side of the argument. One group seemed to see a little bit of themselves in Hawke, and thus ranked him 8 or higher. The other group solidly found him overrated and “not even that good looking for a movie star” and very consistently ranked him a 6. This informal and ultimately pointless study buoyed my day serving coffee, and likely made some folks consider an actor they hadn’t thought about in a really long time.
Ben (bless his heart) had more to contribute than just a ranking. “What version of Ethan Hawke are we talking? Gattica Ethan Hawke? Or like present day Ethan Hawke?” Ben, unlike other customers, seemed to have the luxury of an untimed coffee break, so we were able to get into the particularities of which era of Ethan Hawke we were considering, along with the rubric for ranking.
Ultimately, I don’t care how attractive Ethan Hawke is. What I do care about is play, and by that I mean a person’s ability to play along with a meaningless conversation in order to make the time more bearable. Ben understood this, and so I like Ben. I trust Ben. I would like to one day hang out with Ben.
I think a year in quarantine has amplified my hunger for this kind of banter. Fortunately, Chey is sharp, funny, and trained in theater, so playful conversation comes very easily to her. The problem isn’t the quality of our conversations, but instead the quantity. As a barista, I spoke to easily 100 people a day. This gave me a variety of viewpoints, insights, and attitudes, all of which I would play with in my mind to fuel further conversations, even writing. By talking to 100 people a day, I could get a unique perspective on what the people of Pioneer Square were thinking. Now, the only person I talk to Chey, which has given me psychological whiplash.
Previously, a lot of my mental play was social. I thrived in real-world interaction, and used the thoughts of my community to fuel my interests. As a barista, if I learned that a dozen regulars were into, I don’t know, furniture restoration videos, I’d look into it. If a customer I liked recommended an album to me, I’d listen to it. My brain was at home amidst a wealth of in-person chatter, which has now been replaced with silence.
As much as I love the internet, Twitter doesn’t provide a comparable experience for me. Neither does Twitch. As someone who has spent a focused effort talking to people, there are intangibles that I have lost, leaving me feeling adrift and untethered. I often lie awake at night, unsure of who I really am, because so much of myself was defined by the collective interests of my community. Think of it this way: imagine you were a librarian that knew all of the library’s patrons, and you went out of your way to fill the library with books tailored to their specific tastes. And then one day, people stopped coming to the library. What’s the point of bringing in new books and magazines if no one is there to read them?
Another reason that I loved shooting the shit because it created social glue. Talking about Ethan Hawke was just one of many ways to make people feel human and comfortable when coming to the café. Of course, not everyone wants to talk, but I find a lot of people do. And I, personally, love to learn and listen. This was a defining personality trait of mine, which I put into action at most jobs I’ve ever had. Now, I’m not sure what I’m interested in any more, because the truth of the matter was that I was interested in my friends’ interests.
At my current remote job, I have scheduled video calls with a couple of my co-workers, designated specifically to talk about whatever we want, even if it’s not work related. These conversations give me life, and I’m doing my best to have more of them. It’s a little awkward to schedule them, especially when I know a lot of us are supposed to be working. It feels strange to mark in my calendar a conversation that would organically happen if we simply left the office at the same time for coffee.
Until then, I’m flipping through books and slowly losing interest. I know that there are ways to re-work my approach (Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, Discord), but for now I’m grieving the loss of the world I created for myself in the before-times, a world filled with an endless queue of casual conversation.
