Pain Center Excerpt #2: The First Three Punches
“After the first three punches, you are a quarter of the way to a free one, though some drinks are worth two punches, if you are at all interested, you can check out the punch system on our website, and it will tell you all about it,” the girl at the register helpfully explained after my third visit of the day. 'Thank you.'
I felt weird coming back so often, but as far as I could tell, everyone in there was doing the same thing, they just had jobs to go to. I used to have a job. Now I just have pay. And time. So much fucking time.
To think I never would have known about this if I hadn’t broken my glass coffee pot. But now this was my whole day. Three cups in and I was already an addict, wanting to drink Huxley’s Coffee and learn all about the phenomenon and the man himself, who had somehow managed to get the fine people of Hartsburg Massachusetts to abandon their Doggin’ Donuts Coffee, which was no small trick. Believe me. This town once loved their Doggin’. 20 years before, when I was still working at Hardens’, Doggin’ was king. Now, it was harder to actually find one that was still open. They’d all moved out when the town became harder to do business with. In the void came the Money People. Who had their own ideas about how to make the place that they came to just like the places where they came from. Which made absolutely no sense to me.
In my research, this is what I learned about Huxley and the missing day….
Huxley was an American expat living in Samoa, who a few years back had to realign its time zones to sync with the Australians and the New Zealand. But to do this they had to cancel one day of the year: December 30, 2011. So that day officially does not exist on your leftover Samoan calendar from 2011. Fun fact: I was sick as hell on December 30, 2011. Like, sicker than I’d ever been in my whole life, before or since. I lay in bed for almost a full 24 hours trying to get over it. I lost the whole day, being sicker than I thought possible. It was like my body was trying to sympathize with the plight of all the people who lost birthdays and anniversaries that year because of a time change that was economically related. I get sad thinking about it, for absolutely no rational reason.
It was all very complicated, but it had something to do with church and trade and how it was initially set up and politics…
Huxley, previously lost in life, found himself troubled by this.
The Coffee Company grew out of Huxley’s desire to share his vision of 12/30/11 with the world.
All this research and I was tired. I think I needed another cup of coffee...
READ PAIN CENTER: THE NOVEL! Available here! http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCen...
I felt weird coming back so often, but as far as I could tell, everyone in there was doing the same thing, they just had jobs to go to. I used to have a job. Now I just have pay. And time. So much fucking time.
To think I never would have known about this if I hadn’t broken my glass coffee pot. But now this was my whole day. Three cups in and I was already an addict, wanting to drink Huxley’s Coffee and learn all about the phenomenon and the man himself, who had somehow managed to get the fine people of Hartsburg Massachusetts to abandon their Doggin’ Donuts Coffee, which was no small trick. Believe me. This town once loved their Doggin’. 20 years before, when I was still working at Hardens’, Doggin’ was king. Now, it was harder to actually find one that was still open. They’d all moved out when the town became harder to do business with. In the void came the Money People. Who had their own ideas about how to make the place that they came to just like the places where they came from. Which made absolutely no sense to me.
In my research, this is what I learned about Huxley and the missing day….
Huxley was an American expat living in Samoa, who a few years back had to realign its time zones to sync with the Australians and the New Zealand. But to do this they had to cancel one day of the year: December 30, 2011. So that day officially does not exist on your leftover Samoan calendar from 2011. Fun fact: I was sick as hell on December 30, 2011. Like, sicker than I’d ever been in my whole life, before or since. I lay in bed for almost a full 24 hours trying to get over it. I lost the whole day, being sicker than I thought possible. It was like my body was trying to sympathize with the plight of all the people who lost birthdays and anniversaries that year because of a time change that was economically related. I get sad thinking about it, for absolutely no rational reason.
It was all very complicated, but it had something to do with church and trade and how it was initially set up and politics…
Huxley, previously lost in life, found himself troubled by this.
The Coffee Company grew out of Huxley’s desire to share his vision of 12/30/11 with the world.
All this research and I was tired. I think I needed another cup of coffee...
READ PAIN CENTER: THE NOVEL! Available here! http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCen...
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