There is a regular at my local coffee shop whom I know by voice. Even now, as I sit at the window bar wearing noise-cancelling earbuds, he comes in loud and clear. He is perfectly friendly, but places his order like a foreman giving commands at a busy construction site.

My usual, please, he booms. Okay, see ya! he calls on departure.

I think he owns a juice business (eavesdropping on his conversations is unavoidable) and I wonder if that’s a particularly loud line of work.

I notice this not because it’s interesting. I notice it simply because it’s something to notice. It is a peculiarity of my circumstance, and I want to remember it. I do not need more context than that — I have no inclination to start up a conversation. I like that this man is a minor character in my story and am fine not being one in his.

I often feel like I am watching my life from a third-person point of view, an outsider to my own experience. It can be a powerful coping mechanism (but rather offensive on a first date or during a heavy personal conversation — are you even listening to me?).

I wonder if dissociation is a quirk all writers share.

Perhaps I have been paying more attention to small moments like the loud man in the coffee shop because it is an exercise in being present. It may also be a signal of aging, becoming aware of the decreasing distance to death, desperately grasping to hold onto something, anything.

Or maybe it’s because I want to fill my life with beauty and have failed time and again to do so in any meaningful way. So I try to see the beauty in the simple things or whatever it says on a department store throw pillow.

And what is beauty, anyway?

I can’t help but think that no matter what I’m looking at, be it the reflection of a snow-capped mountain in an alpine lake, a graffitied alleyway, the familiar power-line-packed view from my apartment, or the laptop screen I’m locked onto right now, there are photons hitting every receptor in my eyes. The photons do not know the images they express. A photon from a blue pixel carries the same energy as one from the sky.

And yet we judge them.

These ones are artificial. Those ones are stunning. These ones are stressful. Those ones make me tear up.

Ten years ago, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. I remember this not because I cared — I don’t really follow sports — but because I saw the cover of a newspaper announcing the historic victory. In a full-page photo, fans embraced, laughed, cheered, cried, and spilled their overpriced beers.

I wondered, not judgmentally but curiously, why is this news? Isn’t it just a game, after all? What makes it so important? Why are these photons worthy of the front page?

There is no intrinsic value in a baseball game (even a win more than a hundred years in the making). Its value is made up, assigned to it by subjective, irrational human beings.

Like stocks, gold, or crypto. Or art.

Oh. I like art.

And I realized my critique was not criticism. It was the whole point: things matter because we make them matter. We are the context. We can judge the photons all we want, and we should. Fuck the power lines blocking my view. A lack of intrinsic value is not a deficiency — it is what allows us to have a human experience at all.

But when you create meaning, you create pain. Anger. Grief. Jealousy.

And, occasionally, beauty.

Okay, see ya!