How I Became a Regular at a Place I Don't Even Like That Much

There is a gas station near my apartment that sells what I can only describe as a cylindrical, heat-lamp-adjacent meat product encased in a tube that has been rotating on a metal roller since probably the previous week. I know this because I have eaten it. More than once. On purpose. Not because I was delirious or lost a bet, but because I had walked past it enough times that my brain started filing it under “you’re hungry. Let’s eat it.” That is what proximity does to your standards. It dissolves them. Slow and patient and without mercy.

Which brings me to The Place.

I will not name it because I am a person with some dignity left, but it is a coffee shop that is not good. The coffee tastes like hot brown water and the music is always something a person would describe as “acoustic” in the same tone you would use to say “minor fender bender.” The chairs are the specific kind of uncomfortable that makes you feel like you are being punished for wanting to sit down. I found out they have a loyalty app on my fourth visit, which means I had already been there four times before anyone thought to bribe me into returning and I downloaded it.

I now have two hundred and fourteen points.

This did not happen because I evaluated my coffee shop options and made an informed, confident adult decision. This happened because The Place is between my apartment and somewhere in the fog of routine. I started stopping there the way you stop noticing a chip in your wall. You did not choose the chip. The chip just became part of your wall.

The first time I went, I told myself it was a one-time situation. The kind of thing you do when you are tired and your standards have briefly stepped outside for air. The coffee was fine, which is the culinary version of a shrug, and I sat in one of those punishing chairs for like ten minutes before my spine presented a formal complaint. And I left. And then I came back. And then I came back again. And at some point between visit six and visit nine I started calling it “my place” out loud to other humans who had done nothing to deserve that information.

The problem is that “fine” is a trap that has claimed entire years of people’s lives.

Fine is the loyalty program of mediocrity. It punches your card every time you don’t hate something enough to leave and slowly, without any dramatic announcement, you have accrued enough visits to earn a free beverage that you will drink in a chair that is enjoying the torture against your lumbar spine while music that sounds like someone being sad near a guitar dissolves into the air around you. You will enjoy none of this.

You will come back anyway.

What I have identified, after extensive field research I did not plan on conducting, is that comfort is not the same thing as quality, but your nervous system cannot tell the difference and does not care. Your nervous system wants the thing it already knows the location of. It wants the place where they have seen your face enough times to start your order before you finish saying it. It wants the friction-free consumption of an acceptable product at a known coordinates situation, and it will sacrifice your taste buds on that altar without so much as a warning.

The barista at The Place knows my name now. She writes it on the cup without asking. I am not sure when this started happening or what specific visit pushed me from “customer” to “regular,” but one morning she had already spelled it wrong in the exact same way she always spells it wrong and I thought, this is intimacy. This specific flavor of being known incorrectly. I felt something close to warmth about it, which I recognize is bananas and also possibly the psychological phenomenon where you bond with your captors.

I have recommended The Place to people. I said the words “there’s a coffee shop I like” and gestured toward it as if I were a spokesperson for the experience of being a little let down in a consistent and familiar way. One of those people went and texted me “it’s fine” and I said “I know, right” and that was a normal exchange between adults.

Familiarity is the enemy of standards and I have the points to prove it.

Two hundred and fourteen of them, stacked up like a monument to every morning I chose the known mediocre over the unknown potentially better, standing there in an app on my phone like a little trophy for lowering the bar so far it is now load-bearing infrastructure. I am three visits away from a free drink.

I will be there.