I hate to call him that, cause not only did we spend gobs of hours fooling around with coffee and tea, we kinda got paid to do so.
He also created some of the most beautiful tracks on my album, found just about all the other artists involved, and calmly put up with my nonsense when I simply couldn't live with something and had to redo it.
The hours we spent together (and there were lots of hours over three years) felt more like play than work, so for the rest of this blog I'm just gonna say he is a friend.
Anyway, so an old friend calls me up and wants to know if I could meet for lunch the next day and talk about the coffee business. And I'm like "Sure . . . of course . . . lets do this."
Boy was I excited.
He owns a small coffee roasting business and might have an opportunity to expand exponentially. I won't go into details, cause they're not mine to share, but let us just say that his concern is quality control vs bottom dollar economics.
Something I know well.
And yes . . . it felt really good to share.
I hadn't taught retail mechanics and training methods or even thought about something as esoteric as a Profit and Loss Statement in a very long time.
I spent a decade and a half mastering a skill that I have no use for right now.
Wicked weird.
But thankfully, it's all still there rattling about, it just happens to have to share space with venue preferences and the lyric stylings of Rascal Flatts.
The reason I bring this up for ThrowBack Thursday is that despite the fact that I only have two cups a day and haven't compared a Guatemalan against an Aged Sumatra in 15 months, I'm still a coffee and tea guy.
I still love the stuff.
I still love talking about the stuff.
I absolutely still love teaching the stuff.
And I still got it.
I mean, imagine the great high school quarterback waking up to find that he's 38 years old, two cars, two kids, hot wife, and still has the arm strength to chuck it down field with pinpoint accuracy.
That's some cool stuff right there.
What makes ThrowBack Thursdays fun is looking at the old pictures of ones self. The odd clothes, the massive hair, the Teen Beat poses, the 'What was I thinking?' and of course the 'Who is that guy?'
But part of being an artist is the constant aching struggle to find an objective identity in a purely subjective medium.
So in fact . . . looking at my yellow pad filled with notes on production and distribution and corporate structures and long term objectives . . . I realized I know more about the man I was then than I know about the man I am now.
Which is perfectly fine.
I'm not a man in crisis and I don't have any plans to change course.
Adventure isn't about chasing the calm waters, it's about trying to catch the wave. But if I do find myself shipwrecked somewhere down the line, at least I know where to swim.
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