Want to know what’s really hard? Lighting.
No, seriously…freaking lighting is a nightmare. Table lamps, chandeliers, recessed, track, indirect, spot, flood…
Lights are, to all intents and purposes, flat out evil.
Have you ever tried to find the perfect pendant lights for a brewery in a 100-year-old train station? Good lord, I feel like a 14 year old trying to find just the right outfit for his first date…
*sigh*
See, this is how places end up with basic fluorescent lighting that doesn’t only look like shit, it also pisses off the customers: it’s just easier that way. There are companies out there whose entire business model is based on our society’s subservience to FOMO.* But not these lighting folks, nosireebob. They’re just the opposite; they build their model off our willingness to surrender and simply settle. They know someone shopping for new commercial fixtures is likely starting a new business. They know that particular someone is going to be stressed and overwhelmed. They know timelines and costs are probably already out the window by the time the buyer gets to lighting, so they base their marketing and product selection on that other little nugget of societal gold: “Stop dithering and just buy something, ferfuckssake!”
*Fear Of Missing Out, if you’re wondering.
It’s insidious. It’s evil. And, of course, it works.
Crap, I wish I had known more about sales and marketing when I was in high school and college — I wouldn’t have left “those” parties and bars alone quite so often.
Ahem. Never mind.
The good news out of all this is that I am at the point where lights are a concern. Freakin’ lights! That right there is progress, if I do say so myself! Remember way back when I told you about how I really am able to write — really write — only in taprooms? And when I hinted about becoming my own best friend in that regard? Yeah, that “really far down the road” ain’t lookin’ so far away now…
Of course, then I just have to find (or manufacture) the time to actually step away from everything else and just write. Ah well, it’ll come…it’ll come…
Ray Bradbury was really good at titles. Yeah, the man could write, too…but he truly ruled at creating titles. My favorite title of his? Something Wicked This Way Comes. Change your perception of the second word to our modern slang interpretation, and…oh my, does that title work even better for me right now!
If you’re curious, by the way: Desmond Depot Brewhouse
{Musical Note — Let’s go with a band I haven’t posted on here before…
Edit: the writer created this song while backpacking alone through a strange country. It was a song about alienation, and missing home — and also about hope. It is also, of course, a song about the cost of being away from home. This is, when you get down to it, a song all of us wanderers and hobos can identify with.}
Finding My Way Out 