I picked up a habit a long time ago from a book that I read. I’m sure it’s not a unique to tim rogers habit, but that’s where I learned it.

tim rogers (sic.) in, what I think was his memoir but might have just been a novel, talks briefly I think a few times about his Emergency Coca-Cola that he always keeps in his fridge. The idea being, of course, that if anything were ever to go totally awry, he could go home, open his fridge, crack the can, take a sip, and everything would be okay.

The idea also being, of course, that if he never cracks the can, then whatever’s going on can’t be that bad. It’s a kind of mindfulness trick to ground oneself in the face of what may momentarily feel overwhelming but is, in fact, just another thing that happened to you.

So I have for the last, gosh maybe ten years, been doing the same thing. At first it was literally a can of coke, just like tim. Then I switched to a can of White Monster, because really I liked it more than coke anyway, and it felt more personal that way. Then my family, and later roommates, kept stealing it, so I switched back to coke.

Over the last few years I’ve made it a tradition to not consider myself ‘moved in’ to a new place until I’ve got an Emergency Coke in the fridge. That is the final act that makes this place home. This is where everything will be okay, eventually.

This time, when it was time to move in, I went to the 7-11 down the block and got one of those glass bottled, Hecho en Mexico Cokes. I stuck it in the door pocket of my fridge five months ago. Since, I have only occasionally, and less frequently with time, thought about drinking it.

Today was not a bad day, but I did think about drinking it. And I realized something, standing in front of the fridge at 11:32 PM on a Sunday evening: I don’t have a bottle opener to get into my emergency coke, even if I wanted to.

I’m not an idiot, of course, I could open it with my keys, or the counter, or my teeth, or any number of other ways that people open bottles without bottle openers. But I realized that, if everything were to fall apart, and I were to need to drink my Emergency Coke to make everything OK again, that I would have to first solve this very simple problem.

And Lo, it dawned on me the beauty of the allusion that I will render here explicitly: Sometimes you have got to put in just a little bit more effort to make everything OK again than you thought you would, but it’s not that much, and it’s not more than you can handle, and it’s worth it in the end.

I hope you’re doing well.
Email me, I’d love to connect =)
11:50 PM, Sunday, August 10th, ’25