I was pumping gas at the station when a male voice from the speaker said, “Do you ever wake up in the morning thinking you deserve more?”

More? More? Yes, every single day.

Of course it was an ad for the station. But minus the rest of the ad for a dollar off a thirty-two ounce soda, it was a deeply philosophical question, one that echoed on my long excursion back home.

I reminisced about those copious hours in the record shop, the albums I perused, the cover art and tracklists. I even used to peek down the sides of cassettes and compact discs to see how thick the booklets were. Weird, I know. Bonus points for lyrics.

I used to race back home, whether on bike or bus, to lose myself in them, to read the song lyrics and decode their meanings.

But that all changed once the wrecking ball swung into the record shop for the digital shop. From thereon, I had to click my way to albums that were no longer physical copies in my hands but digital tracks now called files. The files collected like silt in their file folders on my hard drive.

And then streaming came streaming along, which at first was refreshing. Wow. Just as long as I pour out a monthly subscription, I could listen to every file (well, not every file but a whole watershed of files, some of which I hadn’t listened to in ages). I wanted to listen to that. And that. And that. I listened to this first but switched to that then switched to that. The streaming menu overflowed my reservoir with recommendations channeled from my history. Should I listen to it again? Okay, I’ll listen to it after this. But I don’t know. I kinda wanna listen to it now instead of this. Wait, I promised myself that I would listen to this. Ah, fuck it, I quit. I’ll just go for a walk. After an hour of deciding what to stream, I turned the valve off and the streaming with it. I might as well have paid just to window-shop.

I tread the same water at restaurants over a menu that stretches for six pages long. When I want the cheeseburger, I also want the pizza. But what about the fried chicken and waffles? The waiter comes to my table for the eighteenth time and asks, “Well? Have you decided?” My gut tells me to dive into the fried chicken. If it tastes great, then great. If, however, it tastes god-awful, then damn. Just give me a restaurant that dishes the most tenderest, juiciest ribeye and a cheesecake that bounces me off the walls, and I won’t have to grind my teeth over whatever else looks great on the menu.

Decisions hit harder, though, when I lived in the big city, with excellent ribeye and cheesecake abound. Where I live now, there ain’t many options, not a myriad. There’s just a few. My palate ends up watered down by the same old burrito each week, so I have to sail to some uncharted restaurant and hope for the best.

When it comes to consumption, like creation, too many streaming channels flood my head. There’s never a drought, always a flood. A classic burger joint on my side of the country serves burgers, fries, milkshakes, sodas. That’s it. No egg sandwiches, no hot dogs, no onion rings, no tacos like those other burger joints. The burgers come with lettuce, tomato, onions, cheese or no cheese, and a secret sauce (that everyone knows is Thousand Island). No Swiss bacon burgers, no barbecue sauce burgers, no vegetarian burgers, no chili on the fries. The milkshakes come in chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry. My mother calls the place overrated because the burgers taste too salty, the fries too plain. But she’s my mother. She doesn’t count. Her taste buds are the pickiest this side of the Mississippi.

But never mind that aside. The burger joint has kept on flowing and will someday become a national treasure (if it hasn’t already). It keeps it basic. If you want chicken sandwiches, then drift on over to the other place down the street. If only other businesses followed the same model. The model of too many others is: more is more, even when everyone acknowledges by now that less is more. The more products the cheaper. Some of them have an automotive section combined with a grocery section. How the hell can I depend on the store to rotate my tires when it carries butternut squash?

So the next time I sit down to write, and my head is flooded with ideas, I must start eliminating the waste.

Alright, enough analogies today. Now go take your dog for a walk and enjoy the sun.