Every Restaurant in the Phonebook
How to be somewhere completely
“I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”
— Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums
In the spring of my last year in Billings, Montana, Be and I sat across from each other at a Thai restaurant neither of us had been to before, trying not to cry. Not from emotion but from the food. The curry was so spicy that we joked it would melt our faces. We ordered more water and finished every bite. Then we crossed it off the list.
We had been doing this for months: picking a restaurant from the local phonebook, showing up, eating, and marking it done. This was the early internet. Yelp and online reviews didn’t exist. If you wanted to know what a restaurant was like, you either knew someone who’d been there or you went and found out yourself.
No cameras, no reviews. Just the understanding, without ever saying it directly, that this time was ending. College graduation was coming, and we were leaving. The question was never if, only when and where.
So we ate.
The Rules Were Simple
No fast food. Sit-down only. Nowhere we’d been together before.
Billings is the largest city in Montana, and the restaurant options ran the full range: everything from diners and buffets to steakhouses and pizza joints. We worked through them steadily, one meal at a time, over six months. Some were forgettable. The Thai place nearly ended us.
We also made it to The Petroleum Club, a now-closed institution on the 22nd floor of the tallest building in Billings. Members only, except for certain dining hours. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Oil money steaks in a room that felt like it had absorbed decades of deals. We went shortly after I’d done stand-up comedy for the first time, and we spent most of that dinner trying to write jokes together over cocktails, the whole city spread out below us.
We never named the project anything. We were just eating at every restaurant in our hometown before we ran out of time.
A Word Arrives
Around the same time, I was taking an Intro to Buddhism class and had picked up Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. One of those combinations that arrives at exactly the right moment.
I had already fallen for Kerouac. On the Road had cracked something open in me: the sense that life was larger than Montana and that I was meant to move through it. Dharma Bums went somewhere different.
That’s where I first encountered the word tathata.
It’s a Sanskrit concept found in Buddhist philosophy, usually translated as “suchness” or “thusness.” Things as they actually are, without improvement or documentation. Just: this meal, this friend, this ordinary Tuesday in a city you’re about to leave.
When I read it, something rang. A word arriving for what Be and I had already been doing every week over watered-down cocktails and face-melting curry.
We were, without knowing it, practicing suchness. Each meal complete in itself. Each cross on the list not a task finished but a moment fully lived.
The Last Restaurant
We saved The Granary for the end. It’s the kind of place people go to mark occasions with the white tablecloths and the good wine list. We had agreed early on to save it for last. I don’t remember what we ordered. I remember the feeling: celebratory and complete.
We talked about the next decade. Be wanted her doctorate in sociology. I wanted to be in New York doing comedy. We raised our glasses to both.
Neither of us said what the project had really been. We didn’t need to. We had spent six months practicing presence in the only way that we knew how: by showing up and paying attention to what was in front of us.
Then we left Billings. Be to her doctorate. Me to Texas, then Denver, then finally New York. Six years of working up to the leap I’d promised myself I’d take.
We both kept our word.
The Coordinate: Notice
In the ENOUGH Principle, Notice means awareness before action. It’s the pause between what’s happening and the story you tell about it.
Most of us move too fast for that. We’re already thinking about the next thing while the current thing is still happening. We’re already documenting the moment before we’re finished living it.
Tathata is the antidote. A practice, not a philosophical exercise. Can you let this meal, this conversation, this ordinary weeknight be exactly what it is?
Ask yourself:
Where am I moving through my life instead of being in it?
What would I notice if I stopped trying to make this moment into something?
What’s already complete that I keep treating as unfinished?
What the Culture of More Gets Wrong
We treat attention like a resource to be managed rather than a gift to be given.
The culture of more says experiences need to justify themselves: they should produce content, insight, growth, or at minimum a good story. If you can’t extract value from a moment, you’ve wasted it.
This is scarcity versus sufficiency with presence.
Scarcity says: experiences only count if they’re building toward something. Anything else is wasted time.
Sufficiency says: the meal in front of you is already complete. Being there is the meaning. You don’t have to extract anything.
A Small Practice
This week, eat one meal without your phone on the table. Not as a digital detox but as an experiment in tathata.
Notice what the food actually tastes like. Notice who’s across from you, or what the room sounds like if you’re alone. Notice the particular quality of this hour that won’t come back.
Just let it be what it is.
See you next week.
P.S. Is there a season of your life you remember with unusual clarity? Not because you documented it, but because you were actually there for it? I’d love to know what it was.