If I've calculated correctly, today's newsletter should change your life and make you hungry at the same time.  "Why do you feel like the world's best kept secret?" The best restaurant here in Nashville, Tennessee isn't unlike the best restaurant in your city or any city for that matter, it's the restaurant that most everyone in the city has never heard of. You won't find it on Yelp. You won't see it festooned on the face of some glossy magazine. You won't stumble upon it on a blog run by a national enterprise desperately trying to give off the impression that they are "local". Nope, only locals (true locals) know about this restaurant. And, if you're fairly new to the city, the only way you learn about it is if a local thinks you're worthy of such learning. All that to say, I'm about to tell you my favorite restaurant here in Nashville, Tennessee recognizing it goes against everything I just argued in the previous three rectangles. I'm justifying my hypocrisy with the following two arguements... 1. There is a very good life lesson at the end of all of this and the only way I can convey this lesson effectively is if I tell you about my favorite restaurant. 2. My favorite restaraunt deserves your moolah. *drumroll* Thai Kitchen is a shitty-looking shack on the edge of Nashville, smack dab between a swanky boutique motel where couples go to fuck each other's brains out and a Jersey Mike's. The floor is in dire need of a scrubbing. The cushions on the chairs are covered in a cheap laminate plastic that has begun to crack from years of taking the weight of hundreds of denim-clad asses. And, on the wall there is a TV, an old TV, the one that is shapped like a cumbersome cube rather than a thin rectangle so sharp you could wield it to shave your pubes. The counter is covered with a copious amount of shit: a fishbowl half-filled with tips, Asian candies, almond cookies, menus, a calculator (the big kind with fat Cheez-it size buttons), coffee-stained legal pads, to-go boxes, receipts, etc. And, behind this counter sits a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet where two Taiwanese women can be seen working like a pair of sorceresses, concocting magic in the form of various curries. If you go, you must order the Green Curry, which you will do by pointing and nodding and praying this pointing and nodding results in you receiving the correct order. (They've never gotten my order wrong which is perplexing considering they don't speak English yet still have a higher hit rate than McDonald's.) After you order you sit down at a table that is clean but somehow always sticky where you will see a saucepan with sauces whose heat range from "this isn't so bad" to "chlamydia" ââ if you're a first-timer, the owner will warn you with raised eyebrows and a pointer finger held close to a thumb that you should use very little of the "chlamydia". Eventually, a fat bowl of green curry overflowing with copious amounts of carrots and bamboo shoots and cabbage and broccoli and chicken arrives in front of you accompanied by a thick wad of steaming white rice and a pair of spring rolls that are fried to such a golden crisp perfection that when you bite into them you can hear their crunch five tables over. You pay $15 for this experience (and that's after tip). The reason these places exist and don't go under, despite 99% of the city not knowing of their existence is because people, like myself and my brother, frequent them one to two times a week. Which, brings me to the whole point I'm writing this... You don't have to be well-known to do well. You just have be loved by a very small number of people. I had a reader write me the other day on [Instagram]( saying... "Why do you feel like the world's best-kept secret?" It was so very kind and thoughtful and I wanted to give her a hug through the screen and it got me thinking... Why can't this be enough? To be the best-kept secret in the world to a very small number of people; to be their Thai Kitchen; to be their green curry. But, I digress. By [Cole Schafer](. P.S. By now you should know the drill... this Southern Indiana kid is prolific and he's putting out more words each week than you can shake a stick at... so keep scrolling. [I'm Chasing Hemingway.]( This newsletter is made possible because of PornHub! Kidding. The lovely bunch of products down below make this newsletter possible. However, some of them do talk about sex (I've placed an asterisk next to the products that commit this sin): [Snow Cones]( my copywriting guide, which will teach you how to write words that sell like a Florida Snow Cone Vendor on the hottest of the year. [$100k]( my freelance guide, which will teach you how I built a six-figure freelance business and how with the right amount of grit, luck and skill, you can too. *[One Minute, Please?]( my book of poetry and prose, that has sold well over 500 copies and has made grown men who usually just get emotional over sports documentaries, cry. *[Quarantine Dreams]( my other just as good but lesser-known book of poetry and prose, that is completely digital and is "pay what you want" which means you can get it for free if you're short on dough. *[Chasing Hemingway]( a shorter way more emotional version of Sticky Notes, that only goes out to a small group of paying subscribers each week. [Moscow Mule]( which is literally just you buying me a Moscow Mule, because I work really fucking hard and sometimes I need a fucking drink. [Or, just tweet me]( The genius copywriter that taught Kurt Vonnegut to put his money where his mouth is. Phoebe Hurty wrote copy for the William H. Block Company, a department store headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana that shuttered its doors in 1987. While I certainly canât say that Hurty was one of the better copywriters to ever live, I can say that she wrote one of the better ad headlines Iâve ever read... Once upon a time, she was slinging-ink for an end-of-the-summer sale William H. Block was running on straw hats. Here was her headline⦠âFor prices like this, you can run them through your horse and put them on your roses.â She eventually hired a young, sixteen-year-old Vonnegut, and here's what she taught him... [Hay.]( Nora Ephron's mother on toasted almonds, bruised ice cubes and brittle men. Nora Ephronâs stunning novel, Heartburn, is autobiographical. But, itâs also a piece of fiction, which makes it a bit of a chore to separate what is true from what is not. What I do know is that itâs loosely based on her tumultuous marriage to Carl Bernstein (the investigative journalist made famous by his reporting on Watergate). She writes, quite graphically, of the affair he had while she was seven months pregnant with their second child and how she eventually found it within herself to leave. In her novel, she writes often about her mother, a very complicated woman, who died well before Bernstein tore her heart in two. At one point in the text, she goes full fiction and writes of what her mother might say had she still been around during the affair and was supporting her grieving daughter⦠[It's ruthless and beautiful.]( "Because if it's all beautiful, you can't believe it." I would never recommend anyone [read Ernest Hemingway if theyâre sad]( and are looking towards reading as an escape from this sadness. Both Hemingwayâs life and work were one long and beautiful tragedy and while I canât speak to the former, the tragedy in the latter, the writing, is what made him so wildly believable ([as well as him writing in the first person]( but thatâs a story for another day). While you walk away from Hemingway with glassy eyes, you never leave not having felt something and you certainly never leave not having believed what he had written. His believability, he claims, was achieved through him never pulling punches where it concerned the more tragic sides of life. *Ernest Hemingway is typing now* âIâm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life acrossânot to just depict lifeâor criticize itâbut to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You canât do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you canât believe in it. Things arenât that way.â If you live long enough, tragedy becomes something like the reaper; be it today or tomorrow or decades from now, you meet him, usually when you least expect it, and he breaks your heart. This is tragic. But, it is true. And this is what Hemingway is after, truth. ["Things aren't that way."]( P.S. If this newsletter made you weak in the knees, you can share it with the world by selecting one of the four icons down below... [Send it.]( [Send it.]( [Tweet it.]( [Tweet it.]( [Share it.]( [Share it.]( [Post it.]( [Post it.]( Copyright © 2021 Honey Copy, All rights reserved.
A while back you opted into a weekly email called "Sticky Notes". Remember? If not, you can always unsubscribe below... and risk breaking this writer's heart. Our mailing address is: Honey Copy 3116 N. Central Park
Unit #1Chicago, IL 60618
[Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](.