Louis Korom

Dallas feels like a huge suburb. The communities that surround North Dallas are especially this way. Whether you are driving on highways 635, 75, 121 or 35E, there is very little to differentiate any of these communities from any of their neighbors on the road. By road, Dallas seems like a sea of two and three bedroom single family homes with some McMansion swells making up the tide. If you’re not overwhelmed by this part of suburban sprawl, perhaps the random, but not too random, combinations of chain retailers will float your boat.

On the surface, Carrollton is one of these communities. To be sure, Carrollton has its fair share of chain stores and single family homes; however, Carrollton is a community that is changing. One of the places where it’s changing most is its downtown.

Much of downtown Carrollton seems modeled after downtown rejuvenation projects from the 1990s. There’s an old theater, old town “ma and pa”-type businesses and charming small retailers selling baby boomer-era nostalgia.

There’s also a DCTA station, a highway, and new multi-family development all around. It feels like an area that is in transition caught between redevelopment models and looking for its soul.

I’ve visited Lemma Coffee Roasters at 1014 S Broadway location in Carrollton twice over the last month. There I found soul. Both times that I’ve visited, I’ve found a fresh third wave coffee shop doing something that I haven’t seen a coffee shop do for a while: be a hang out place for the community.

As with any creative undertaking that finds itself as an expression of a “movement,” there is the requisite third wave coffee aesthetic of the Lemma Coffee Roasters shop. The walls are white, the duct work exposed and there is a small collection of plants and photos to break up the monochromatic black and white interior design. Of course, yeah, I like it. This is my kind of style. What’s not to love about a carefully curated batch of pictures featuring the desert, vintage signs, motorcycle parts and a blue camper? These are all the ingredients that go into making hipster heaven.

But there’s something else that is super cool happening here. People hang out at Lemma. Like, a lot of people come and hang out at Lemma. Regular people come and hang out at Lemma. You don’t see that anymore at coffee shops. That’s the stuff of second wave coffee.

Sure, people will come and do work at a coffee shop in the old days, but it seems like a rare sight to see people come in and hang at coffee shops anymore. I think that part of the reason is that coffee shops aren’t really built for hanging out like they used to be. Food is becoming an increasingly important component of the coffee shop business and so many places seem like they are trying to turn a table to bring another customer in. I don’t know if it’s anything specific, but that feeling that isn’t present at Lemma.

Getting out of town is important to me. I've raised myself on a steady diet of travel shows and exotic food media, so a certain of degree of wanderlust feels natural. In my wildest of dreams, I'd like to tour France for a month and eat my way through it. The same goes for China, though I'd probably like to spend longer there.

In the meantime, sometimes l get to take little adventures outside Denton and experience things a little outside my norm. Today I took a drive to Decatur, a little Texas country town in Wise County. Decatur, Texas is one of those places that you hear talked about, but you can spend years living near without going to see it. It's a quiet place, a town whose DNA is saturated with all of the stuff that makes Texas small towns great. There's a small town square with a courthouse adorned in red stone. The local newspaper, the Wise County Messenger (truly one of the great newspaper names), is located just a block off the square. There are law offices, boutiques, restaurants, and a place called the Divine Center of Yoga located on the same street as Sweetie Pie's Ribeye's. For sure, this is the DNA of a great place.

Trinity Street Coffee Bar is here on the square. It's a part of the West Oak Coffee and Kimzey's Coffee portfolio of brands. I've had very good or great coffee at all three places, but I think that the real highlight of the portfolio is Trinity Street.

It's unavoidable to use a term like 'bespoke' when describing Trinity Street Coffee Bar. From the Austin-inspired white limestone on the Western wall, to the Edison bulb chandeliers near the back of the space, to the live muddling that I observed today, this is a place that has all of the trappings of a pretension-filled exercise in third wave coffee. Yet somehow, the pretension doesn't seem to exist here.

Maybe it's the town that does it. The sleepy quality of the Decatur town square carries itself into Trinity Street Coffee Bar. You can order a sandwich from the restaurant a couple doors down from Trinity Street. There's a fairly extensive Whiskey collection here, but both Buffalo Trace and Weller are on the top shelf. The taxidermied deer head that overlooks the bar even sports a trucker hat with the Trinity Street Coffee Bar logo on it.

This is the hipster coffee bar at peak relaxation, and it's all the better for it.

When I look at this life, I prefer not to think of my life played out under a single thesis statement or narrative focus. Instead, questions like these energize me:

What if we approached life as a blank slate? What if we lived life in such a way that we were watching our own documentary play out right in front of us? What if we started to make choices that didn’t seem fatalistic, but were instead inspired by the plot twists and turns that we’d like to see play out in front of us?

What if creativity was a regular practice of our daily lives?

I think about creativity falling along a continuum of free choice. In this sense, the beginning of this type of creativity might look something like the free choice of a person to do a process in a slightly different way or a slight alteration of a plan to a person’s liking. The upper limit of this type of creativity would be making and executing a creative vision from nothing.

Embracing the conscious choice to create in moments along this continuum is devotional. The devotional act begins with an affirmation of humanity. In the willful act of creation, you affirm your experience, the free act of choice, and your own point of view just by making the choice. You are asserting: “I am here. I contribute. I have something to say.” In this way, you are stepping into your own power. You own your own equality and you assert your presence in all those who experience your free choice.

In your choice, the possibility of rejection and failure also confirm the act as an act of devotion. In all creative acts, there is no promise that the act will ‘work’ the way that it is intended to work. In our juggling rejection and failure, we are challenged to see our choices as a place of growth. Our challenge becomes how we process the experience and go on to make more creative choices. In this way, it’s an act of humility, with you assuming your need to grow and your willingness to be a part of that process.

Devotional acts don’t typically happen just once. In fact, the devotional act ought to be habitual. Prayer, fasting and the practice of charity are all commonly-held devotional exercises. However, when practicing creativity consciously in our daily lives, we open a new dimension to our spiritual devotion—our lives as free ‘choosers’ of our own lives, values and choices. We gain confidence in the regularity with which we engage in the practice and incorporate creativity into our other pursuits.

I started using Brave browser on my Motorola G6 recently. Brave feels to me like the browser that Chrome should be. By that, I mean that it’s super quick, which is my highest value for a program on my Motorola G6.

With the update to Android version 9, my G6 just hasn’t been performing as well as the version of Android that was on it when it shipped and that I used since I picked up the device. Brave feels like it’s giving me that fraction of speed that I need to get into the browsing experience that much more quickly over Chrome and the program remains quick while I use it.

The user-interface is very close to Chrome. Brave has retained some user tools like the home button, bookmarks, and search on a toolbar at the bottom of the screen. While I like that Chrome has moved those into the address toolbar to get a fuller sense of the web page at hand, Brave hides the tool bar and the address bar as you scroll the page. The tool bar and address bar return when you scroll upward, which is handier than having to click a button in a toolbar and then having to search for the command that you’re having to execute in a menu.