Painting Diesel is not an easy task. We are open 18 hours out of the day, seven days a week. There is little “down” time at Diesel, so a task like painting the walls, which seems like it should be easy enough, is a week long ordeal done in the over night hours when everyone is sleeping. Picking paint colors for me and Tucker was certainly a challenge. Total, it took us about 4 hours and, in the end, we stuck very close to the original colors, although we had a few people fooled that the red wall was going to be Pepto Bismol pink. This time painting the store was different for a few reasons. It was the one of the first times that I did not take on the task of re-painting myself. The red wall was re-done completely for the first time since we opened. The store never smelled like paint.
One of the reasons that I love painting is that I actually like the smell of paint. But, it does make me feel queasy, light-headed, and eventually gives me a headache. About a year ago, when we got involved with GoGreen Somerville, I learned that there are actually different kinds of paint that are better and worse for the environment. Most paints on the shelf contain VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds) that are harmful to the environment and dangerous to human beings and animals. While I was sure that sniffing glue and paint thinners was not a good idea, it had never really occurred to me to a) consider an alternative and b) stop to think why it was not good for the planet and to people. When we decided that we were going to re-paint, we were reminded by our in-house propainter Cole Johanneck that there was a paint at our local hardware store that was low odor and no VOC paint called Mythic Paint.
In comparing and choosing “green” and “eco-friendly” products, we have learned a couple of things. First, many of these products are not really “green”. Take for example Cloroxs’s “green” alternative. I think the only “green” thing about it is the color on the label.
“Currently, there is no industry standard definition for natural cleaners. To create Green Works™ natural cleaners we set ourselves a very stringent standard. The ingredients must come from renewable resources, be biodegradable and free of petrochemicals. Green Works™ cleaners are at least 99% natural. In certain cases we had to use synthetic ingredients, like the preservative and green colorant. But we’re working hard to develop natural alternatives so the entire line can be 100% natural.” Does anyone else think that this is really funny, preservatives and green colorant????
Second, we have also learned that in some instances, “green” alternatives are not as effective. Since I just made fun of Clorox, I will admit that we use chorine-based bleach in our stores for disinfecting and sanitizing purposes. We have tried oxygen-based bleach and have not had much sucess with it. Here, customer perception plays a large part in why we chose to go back to chlorine bleach. The color white symbolizes clean to all of us and having “dirty” looking rags and cutting boards seemed to reflect poorly on our sanitation….Perhaps these are merely excuses, but.
However, every once in a while, we come across products like Mythic paint that really deliver while standing true to their mission. The paint did not smell at all. I even stuck my face in it so far that I got green paint on the tip of my nose and could hardly smell a darn thing. And the paint covered beautifully.
Needless to say, it is a great thing when any product exceeds an expectation and we were very pleased with the results!!!
PS. Thank you to everyone who helped paint Diesel. We couldn’t have done it without you.
On May 29th 1999, Parky and I gave birth to a two-ton baby, the spawn of our connection. Our offspring, or what I like to jokingly refer to as our giant love child, we affectionately named Diesel. She doesn’t like it when I call it our love child. Maybe that is what makes it funny. And from our love child came all of this. Four walls with lots of space in-between. Four walls virtually designed for intersection. Four walls containing countless connections and endless creations. Four walls inside which tell at least four million stories. And I only see the most minute fraction of it, but it’s interesting to think about it from that perspective. Although falling in love is often a very self-absorbed moment in time, it isn’t often that the absorption is realized in the tangible. Although it 
may seem as though the planets have stopped and that time is shinning down, typically affection, even that which is returned, doesn’t usually directly impact too many outside the immediate social circle. Just last week though, a person came up to me and told me the story of their two good friends that had just had a baby and went on to say that the couple had met at Diesel four years prior. I hear similar versions of that same story fairly often. It’s pretty cool to think about both the direct and indirect impact of a single intersection or what I like to refer to as the “Trickle-out theory”. I think about this even within the smallness of my own life and the inextricable people within it and how Diesel has facilitated a great many of those meetings. And then I multiply that outward and it gets so 
much bigger. I ponder all of the connections that were made possible indirectly through a meeting of chance, Mass Ave and Dunster, ten years earlier. Dumb luck or more, who really cares because I couldn’t feel any more thankful than I do and this is my story of love.”
landed her at that Harvard Square corner at the exact moment that I was frantically running by. We can forget it all because it is too big to think about. We can simply purge the thought of every detail, not only on that day, but on every day that came prior. One huge, way-too-elaborate, mathematical mindfuck. Each moment had to go just the way it did, from the precise instant that sperm greeted egg in order to facilitate the navigation of our collective gravitation. And it gets exponentially bigger because each detail matters in the lives that came first and brought us here. If my grandfather’s grade school teacher hadn’t decided to do the seating assignment in reverse alphabetical order that first day of his fourth grade year, who knows what other girl might have sat in front of him and taunted him 
with her mesmerizing braids of molasses. Without them I am nothing. And without their parents they are nothing and on an on backwards as far as we can conceive. Every last fucking moment exactly the same, otherwise, it’s all different. So, automatically, our story begins with more dumb luck than I can imagine, with an infinite (and by that I mean a totally countless) number of details dictating our intersection. But for the sake of space and sanity, let’s try to start the story where it faux-begins. Mass Ave and Dunster, we intersect.
needed the money more than her and that she hoped it would help him in his life. It was an early lesson in optimism, one of the few things I would grow to actually excel at, arguably to a fault. But really, my “sunny side” as it is often unaffectionately referred to, is largely beside the point. The point is more one of memory. If you think about it one way, every last second of every day is memorable, but virtually all of them are oddly and easily forgettable, or at least forgotten, or more generously, misplaced. And I was thinking about that I as I was retelling the story of my grandmother’s mugging. It wasn’t a particularly poignant circumstance. Even at the time I recall feeling as if it was just part of life and one of those things that just happens, at least that’s how it seemed, judging from 
my grandmother’s reaction. Yet here I stand, some twenty-eight years later retelling the story and I realize that it is one of the very few that has actually stuck around and not succumb to the near inevitable abyss of misplaced memories. In the moment it is near impossible to recognize the ones that someday you will choose to sew together to title your history. I guess in a way, I see this love story as one of those moments. A meeting of chance, that at the time seemed not distinctly different than any other coincidental point of greeting. And although the fast friendship and four-year love affair that followed were admittedly unique, it was still accompanied by a sense of misunderstanding of significance. It isn’t every day that you intersect with someone with which there is unquestionable 
connect, so this in and of itself should scream summersaults and jump off the page. Yet sometimes you need the benefit of time to reveal the picture, fuller. Sometimes it is impossible to glean the impact of a single detail until you are allowed the luxury of distance to understand the actual magnitude and how something so big can come out of something so very small. Without the improbable intersection, Mass Ave and Dunster, there would stand no Diesel at the corners of Elm and Chester. That much I’m sure of. And I don’t like to think about my life as the unending series of near-misses that it certainly is, but at a certain point it’s difficult not to. It’s difficult to imagine Diesel would have remained this massive mass of potential energy bouncing around, instead of the heap of kinetic that became, had I not hit snooze an extra time on that December morning. And that is not yet to mention the other half of my equation, my best friend, my business partner, my accomplice in crime, Parky. So integral, so entwined, so inextricable that I can’t imagine my hours without her.”
