When and how I heard about Pie Hole’s Tuesday $14 large two-topping pizza special is lost to the sands of time. But what I do know is that about eight years ago, my friends and I started going to Pie Hole every Tuesday.
The ritual was simple and we adopted it quickly. We would call in our order, walk half a block to pick it up, play Super Bomberman until our eyes bled and shove pizza into our faces every time we died. An A+ collegecore experience.
Eight years later, much in my life has changed. I’ve graduated, weathered a break-up and a global pandemic, lost friends, gained them, moved around and gone through like six jobs.
But through all the changes, every Tuesday that I’m physically able, I get a jalapeño-pineapple pizza at Pie Hole. I’m enough of a fixture now that the employees don’t ask for my name over the phone anymore. I roll in, grab my two packets of parm and one packet of red pepper flakes, watch whatever VHS is playing on the cathode ray TV in the corner, make ten seconds of small talk, pay my "14 doll hairs" and roll out.
Usually, the process takes less than 30 minutes, and I’m only in the shop itself for under five. But the ritual has had an outsized impact on my well-being beyond stocking my stomach and fridge with reasonably priced pizza. It reminds me I’m part of the wider community. The rotating cast of Pie Hole employees do me the favor of remembering my name, face, and order, and my God, it feels good.
Through my love of routine and cheap pizza, I’ve tapped into the magic of what professional smart people call weak-tie relationships.
The Importance Of Weak Ties
If you're unfamiliar with the concept, sociologists categorize our interpersonal relationships as either "weak" or "strong" ties based on the intimacy of the relationship. Your best friend? Strong tie. Your bartender? Weak tie.
The benefits of close friendships are pretty obvious, but why would accumulating a bunch of shallow acquaintances matter?
The usefulness of weak ties for getting jobs has been well-documented since the 1970s, but a more recent study explored their effect on happiness: "...participants with larger networks of weak ties tended to be happier overall, and that on days when a participant had a greater number of casual interactions with weak ties—say, a local barista, a neighbour, a member of yoga class—they experienced more happiness and a greater sense of belonging."
Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic threw the necessity of weak-tie relationships into sharp relief. Quarantine knocked our social lives badly out of balance. Many of us found ourselves spending a lot of time at home with our strong-tie relations, cut off from our weak-tie relations. The result was that many of us became the load-bearing contact in our closest relations’ lives.
For instance, I knew two separate people during quarantine who were only staying with their significant other because they owned a Nintendo Switch and they didn't want to lose their Animal Crossing island. A game that, ironically, heavily features weak-tie relationships.
So yes, you need intimate connections, but they're not everything. And frankly, they're not even the most helpful when it comes to forming a wider community.
Mark Granovetter, the originator of the weak/strong-tie concept, said that weak ties “... connect you to networks that are outside of your own circle.” Close friendships usually happen between coworkers, classmates, and people with shared interests, which is a phenomenon common enough that it has a name: homophily. Basically, people tend toward echo chambers, but weak ties offer us a peek into different worlds.
My partner, who works at a downtown coffee shop, recently saw this in action. A Patagonia vest-wearing regular saw a sign promoting a minimum wage hike and asked him, “Do you even know anyone that would affect?”
While asking somebody in the service industry if they know any minimum-wage workers certainly scans as clueless, this question wasn’t posed in bad faith. The regular genuinely didn't know anybody in his circle that would directly benefit from a minimum wage hike, and assumed others wouldn’t either. Conversations with people outside your sphere help you learn what you didn’t know you didn’t know.
How To Make Weak-Tie Relationships
If you're like most people, your weak ties suffered during the pandemic, and the infrastructure we've built around convenience hasn't helped.
Not to rag on Gen Z, but statistically speaking, they love their food delivery apps. And fair! They're great, especially for the disabled and overworked. I won’t be high and mighty about the whole thing and pretend that grocery store pickups haven't kept my dysfunctional ass from starving to death.
But I always love what Kurt Vonnegut once told David Brancaccio about why he didn't like to buy in bulk: “[I] go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around.”
There are ten million ways to increase your network of weak ties, but I cannot stress how easy it is to do if you literally just start showing up at a local establishment on a semi-weekly basis. Tulsa is the perfectly sized city to do this in. If you go to the same places on a regular basis, I can promise you will end up seeing the same people. So, if you're looking to de-optimize your life, go out, people watch, see some great-looking babes, and say hi to your local barista.
However, be warned: if you're going to be regular, be a good one. Nobody wants to become "God, this guy again" in the minds of their local service workers. Be nice, tip generously, and don't overstep your social boundaries by assuming they remember your order or that you're besties. To this day I'm haunted by the random customer who once stayed past close, smiled at me, and said, "Thank God, everyone's finally gone."
The Importance Of Farting Around
With how convenient everything is nowadays, you could conceivably fulfill every possible need or want in your life from the comfort of your couch with brief sojourns to your front door to pick up DoorDash orders and Amazon packages. And yes, convenience is great, but if you choose the impersonal 100% of the time, you're missing out on the silly, essential, beautiful mess that is a community.
Being a regular and having regulars has been an incredible boon in my life. Beyond making me pizza, the Pie Hole gang has helped me track down a lost dog and found me on Facebook that time I left my credit card behind. I got my first writing job through one of my regulars. And sometimes, with time and the right circumstances, weak ties can evolve into strong-tie relationships. I've made some incredibly close and lasting friendships with people who were once my regulars.
Harvey Milk put it best: "Let’s make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with the neighborhoods...To sit on the front steps...and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color."
I'm not saying that getting a pizza every week makes me the author of the American Dream. Harvey Milk said it for me.
