Drift Reality > San Diego > Money and Happiness 1

Later that same day, Kelly came over again and she regaled us with tales of her adventures at Monzu, a foo-foo restaurant in La Jolla where she worked as a hostess.

"I just can't be bothered with being nice to these old men that ask for my phone number anymore," she said. "I don't know what it is about these old men that makes them think that I would be interested in them. And they always give me their business cards, what is it with the business cards?"

The way that Kelly spoke made me feel that there was absolutely no interval between the point at which a thought entered her mind and the point at which she would externalize said thought. It was a perpetually flowing waterfall of dialogue that at times seemed to defy gravity by flowing in preposterously disconnected directions. At one point she would be talking about old men trying to seduce her at work, one second later, she would be talking about her friend at home who only dated black guys, and one second later, she would have returned to her original train of thought. At the same time, whenever someone responded, she listened intently at what they were saying.

I personally found it to be extremely entertaining - talking with her was like stumbling upon a tree bearing an endless variety of fruits and having the luxury to pick whatever you felt like at that point in time.
Kelly's endless line of dialogue turned towards one of her friends who had started an internet-based business back in Virginia and become rather successful, Karl's ever-present entrepreneurial spirit prompted him to reply to me, "I still don't know why we couldn't do the same thing with Roaring Fish."

Karl was, of course, referring to a company that we had attempted to start, creating web pages for small businesses. There were two main stumbling blocks to our companies progress: one being the fact that neither of us were any good at web-design, the other being that neither of us had ever had any experience with finding clients. Our company's first and only client had been one a family friend who wanted us to create a website showcasing her artwork. That had more or less, been the pinnacle of our companies' success. Shortly thereafter, Roaring Fish had taken a turn for the worse as we failed to land any more clients. At one point, Karl had walked into a used-lamp store and asked if the proprietor wanted us to create a website for her, to which she had responded in the negative, and shortly after this incident, our company folded and dissolved into the endless void of the internet.

To this day, Karl had maintained that if we had been more aggressive in our pursuit of clients, we would have eventually found success, which is what prompted him to respond in the manner that he did when Kelly had brought up the example of her friend who had successfully started his own business.

"Roaring Fish didn't fail because we weren't aggressive pursuing clients," I said.

"It failed because about a million people thought of the same idea years before we did."

"We need to find a niche, something that no one has though of before," Karl said. "Like, like," Karl muttered. "Like down in Pacific Beach," he continued. "Remember when James had said that he wondered why there wasn't any ice cream carts down on the beach?"

"Yes," I answered.

"Well, maybe it's just because no one has thought about doing that yet," he responded and I could tell that he was beginning to get excited.

"Maybe it's because the zoning regulations in Mission Beach don't allow ice cream trucks," I responded.

"Then we figure out what the zoning rules are, and we figure out a way around them. That is how you have to do business, you have to be able to do things that other people wouldn't think of," Karl said.

Karl was starting to get an inspired look in his eye and there was something about it that bothered me and I couldn't figure out what it was.

"You have to find something like that, which no one has done before, sacrifice a few years getting it together and making your money, and then once it is set up, you get out and just enjoy the fruits of your labor."

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