JOURNEY

why (dis)traction coffee?

Well, when your name is Andrew Wilson, every remotely normal website domain is already taken. After searching for the perfect “URL” that featured my name, I realized I was trying too hard to package myself instead of being myself.

So this time, I decided to lean into something more personal. I’ll break it into two parts:

(dis)traction

Years ago, in the Sacred Valley of Peru, I experienced a psychedelic-tinged hallucination. My entire field of view became a giant computer screen, flooded with millions of bouncing Microsoft Windows, like when a Windows 97 computer would suddenly glitch and spiral out of control. Texts, movies, phone calls, television, social media. It felt as though a dam had burst, filling my eyes with endless digital overload. Then, through the chaos, one word began glowing: traction.

Dazed by what I was seeing, I reached for a pen and paper and wrote it down. Moments later, the prefix dis- began flickering in front of it like a glitching graphic:

dis-traction.

The next morning, I couldn't stop thinking about it. After a long breakfast conversation, I arrived at a theory:

Traction is what gives us connection to the ground. It allows us to move forward, to dance, walk, run, jump, explore, and evolve. Without traction, we lose our ability to truly move through life.

The prefix dis- means "away from," "apart," or "the opposite of." So perhaps distraction is more than an interruption. Perhaps it is the act of being pulled away from the ground of our own lives.

I eventually distilled the idea into a simple metaphor:

Living in distraction is like walking on a treadmill. It creates the sensation that we are moving, progressing, going somewhere, but in reality we remain suspended in place, unable to build momentum. Stuck.

At any moment, we can choose between two ways of living: being deeply connected to life itself or endlessly distracting ourselves away from it.

Coffee

When When I was in high school in the early 2000s, coffee shop culture hadn't quite reached rural America yet. I grew up in a small farm town in Pennsylvania where most adults drank Folgers or, if they were feeling fancy, brewed the mail-order Gevalia they saw advertised on television.

My high school best friend, Ian, was the only person my age I knew who drank coffee. Every morning before school, he'd grab a cup from our local gas station chain, Sheetz, and show up carrying it like some worldly adult.

Fast forward to 2006. I was on the international tour of the Broadway musical Cats, performing in São Paulo, Brazil. In the United States, evening performances usually begin around 7 or 8 p.m. In Brazil, our show was advertised as a 9:00 p.m. curtain, but in reality it often began closer to 10. Doing Cats at midnight is a special kind of punishment.

Night after night, I found myself yawning through Act Two. One evening, my Brazilian dresser asked if he could make me some coffee. I told him I'd actually never had coffee before. He stared at me in disbelief, then ran off.

A few moments later, he returned with a small cup of Brazilian coffee made specifically for me And just like that, my coffee addiction was born.

But my relationship with coffee has never really been about caffeine, waking up, or staying alert. I'm addicted to the experience of it: the ritual, the atmosphere, the conversation, the sense of community.

(side note: on that same trip to cusco and the sacred valley, i discovered my favorite coffee shop in the world - Xapiri ground in san blas plaza.)

so consider this a coffee shop serving traction and distraction, in website form.

with love,

wait… why (aj)?

My full name is Andrew John wilson, and from the moment I was born, everyone called me "AJ."

Flash forward to 2008. I'm 22 and dating someone I thought was cooler and more intellectual than I was. Naturally, I had a mid-20’s identity crisis. I examined every inch of myself and decided the name "AJ" was too childish, so I started going by Andrew.

Shortly after, I joined the Actors' Equity union, where you're required to choose a stage name, so I made it official and chose Andrew.

I often look back on that decision with a lot of remorse. It wasn't really about a name. It was about abandoning parts of myself instead of standing proudly in who I already was. Since then, I've been slowly inching my way back to AJ.