Yes, HappyCow.org has been thanklessly guiding my gut for years now, but without smart phone or hotel internet in Des Moines I opted, over driving aimlessly back and forth across the river, to seek counsel of the phone book for dinner, heartrendingly missing HC’s recommendation of ‘A Dong’ for some vegetarian-friendly Chinese. What can I say, I can’t resist being a taker. Though Zanzibar’s Coffee Adventure was revealed to me fortuitously on the drive up to the north side for a Bandit Burrito, it wasn’t until the soy chorizo bezoar began to coalesce dangerously on the car ride back that it became imperative for me to pay them a visit.

I was in Des Moines for about eighteen hours as the far bookend of a trip to Cedar Falls. My mental palate was blissfully vacant from the grand right angle drive of interstate and state highways through afternoon and after dropping my charge at the airport was liberated into plains dusk that threatened to swallow me but I didn’t care. It was palpable and delicious cooling my comfortably sweaty skin. Inside Zanzibar’s I took a few sips of my coffee to pulverize the soyrizoar, cast it loose, and sat outside on a little bench built into the window watching the sun go down far over Ingersoll so slowly that it was still up when I got back downtown, where, walking again around Chipperfield’s little glass library I was able to see it flip from a solid, the copper mesh nested into the glass panes prominent in any hint of daylight, to a shelled hollow as the interior lighting surmounted the twilight. Then as suddenly as that had been protracted the city sat completely in darkness.

Then I walked on fuel of postprandial coffee for hours. I jittered back and forth across the river inexplicably looping through the nightlife of the Court Center area repeatedly. On perhaps my fourth swing through the garish sidewalks where both men and women strode in striped blouses I saw a dollar bill idly lifting from the sidewalk. As I bent to retrieve it I noticed, folded into a thick wad, another deposit of cash just a few feet further down the street. Nobody was nearby at this edge of the district and I was not about to make the rounds of the knuckleheads who might keep loose cash folded in the silken breast pockets of their billowing blouses. The yield of my discovery was just over $30. Still manic from the coffee, though physically exhausted, I decided to leverage a bit of my windfall on downers at a decadent patio tequila bar where the fools whose pockets I fancied I had just picked, one and all, lounged on upholstered white settees and banquettes, and on over-sized wicker armchairs. I spent about a third of my cash on drink and, turned tepid inside and out, Zanzibar’s first slipped away then this place and these people in the cradle of warm midnight.

The next midday I drove out to the Des Moines Art Center with a baguette and tub of hummus. Trans-Europe Express came on the radio. The museum was nearly empty and I was moved alone amidst Robyn O’Neil‘s large pencil drawings recalling the youthful isolation, and the skills learned from Commander Mark‘s afternoon television drawing shows, that drove me to fill up little notebooks with cities and men on another planet called Flambenoi. I instantly regretted wasting the money I had found on tequila, bought O’Neil’s exhibition catalog (and a postcard of Bacon’s ‘Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X’) with my remaining funds, and sat in the drizzle eating an entire loaf of bread wondering why I hadn’t spent the evening in my hotel drawing.

Perhaps it occupies a drifting, rote place in my footsteps because it was the first coffeeshop in Eugene I visited, down the street from the Timbers Motel on Pearl where we stayed when looking for a house to rent in early summer. It rained that first day only as we hurried from the noodle place to the coffee place, both noted on our roll into town. The room seems filled with sun in my recollection, at least the bakery side, which I in fact did not visit until later, and I chatted up the barista about the good places to live in town. I don’t recall what she offered, but recall the growing understanding, after polling all the people we could find in restaurants, shops, cafes, and thrift outlets, that we most likely would not be rendered insomniac for fear of having our door kicked down in the middle of the night in Eugene. Thus, not having formally left, and still with some soul-aching to suffer upon my return, I mentally departed my longtime home of Atlanta.

Working from home has pressed me to confront my mortality. For ten years the day-by-day routine of office life slowly transformed my perspective on consciousness from empty vessel to collect experience to vessel on which to sail away from the body. I felt that the repetition of those days, the unsurprising surprises and dependable infuriations, was license to believe that were I to leave my body, were my consciousness, the homunculus in Principal-Skinner-aqua tennis shirt diligently monitoring the conditioning of my senses from the tiny upholstered office chair in my skull, to make tracks, that my body would continue on its way thanks to the training of the repetition, thanks to the inevitability of every gesture and response. Though I of course do not believe such a thing is possible without the additional benefit of mental illness, or perhaps drugs, or perhaps a few more years on the rack, it has been a source of limitless preoccupation for me, even baiting me in the last several months of the ritual to read several books on the mechanics and anecdotes of astral projection, something else I don’t believe is possible… without drugs.

Then I moved. All of a sudden, everyone disappeared. My office disappeared. My coworkers disappeared. The highways and booming bass cars disappeared. My patronage to the homeless drug addicts of east-central downtown Atlanta expired. I spent the days in isolation, first in sun, then in perpetual fog and cloud, in the unfinished basement of my remote office in Eugene, Oregon.

Perhaps consider Thos. the Charon who ferried me three thousand miles to the shores of this purgatory. Our drive across the country folded the routine and belief in mind and body duality into a vanished little fantasy. The only problem was that nothing existed in this new isolation to replace it, and I considered the beauty, not of escape, but of the consciousness disappearing, of the graciousness of mortality. I felt I almost physically approached it in this isolation. I even read several books on mortality! Yet within this gray concrete void, the roar of the little heater at my feet, and the drips of rain dead glistening in the bare limbs outside the tiny high window, I soon found a new routine.

Like the seasons from whence planted seeds of Peachtree Center in Atlanta, by happenstance prepared in the distant past when my family visited Atlanta and stayed in the Marriott Marquis, overtook my liberated Atlanta lunch-hour consciousness and drew me there no matter where I fancied my feet might stroll, Full City has become a reflex. I fancy much like an addiction, the body absently acting through the preparatory steps toward the consummatory action, I find myself, long after shutting my front door in oblivion, three-quarters of the way downtown on foot with Full City’s tile and arched window (is it arched?! (yes, but only on the bakery side!!!)) already enveloping me. Upon realizing this, perhaps nearby Sweet Life, or even on to Willamette where I could turn oddly right toward Perk, I still admit the strength of the habit and pay my fix a visit.

The routes appear confused when marked out on Eugene’s grid in an intentional nod to my belief that I am a man of impulse in love with the chance of the drift. That they all pivot about Full City like a Spirograph x-ray of my days belies the fact that I am an inflexible old prick. Though, sometimes, like today, it is enough to simply walk by as a punctuation to divide my visit to the bank with a climb up Skinner’s Butte.

This resurfacing of routine, or habit if you prefer, in the indefinable midst of telework-annihilation clarifies to me that the old routines that I venomously attributed to the endless progression of days at the office were merely the fiber of stability I needed, woven thicker with each passing day, to keep me from spinning out of control. I mistook the annihilation of simply growing older and having responsibilities as the cause of routine not the illness to which routine was anodyne. Here in Eugene, where the lack of structure helped me tend toward death, which though I am now quite well-read in its character, often stopping to recognize its theft of my senses in the silent gray of my basement, I still hope to avoid for some time, I needed to find the geography of new routine that forced me to be alive.

A woman at the university told me before I moved here that she had found, in a period of working from home, it gave her comfort to wake up every morning and go out for coffee with her laptop so that she felt like she was going into the office. That is not the sensation I am hoping to cultivate. Annihilation, as I have read, is a phase of life. I am fine to recognize it coming, from the safety of my selected routine, in the midst of my life. It may be in fact the whole of life, offices, coffeeshops, tortuous walks, strained livid writing, as they all fixate, however repelled, on that gray finish line.

All of my trips have been impromptu, al fresco nightcaps with Leach, all in humid darkness, one with his wonderful wife, and one rewarding me with the assignation of a fantastic Miami Dolphins mug for my chug. However, my most recent trip to Epoch was calculated. For a brief stint at my day job we were furloughed to 32-hour weeks. Having not taken any days off myself during that time and having to be in Austin on a Monday night for Tuesday festivities I chose to travel Monday morning and set aside an entire day to stomp the city, the centerpiece being an epic sit-in at my chosen scriptorium, Epoch.

My flight was delayed on the tarmac and I sat in the last seat on the plane next to a large tween and her mother thinking about the dim daylight I was being denied deep in Epoch, the choice remaindered mugs I was missing, the sweat greasing my collar. Those moments in every day submitted to the quotidian mastications of the machine like traffic, waiting in line at the post office, working, and talking to strangers are the black-outs in my addiction to control. So I faded away and waited.

Hours later landing in Austin through brutal crosswinds I darted away in a little maroon rental car and was at Epoch with the ease of my six years of Austin geographical education. It was packed as usual and I got a rather large medium coffee in a clear glass, fluted mug that looked like it would be stored in the freezer to serve root beer out of. I had a notebook I needed to transcribe from and set up my hulking computer against a wall facing into the room.

I generally spend eight to ten hours a day with earplugs in and headphones clamped over them blasting Asphyx or Bolt Thrower. It is my best version of silence, absolute control over the sound I hear. My visits to coffeeshops are generally cut incredibly short if I have to sit somewhere I can see somebody’s lips moving. If I haven’t brought my headphones the visit might amount to ducking in, not ordering a coffee, sitting for two minutes to see if I can stand it, and then rushing out the door enraged, both for being irritated and for bothering to tease myself with the belief that I could suffer through it.

The music was very loud in Epoch. Having never spent more than the duration of my order inside the place it must have never struck me. I speak quietly but the barista had hardly heard me. I was at first concerned. But looking around at the cadaverous Powerbook faces it became clear that they were all as withdrawn into a place parallel but coincident with this one as I planned to be. The music was the silence. It was dim indeed, a nighttime place that seemed odd with light struggling into it, like a crypt or humidor. I settled into my work.

He closes the door quietly with the latch withdrawn and slides it into the pocket by turn of handle. The hot silence haunts. It is the silence that can exist only to precede muffled voices. Interruption lingers in the blank walls. Crushing winds build behind still fabrics. The monologue of the air conditioning shapes a new, vast silence. The dark lake of carpet only shows its green beneath three lamps. He adds two flat pillows from the far bed to the two on the window bed and sits in the amaranthine reflection of the dormant television. He lolls his head and hand in the convex monochrome spilling out from its borders toward the pillaged empty bed. He sleeps with his feet on the wall.

Even in I silence I construct vistas of silence. In solitude I construct enclaves of deeper solitude. I stay at the ready in silence for the silence to be broken. But in Epoch the construction was sound. Loud music and Facebook-hypnotized students built an unflappable cocoon. Certainly it helped that I was only transcribing and hardly thinking. If so I would probably have spent the whole tableau lamenting that the blasting Decemberists distracted me with their intelligible (and painfully precious) lyrics. As it was I only stayed about an hour, just long enough for me, before being summoned to lunch down the street and an afternoon of carefree rambling.

PS, it is impossible not to mention that the place is open 24/7.

Steely Pittsburgh

In Pittsburgh on this steely autumn afternoon I was traveling in a pack. I had managed to break free in a little stuffy bookshop just down the road from the chainy noodle boutique we had lunched at by tediously reviewing the constellation of Proust texts much to the annoyance of the illiterate knaves on my case. I exhaled as they passed by the dirty window, crammed the bloated volumes back onto the shelf, and stood in the alcove watching until the band crossed Forbes and headed west. Satisfied that they had loosed me I headed with relish just up to the corner shop to take a coffee. The doors were open and cool air drifted in, ruffling my tie, and calming my spirit.

I began my tenure in the loft above the barista looking out over the heads and laptops of the folks downstairs, trying to let the wind cloud my ears. But as though emerging from the coffee within my veins a racket of typing, shuffling, giggling, and posturing took to the hard walls of the downstairs and ricocheted all about until pooling around me in the loft like a dumpster of hardware, glass, people chewing popcorn, crinkling foil bags, and talking with feigned lisps lidded down over me. Without headphones my sickening, guttural escape was not possible and I took my cup down to the street level hoping the wind might sweep away the painful registers and still all the sound into simple nauseating potage. Yet who did I not notice at the barista’s station below but a thorny and droll cohort also broken free from the herd retrieving a coffee and headed for the same bistro table as I. It was too late to duck away, although over time I have learned that it is never too late, greater people’s senses of indignation heal far quicker than my own, and that I could have easily slipped away with a simple wave of my Dos Passos.

I parked it at ‘his’ table and we looked at the gray sky back out over CMU. We were in Pittsburgh together for the opening of a new building that neither of us had any affiliation with and we took the opportunity to question all of the things that the armchair critic has the license to question. Why were the interior finishes so compromised, why was the central atrium so dark, did the chaotic exterior window pattern really heighten the sense of individuality for the office denizens inside? It grows easier and easier to smother the endeavors of others with our own paranoia as time goes on and we continue to put so little into the world. Suddenly you are a forty-five-year-old-man sitting at a bistro table realizing that the golden years of your creative virility have been spent spinning cocoons of doubt around what other people have had the confidence to fling out into the world and move on from to the next of their public accomplishments. Realizing this as your craft has nothing to do with the fight to unburden yourself from it. By the time you are of this age most of your behaviors, from simple core tendencies to those woven into the fabric that you would call ‘what identifies me’ have the tenacity of a physical addiction. Truly they were laid down in sedimentary layers over your entire adulthood rather than bludgeoned into your neural circuitry by the first ecstatic pull off of the meth pipe, but they are just as ossified. So my tablemate and I, exhausted of our disparaging bons mots, simply looked over each others head at the drizzle until we had finished our drinks.

In a TGI Friday’s at the Pittsburgh airport I took the second step in my new 12-step-program to contribute to society by taking a tepid Molson with two of my bros from the group and sat crippled with nausea the whole flight home. Crapped out at step two, here I still am throwing darts behind an assumed name.

For those readers who undoubtedly will find this tableaux too self-indulgent, you may be amused by one of my more satisfying pasttimes of documenting Starbucks stores in direct adjacency to real coffeeshops.

At a normal time but in the edge of time zone darkness the two men wake up. An iridescent blue aurora divides the starched rococo pattern of the curtains. In the shower he looks out an open window. The canyon walls materializing out of the dark are drenched in a rolling ambergris front. A thick mist of drizzle is visible before the rock. His eyes are nearly swollen shut and his neck, as has been growing the case, is welded with paralyzed sleep.

I stand in the field beyond the motel watching the vent in the curtain of their room. He is coming down the stairs, stops, maybe to look back at the blinded brown horse and the blinded white horse in the back field, but is gripped presciently by the aromatic charge of the air, or the sudden pressure around his head of his cap soaking through, or the clouds slumping down the slate cliff and pooling into the empty field around the corner of the building. I am still standing there watching the vent in their curtain when they breach into the field. He and I wince, though somewhat relieved; we don’t recognize each other. This can happen but once in such an empty tract.

Up the road he asks them to burn the coffee and they oblige. First they burn the beans beyond the still unfathomable process of their tender and slow roasting. Then they place them in the bottom of a copper vessel on a high fire whose smoke is indistinguishable from the fog but for its odor. A second, more acrid smoke arises from within the copper and that he breathes deeply. Only the breath, the gasp of the recently destroyed is of complement to his palate. They oblige. When they make coffee of it he breathes its steam. He watches out the window as a vague change in the face of the rock registers the day risen. In the gravel road he dumps the coffee. A vague being like him needs only its breath, the gasp of its odor.

He wears faded blue boots with a gray flannel shirt and slacks that were creased as if to define him in them when they fluttered. Water quickly beaded and collected in stalactite waves rolling back and forth across the bill of his cap as he walked away. I lost them in the fog as they headed up the canyon road until it stopped. From there they walked into the canyon where it rose and narrowed. His companion put on a poncho and when his shirt no longer beaded the rain but drank it he did as well. They swayed like two blue ghosts, as a descending woman called them. The rain tapped on his hood and on his shoulders in unrepeatable code. Nagging fingers of water ran down his plastic raiment and fogged his neck. Juniper berries drifted against the canyon walls. Some had blossomed into little urchins of soft new scales. Wild turkeys strutted into a clearing. The half-eaten cactus pears bleeding onto the sand lay unclaimed. He stopped at the base of a high segmented cliff missing a cleft like the shim from the eye of an ax. Slots of the jelly milk sky eased between the segments and forth from them visible only before the black face of the cliff a much finer rain came than he expected from the tapping on his poncho. The vague droplets fell in flagellate swerves like a mistake in his eye when he looks into a blankness like the dead and flushed ochre wall of his enormous motel room.

I have gained access to their room. Where he had not been I became the landmark. A key had been left in the door for him the evening before and therein a second key was left on the small table against the doorside window. This I took before posting in the field for the night. Where they are not now I become them. The expiry of the window air conditioner rushes out into the room and stalls. That sound is protracted and repeated. A freshly vacated motel room is miraculous. It is coupled only with the funeral parlor in its capacity to bilocate the human individual into a setting that whatever is known to primarily compose them has fled. It also competes with the funeral parlor in the thickness of its lit air. Something too revealing is concealed behind meticulously pleated curtains. I began in the arm chair beneath the window but was so compelled by the vast field of bare carpet between the unmade beds and the far wall that I spread out there and read the bracketed passages in his dog-eared book ‘Peaceful Death, Joyful Rebirth’: Billions of bacteria, I am told, live in our intestines alone. Every one of them has a mind and seeks happiness. The curtains in the funeral parlor keep death in, not the light of the sun or the wash of the clouds out. I had always believed that the barring of natural light from the parlor was to protect the memory of the vacated corpse from the pale probe of the sun laying bare its failure to flush and prickle. It said here is a translucent body that could no longer live. But it is to keep that thin pallor from taking wing on the air and dusting the rest of the walking and blissfully alive with the foundation makeup of what seems a pathetic afterlife. I throw the curtains overlooking the canyon road. The clouds have feathered up, draping the far high crease of the canyon. Sheeting rainwater on the dark cliff straight out reflects the sky. For a moment I am ten million years hence in the erosive death of this canyon. The ochre of the room smothers me when I see the fleshy white sky. These colors are too close to the colors of the mind. I often refuse to acknowledge that the sky is the blue that it is. It shocks me too much. I rush out of the room on foot up the canyon road. He can pull the curtains shut again when he returns.

I have lost them but I climb the canyon floor as it rises and the sand yields to rock and clouds sail around me, then beneath me. The clearing out to the white sky is intermittent. Less frequently the canyon floor materializes. I catch views to the opposite canyon wall where folks stumble up a trail that appears to be etched lightly onto the rock. The people look cut out of frayed cloth. Like me their akathisia is rooted in an unknown. I have tried to give it a body at least. He steps out of the trees into the sand dimpled by the swelling rainstorm. I stand at the edge of the trail with smooth shear rock glossed down to him.
The will to live is like the belief in vision. I believe it has been with me always, that I see even when my eyes are closed. I know that something else exists, a tendency, that something else can be obtained. In that sudden binary where always there is one and the other is its opposite, I feel the magnetism of the canyon floor. My brain liquid in my skull lurches forward as if to leap out on its own into the rain and cloud. This tendency reaches around and blinds the capacity to see life eternal, pulls me to the edge and evokes in me the crunch of my skull quickly and simultaneously eradicating him and the canyon and the sky into precious disparition. But it is a vacuum that is the conjecture of the living. It is a charade of death because the emptiness of death can’t be known to the living. My doctor would accuse me of professoring myself out of suicide, but overthinking often has its merits.

Now completely alive I wait back against the rock wall for them to climb to me. He looks up into the clouds vaguely winding about me and thickening across the knobby tops of the cliffs and it begins to rain more earnestly. Thunder or jet engine stalks the valley. He and his partner turn back, visible walking far down the valley, then disintegrated beneath Velvet Ash canopies.

He sat up late by the low stave fence with an unopened can of Black Label ogling a prone cow. Her head of curly hair swirled in ringlets from the damp. An enormous, brown, ill-proportioned spot ran up her neck and down her snout shy of the mouth. It was a blemish that would relegate any human woman to a shuttered apartment or at the very least some oddly plastered hairdo. She sat there peacefully as the dusk swelled. Rather often she would creak deeply and kick out her hind legs straight across the ground to what a cow might want for an ottoman. I sat within a break of stocky, black cypresses across the pasture. I slept there too.

Visiting Fibber in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood of Chicago was not in the underdrawing of my travel plans when I touched down on a Sunday morning in Kansas City. No sooner than I had coasted into the ominous silence of downtown Omaha, secured a cold bâtard accompanied by a hummus tub, and sat on the side of a planter waiting for someone to walk by I became lost in calculations on my recalled geography of the prairie states. Chicago was certainly no more than a couple of hours away. Then and there abandoning my plans to futz around Iowa for two days, I just had to fight through two full days in Nebraska.

The drive into Chicago from the west is stifling. I was hypnotized from the eight hours that it had taken me to cross Iowa and Illinois, often envisioning myself flying through space at eighty miles per hour without a car, just me seated and flung. As the city rose and set over the interstate chute I recalled the highway scene in Solaris and saw right through the skyline every time it peeked over at me.

After a knight’s tour of Wicker Park I pulled into Fibber’s road and parked in the following morning’s street cleaning zone. My physical excision was destined to continue. Fibber was at work til late and had arranged for me to get the key from her mailbox in the front door and make myself at home in the bottom floor apartment of her building. The mail slot was a narrow, rusty affair that ground into my steering-numbed hand. I could feel the envelope amidst the junk mail and could even see my name written on it but couldn’t clip my aging fingers around it. I felt like I was fishing a golden ticket out of the sewer and was about to give up and drive to a Super 8 I knew in Remington, Indiana when the door swung open, having never been locked in the first place. I took the key, dumped my bindle on the couch and went off floating on foot.

Partially spectral with cornfield ennui, stumbling around Six Corners was the equivalent of the beating I longed for sitting on my planter two nights into my stand in Omaha when I felt that I had not even been touched by a voice since debarking the plane. I became completely turned around like a country mouse and headed off down the wrong spoke a klick before making my way back to Wicker Park to stew in the slow city dusk.

In full night I marched back up the compact city streets with little bodega storefronts tucked in beneath the umbrage of street trees clouding orange lamps and the wide sidewalks alternately steely white shining through shadow and agitated with feet and voices in clumps blazed straight to a bustling intersection with some laundromats perhaps, light icy windows, a breeze, and a glimmering neon and verdant window across the street where Atomix glowed, just as Fibber’s note to me had made a point to landmark. Its impression of a future of the not-too-distant past showed its hand even from afar. I noted upon returning to Atlanta to research my tableau that ‘The Future of Coffee’ didn’t have a website and mused that its pantomime must have been staged in 1995 as seen from 1955. Strangely tactile though, the aqueous sheen of its atomic age styling baffled by the houseplants was exacerbated by the blue hues, fluorescent lighting, and the bizarre coolness that had gripped the city immediately after sunset.

Rarely does coffee not seize me up. I become staccato and distracted. However, I don’t think I would blame the tired sag that came over me on the coffee either. With narcotic perfection I sat in the cold room, with my mouth and stomach warm, staring at the words on my offbrand MP3 player: Ukrainian Insurgent Army. So far on the trip the looseness, the serendipity that I count on to make meaning of my travels had eluded me behind the stifling bleakness, the staying alone in the hotel after dark when I could have seen through the fire glazed sky to the stars, and the pathetically foiled, wordless attempts to overlap with other folks. Here was a schism of temperatures and sensations whose lucidity crystallized the Ukrainian Village around me into the place I was meant to be at that time and let my movements melt into the sensations of easy purposefulness that I rarely feel.

Dipping my fingers in coffee and rubbing them over the watercolor pencils and graphite bars in my rucksack, dragging them over intently penciled territories, a small scene emerged on the paper in front of me. A little Ukrainian Insurgent Army, for some reason dressed as hoar-bearded elves armed with some sort of hooked staffs, marched down out of a hillscape. I know that it was right because I now cannot recall the sensations or visions that engendered the markings as I could when I was drawing ‘a building’ or ‘a landscape’ in eastern Nebraska. This little puddle of pigment was precisely the absence of myself in the moment and the complete control of the environment and situation over me.

Back in the dark of Cortez I had to move my car from the street cleaning zone long after the main exodus had plugged all of the suitable opposite curb parking. Ending up blocks away and walking again through the neighborhood I felt the poultice of Atomix flaking away in the whir of the passing cars on Damen.

At Fibber’s kitchen table a bottle of wine somehow appears in my photographs and a tall tumbler filled next to my implements served as the medium well for my second Ukrainian Insurgent Army drawing. But the time was then past and I had already sunken to parody of that fleeting recent moment. Spreading out my tools photogenically, connecting my MP3 player to Fibber’s laptop, and dipping my fingers in the wine, the weakness of the resulting new drawing showcased my inability to kindle situations for my benefit.  The movements were too clear in a way that made them ineffectual, their powers misused. I had tried to shoot the gun again, to make it work on my own, but fired into the air, into an arc, doing nothing but make a heartbreaking racket and depositing its charge where it could strike no one. It didn’t matter much. I still hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone, nor they to me.

What’s hotter than hot? Drinking black coffee in Omaha in August. With little else to do but bounce from shop to shop a 2PM, post-lunch, cup was inevitable. The shops so far under my belt were bleak, businesslike affairs with none of the desperate stranded youthfulness I had mythologized for Omaha after blindly pointing my finger to the map in preparation for my summer holiday. On the coma-end of a gastronomical daytrip to Athens, shuffling around the city, we were approached by a youth in youth costume who halted us in the street. “Where is the in place, hey? What goes on in this city? Where are the kids? What’s the secret handshake?” He was asking the wrong ‘kids.’ I’m sure he eventually found what he was looking for. I’ve never been on the inside track with the kids even when I was one. No wonder Omaha looked as sad and baked as any other summer place that unfolds around me.

Blue Line is the dirtiest place that I have ever consumed foodstuffs. To keep from being sweat-welded to the vinyl chair or driven insane by the fly who loved me I eavesdropped. This was the place. I didn’t know the handshake of course. Three kids with nothing to do, miraculously not sweating, in thin cardigans worn with shorts, ruffled their hair like a dance and made plans for dusk, post-nap. A group of kids were heading to the river, to the woods next to a park. Everyone would be there. Kids from out of town that had linked up the night before and slept on Josiah and Casey’s floor would be there, from whence and hence they were less important than now, tonight, and however long. They packed up their Macbooks. I was stuck to the dried filth on the chair.

Summer freedom running across melting highways from grass to grass, gravel to gravel, in bare feet hard now though young and soft beneath. Summer darkness, deepest night darkness, loudest night darkness, alive night darkness. Summer sun still hides so much. We hid in it organized together a group of friends happening to pass by this one summer in this summer city only trying to find things to keep us together all the time from the tugs of time and geography. Summer heat in the shadows where a few of us hid together from the catcher whose footsteps we heard and few of us knew each other’s names but why would we bother. Some of us swam and some lost each other for the rest of the day until dark they resurfaced in small groups at a party with hoses, little pools, and guys starting to wear short shorts again. Summers later barely the shaded edge of a face would remain in the sparks of our brains, much less the names of some kids we played hide and go seek with at Two Rivers.

I drove through Council Bluffs in late afternoon. I got stuck in rush hour traffic looking for somewhere to do a u-turn.

I left Coffee Girls by ten in the morning on a Sunday having woken up in Atlanta, flown to KC, abstaining from breakfast or beverage to give it up to the Coffee Girls. It was an idyllic morning but one rushed by the unseen force that frivolously pointless travel exerts on time. The absence of itinerary can either be languid or voracious. Foolishly I let the more manic of the toxins infect my brain on the desolate plateaux of this voyage bouncing from here to there, desperate to get to the next place however godforsaken and bleak I knew it would be. Agitated by the sun pounding me through the storefront of Coffee Girls I set controls for the Nelson Atkins, my only real primary for the sad orbits of the maroon rental car. As these things went, mapless, as always, I was lost below UMKC and found myself motoring in circles around Aixois debating a landing.

Recognizing on the third lap that I had nowhere to be and that I most likely would never see this place again, and thoroughly titillated by its name, I dropped in for a paper cup and a chill. Only on a useless junket could a double-header like this make sense and only such a frivolous and redundant occupation as coffee-shop-crawling could characterize a trip as being so useless. I didn’t want coffee in the August heat but filled a paper cup from the pumping station and regarded the empty expanse of Aixois that must have been a restaurant. It felt like a truckstop with a vinyl clad rope strung in front of the portal leading from the shower rooms to the Stuckey’s, which was closed while grease-soaked ceiling tiles were being picked out by gloved hands and crumbled into rubbish hoppers or over drifts of sweeping compound, except of course it was all dark wood, mirrors, white linens, a truckstop for turned-up collars and girls named Fifi or Harriet. Whatever the atmosphere’s true inclination it seemed to bar me and I took my paper cup to the patio.

“Marne is leaving for Wellesley this week. I told her father he had to drive her there. You know I don’t know how to drive her Mini.” “I know!” “But he comes up with one of his typical bullshit outs.” “What this time?” “Something about Cheryl needing him to be home with Carson while she is in Salina seeing to her father’s affairs.” “Cheryl doesn’t care about her father!” “I know! She doesn’t care about anyone. Not that I care that Chase has thrown his life away with her. I haven’t cared about him for a long time.” “I know, right?” “But it just chaps my butt to see her dropping this on him, which then drops on me. It’s as if we never split up!” “So what do you do?” “Well we just have to fly Marne up. Chase will have to miss the tournament next week to get that car to her.” “How will she get settled, I mean shop and get her stuff set up?” “Well you know that wouldn’t have fit in the Mini anyway.” “Totally.” “So we are shopping tomorrow and we will box it up and ship it. A lot of the girls there do that. She can get sheets and towels and curtains in her luggage of course.” “Right.” “Damn Chase.” “What?” “He promised to see her before she left to give her money to buy clothes in Boston for school.” “That girl is set!” “I wish he would give me some money!” “I know, right! Girl!”

White and ghostly, gilt and decrepit, people disappear, my feet and I, on seatbacks, on pedals, on and on, mania turns to desolation. Silence, silence in my head, silence in between skin and hair, silence behind glass, silence of the highway, silence of the Sunday downtown, on the road soon enough; I knew that awful checkerboard monstrosity was a Federal Building from the airplane.

Perhaps I needed to shit. Perhaps longing for another mouth for my voice. The word coffee loomed and lit white from a white sky was more a brown katana to my bowels. I bought a white bagel and clumped floating soy in a cup. I used the men’s room. Advertisements on the walls convinced me that Kick Butt was a gateway business for a dojo; advertisements and throwing stars at the register. The Matrix on a television and the conversations of businessmen ushered me back outside. I ate half the bagel under a billboard. I ate the other half and drank the coffee in the parking lot of my destination.

When I was a junior in college studying architecture I was less than enthused about the stature and promise of my studiomates, much less their personalities. On a Sunday morning I could be sure that they would be significantly less charming than usual with their khaki shorts reeking of some unidentifiable cocktail of Natural Light, Tanqueray, and Big K, and possibly not having picked the dried bits of puked-up Varsity off of their soccer sandals. I was supposed to meet my ‘team’ at ten that morning to work together on a shared chipboard site model for the studio. Had I realized before I got there that the time had changed that night, that I was an hour early, I would have just concocted the inevitable lie without dragging myself from Home Park. As it was I perfunctorily loitered for about ten minutes before heading back home to see what sort of debauchery Jeff was into for the day. Whether I have been more of a grown up since that day is arguable, but I never benefited from ignorance of DST’s mechanics again until this just past fall.

In Athens for a gastronomic Grand Tour, we had already hit The Grill, 5&10, Big City Bread, Clocked, and The National, and were emptying out our legs for a Rabelaisian brunch at The Grit. We walked through the clear chill of the Samhain morning from our motel to The Grit. Nervousness and immediate hunger pains prickled when we found the place closed. A couple of other fools stood in front of the door with us until we all realized that we were out of step with the world and we decided to recalibrate for an hour in the new cafe that had filled the block husk of Go Coffee.

Go was a great light-filled diner of a shop that we used to spend mornings playing Scrabble in. Red Eye, we found, was significantly darker in pallor and was jamming NPR’s Sunday Morning throughout our stay. It became quickly apparent that Red Eye had something in common with my deceased bros at Method with their connoisseurship of beans and with their Chemex brewing vessels. I noted this to the somewhat disinterested proprietor and he mentioned that Octane, who had bought out Method, was going to be utilizing the same brewing process and would be opening soon. Now in April of the following year I haven’t had the courage to field verify his assertion. I also noted that I used to kick it in this space when it was Go; his disinterest resurfaced.

It was quiet save for Bob Edwards on the squawk-box and the day with all of the rest of the folks in it loped toward us in the Sunday sun like a slow-motion mob advancing. The cork coaster protecting the glass coffee table kept sticking to my cup and falling in my lap. A man from the real day entered the shop hesitantly. He carried a fresh baguette that filled the whole room immediately with warmth and crusty aroma. A fresh baguette on a Sunday? I recalled another time when I was doing the unstuck. I arrived via treno in Venice on a Sunday morning and hurriedly took a camera at a joint right there in the Canneregio. I had probably been up since four or five because I couldn’t sleep in Florence for some reason that escapes me now. I was hungry and bewildered by the city I had been co-opting for years already and rushed out to find a loaf of bread. Most of the bakeries were closed and a few little bodegas brandished their empty cabinets sadly like I had been at the end of a particularly long Russian bread line. Roman Catholicism’s stranglehold on poor little Venice had reached my doorstep and I languished on the cobbles of a campo until the sun set. It was as odd to me that Sunday wouldn’t be the perfect day to bake oodles of fresh bread as it was that wine couldn’t be purchased in Georgia on Sundays; name two more popular miracles of Jesus than the feeding of the multitudes and wedding feast of Cana. This bastard in Red Eye was lucky, and the smell brought me chronosyncronous with him and the sun.

Bound as we were back into the world, we headed out to destroy The Grit and stroll through ‘Bear Hollow Trail’ at Memorial Park to kick it with their crippled Bubo Virginianii.