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.

I have spent cumulative weeks of my life sitting on the low circular brick planter (now sans sharp holly at its perimeter) in the Equitable Plaza within sight of One Caffe, formerly (briefly) Saxby’s, and formerly something I can’t even recall. I have little to say towards One Caffe other than if you are planning to take a coffee in downtown Atlanta it should be your only choice. The closest other options (Tilt, Danneman’s) are not technically downtown, and you will, during the day, on a weekday, find no exterior spot that is so thoroughly not Atlanta (robustly populous and alive) within the perimeter. It is a safe place for me, where even though my thoughts often roam amongst the rabble to my eternal question of whether I would have time to see my brains on the bricks before me if I were shot from behind or to the fragility of the social contract, I still feel ownership over the bricks in front of the stylobate I lean against.

There is little I can say of my visit today that has not been said in spots of virtually everything I have written in the last ten years.

Excerpt from Chase Scenes 2008:

Far away again in autumn. The sunlight through a flat cloud as you stood on the sidewalk outside a door without a handle flat into the glazed bricks was quiet. The one week of the year had come across trees that had enough leaves on them to blot out the southern sun and the shade was warm enough to sit out in. You spent the long afternoon in a plaza downtown sitting on the swept bricks. In the absence of those faces you couldn’t retain your eyes filled with the white sky. You worked your way back through the mosaic, around cavernous voids that you could feel between your eyes and your skull where whole weeks had been handed over to some black vessel willfully, intentionally. You rock back and forth in the gathered up twine of time hanging down from Atlanta. In some phrases you are there, like now, under a sparse pear tree in the plaza, or slipping back down, not as a journey into that empty Valley, but a plummet, or a twinkling transmigration into a moment. When you began at the end, as a human destination with a trail let out behind it, there was nothing concrete enough to withdraw from but the euphoria of the continuing tides of the hotel, to step backwards from your death and gaze upon it from life. You knew the debris that ended every story. The same things with different connotations. You felt like a bronze cast.

Excerpt from Marquis: A Post-Dated Picaresque Romp Through the Oeuvre of the work.group:

The Equitable Building with Roof Forest

Excerpts from Chase Scenes 2006:

These little compositions generally are born more of their, no, of the conditions under which they are written, such as now, in front of the Equitable Building in Atlanta. The protesters are still here. Their first day was last Thursday, the afternoon I left for the trip. I could not focus at work that day, the impending air travel spooking me a bit so I pulled together all my gear with the intention of leaving for the airport straight from lunch. I sat out in the sun for about one and a half hours (1.5 hours) reading Titus Groan and watching the protesters. They stand against a construction company who is fitting out an office in the tower. I must confess that they bring little sympathy out from me because they appear so singularly disinterested. Each day there seems to be a foreman of some sort who manages the group, he is well-dressed and often has a video camera. The rest of the group appear as if they might be working for their lunch. They are not only an unsavoury group, they seem to have little or no passion for the cause, many listening to Walkmans or only trying to hand out leaflets to women. One of them is the short man who sells pirated DVDs on MARTA out of his backpack which he wears on the front of his body, either for ease of sketchy access or because he has been stared down by a mighty bison on the sage flats of North Dakota.

The man leafleting directly to my left just successfully obtained a woman’s phone number. Apparently she is “staying with her sister out in Stone Mountain.” I wonder, were I to ask the man why he thinks he is of value, not in any context, not ‘to other people,’ ‘to commerce,’ or ‘to the intertwined systems of nature,’ what his answer would be. Would it be different than my answer? What would my answer be, I cannot say. It would most likely be bloated and circular, meaningless. To actually answer these questions I think it is first necessary to answer a question, a fundamental question, does anything have value outside its capacity to perpetuate your own life, or to perpetuate other systems, and then, what is the value in their perpetuation? There is some of that circular logic I feared I would have no recourse to avoid and no ability to rise above.

I have been back from North Dakota for five (5) days now and I stretch my memory during this compositional process to recall episodes that I am neglecting. I believe I shall list them here for the sake of the remainder of the footnotes, first I should like to mention that the man leafleting just to my left was just barking very loudly like a dog. I wonder what sort of impression we used to make in the mid-1990s when protesting fur stores. We received a balanced share of positive and extremely negative attention. I remember one instance in front of Lenox Mall in Atlanta where a man in a pick-up truck threw a large piece of meat still on the bone out of his window at us, then proceeded to drive up on the sidewalk at us. And although we most likely looked like fools, I can be sure in saying that, at that moment, we all felt and exhibited passion for the cause we were standing for [I don’t know if I was inspired by the glances upward in the page where my mind may have trained on “sell out,” for I did mention in the note that “at that moment” we all felt strongly, because it was not long after this period of time that we were having regular protests that some of the most vocal animal rights activists began to do such things as eat meat or become interested in survivalism and hunting in the spirit of Ted Nugent, real roughriders and plainsmen, or whether the thread was inspired merely by the ineffectual protest being staged amidst my composition]. No, I shall not list the episodes for your sake.

Excerpt from Roosevelt in Ruins:

Im sitting in the cavernous lobby of the Marriott Marquis again because it has grown so familiar to me, and although I have finalized a preferred route into and through its bowels, it still perplexes me, at the inception of the project I sat outdoors at lunch against that low brick coping in front of the Equitable building, the timing was ideal as the leaves had flourished all spring and summer on the scrawny trees but had not yet been shed by autumn, the temperature had settled to the point where I could bring my sweater but usually used it as a pillow to keep my lower back from getting gouged by the leading edge of the brick, the university was in session providing an interesting cross section of people to observe as they made their way around me, I spent equal time drawing and developing insights about the folks that strolled into Starbucks, dug through the trash, ogled each other, cut through the park, jaywalked, strained and craned upward at the tall buildings, and hollered into their cellphones, my efficiency ratio was low but the material was grounded in a buzz of life, in shared experience, at night I blazed through fragments of material alone that remained fragments reaching back into the day, but idly, and only in my head, alone they were echoes…

The Castillo was smaller than I remembered it. I am larger than I was then. There certainly isn’t any need to empty out such abused tropes. I certainly hadn’t walked five miles to it when I was a child. Although, as a child I would still have turned my nose up at the ridiculously dangerous open-air trolleys that traverse the city. These are acceptable for riding from your car to the gate of The Magic Kingdom but their safety on downtown streets with other (drunk) vehicles is specious at best. We were almost run down by one’s elderly inertia as it jackknifed all yawning into the driveway for the Fountain of Youth. On a bench out of their way and into the way of the stream of loose children by the entrance of the Castillo we shared a banana and a granola bar. A man with curly nicotine-stained hair sat with a Sheltie on his lap. His perch was clearly calculated to halt the skipping gait of as many preteen girls as possible. “Can I pet your dog?” “Of course! His name is Jamie! Is today your birthday? No? It isn’t? It looked like you had some sort of birthday sweatshirt on.” We tacked on “You know Jamie loves birthday girls. Jamie does some really neat tricks, but he only does them in my van, etc.” Considering we only had $7 cash, instead of paying $6 apiece to smell the mossy guts of the fort we reconnoitered its perimeter by way of the seawall. Below in the dry moat Jamie and his master stood and posed for a photo taken from a bastion of the Castillo by Jamie’s master’s wife. He sweated as he stood amongst the children lest his wife espy his sweat.

We endeavor’d inland through the town, first passing White Lion (the restaurant (unfortunately)) and Crucial Coffee, an open shed of a cafe that reminded me of nothing but Thos.’s summer ‘99 coffeeshop in the parking lot of the Bay Watch back lot in Marina Del Rey. We of course ‘had’ to go there, but not ’til wearied by everything in the town that hadn’t its bizarre magnetism. We loped through the pedestrian alleys smelling taffy and buffeted by Christmas music still lagging on a warm December 31st. The turrets of Flagler drew us further inland toward my memories of the most peaceful day of 2009 spent in the winter vacation rapture of Emory University. We sat on a bench reading (Sebald again, as I had on that day) in the silence, periodically interrupted by a serpentine tourist trolley passing on Valencia or Sevilla Streets. Hearing voices over muffled loudspeakers from a distance, not making out the words just a vibration, leaves me feeling like I am in a prison camp, and we grew hungry, and an early returning student stood nearby stretching and jogging in place with his earbuds draped over his ears by their wires like two loudspeakers blaring a tinny rendition of some booty-smacking drudgery so we padded back into town for a bite.

Swearing off the vast majority of tourist eateries like The Bubble Room, we poked own a fresh alley where a rainbow flag hung over the patio of Kosmic Bluz Pizza. We were heartened. Avoiding the patio which was filled with a family of fools and children (about 6 folks total) we took a high table inside where there was just one other couple, both staring at their phones silently. We were waited on by the proprietrix who, after several minutes brought us beer in plastic cups and took our food orders. We ordered a pizza identical to their ‘Caney’ pizza which came with fresh tomatoes, portabella mushrooms, red onions, artichoke hearts, black olives (canned, we learned), fresh rosemary and basil, except ordered it a la carte to avoid the cheese sauce. We in fact eschewed the fresh herbs as too extravagant and the fresh tomatoes as we would have a tomato sauce on this variant and ended up with 4 toppings. Now, the Caney pizza costs $18. That is crazy. But the pizza we ended up with, which was inferior to the Caney in scope with two less toppings and a considerably cheaper sauce, ran us close to $22. Not realizing our fleecing until it was too late we tittered through the meal at the proprietrix apologizing to the few other patrons who began to show up for their lack of service because the place was ’swamped’ and her waitress was out or scolding a family for foolishly attempting to order food before she had collected their drink order. Of course she needed to sauce them up before they saw that they were ordering a lunch for the price of a February’s-worth of pinto beans! It was my intention to forgo the tip but was chided by my companion into leaving the two singles I had in my wallet and we bolted out the door. I tried to convince myself that that was possibly even more of a slight than the €0.01 tip I had left a waiter in Aix-en-Provence after we saw him walking up the street in a leather jacket halfway through our meal, never to return, which I saw as being almost humorous in its theatrics. A $2 tip surely would say something… wouldn’t it? I could speak of nothing else, and after determining that leaving the $2 as a statement and increasing our already bank-breaking donation to Kosmic Bluz by more than I was comfortable with was the wrong decision, I desperately wanted my two singles back. I thought of going back to demand them but my companion reminded me of Crucial Coffee and I perked up. “Let’s reclaim the afternoon from the jaws of defeat!”

Crucial was quiet but for the strains of some distant programmed Casio jam on the salty air. Of the two windows, one to Charlotte Street and the other inside the shop we chose the latter. Once inside a group of teenage girls arrived at the Charlotte window and proceeded to order smoothies. As I browsed all of the menopause related gifts for sale I leaned against a brick pony wall whose heavy coping slid off and landed on the creamer counter knocking all of the stirring sticks about like shocked lumber. As I cleaned up it became our turn and I coaxed my companion into ordering first. She asked for a rhubarb spice tea. “Would you like that in latte form? It is divine in latte form.” “No just black is fine.” As I attempted to lift the coping again to take a picture of my hand sandwiched beneath it I was elbowed and filed my order for a small coffee. “Would you like a latte?” “No just a coffee please.” The tea came out first with the caveat “Let me know if it is too strong. You can really smell the rhubarb.” A man at the other window was jumping in to try to place his order out of turn and was spurned. My coffee came across the counter and I payed, knowing all the while that what I had been served was a 16oz cup of espresso. Now y’all who can put away the caffeine can cast the first stone, but I have had to cut my intake down to almost nil. I plan to gear back up once my days are no longer populated by typing pool levels of keyboard noodling or outdoor voice conference calls by peanut-butter-mouthed wookie impersonators. But at the moment my tolerance is at an all-time low for the drug. I could take no more than a shot’s worth of sips before feeling the rage come back. My companion drank her ridiculously weak rhubarb spice tea.

We sat at a table by the source of the aforementioned Casio airs. A man named Charlie Brown played standards such as “Shining Star” by The Manhattans and “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” presumably the Temptations’ version, not the UB40 version, and some possibly original cuts that we couldn’t place. He had a joie de vivre and innocence that almost completely erased the day’s shortcomings. But it didn’t. It did reveal to me the pearls, by dint of our current presence at a coffeeshop, I could string into a staged tableau using the previous events to pass construct a judgment on the types of sets and motivations in which I would have preferred to act.

First, in the oblivion of my own life, I chose to tip Charlie Brown with the remaining sawbuck I had in my wallet. His foot tapped the stool as I stood in front of him and put the folded bill into his can. He posed for me to take a picture and glowed. “I enjoy entertaining you and your kids.” We can tell! I relished that moment and the decision I had made. If only I could have given him all $7. Then we hoofed back towards A1A. Early-bird revelers in foiled paper top-hats did shots on the patio of a liquor store. “I need to use a bathroom. Why don’t you throw that espresso out?” “I have a plan!” In a plaza near the Saint Augustine Visitor’s Center was a row of portable toilets. “I’m going in here.” “There are some public bathrooms over there.” “I know but I’m going in here!” I had a plan. And by God if the world was not in my spiteful oblivion then it would be now.

We walked the five miles back to our cottage. The beach grew overcast as we walked in the sand to cushion our bruised feet; mine still suffered from my inadequately shod loop around downtown Omaha in August. There was going to be a blue moon that night, New Year’s Eve. I planned to watch it rise over the ocean from the cottage. I planned to watch ‘Persona’ and eat soup, alone.

Play us out, Charlie Brown.

in keeping with the chockablock aggregation of the suburban start-up coffee house this tableaux was composed in five minute spurts over eleven months. i know that the family of this family establishment went through, according to their website, a “creative process to transform a bare room into a cozy atmosphere”, but for me, the bleak exterior, the white hot sky of central florida december with salt seeding the breeze burnt so harshly into my eyes, that readjusting into the dim on the christmas tree and particle board furniture, was never going to settle into a hot beverage like a riding blanket onto the lap of milady in her taffeta lined carriage, clearly it was for some people, and it could be for you too, twernt for me. so with that caveat, trolls be silenced.

this establishment is right up the street from where the husk of the pre-barnes-and-noble barnes-and-noble shop, bookstop, where i worked in 1994 and 1995, which became wild oats, which was bought by whole foods and then abandoned, is located. as with sun shoppe it is hard for me to extricate the sunlit ennui and mini-blind afternoons of my teenage years on the space coast from my contemporary discoveries there. sun shoppe at least has a newly established framework: my parents take a coffee there every saturday morning and have taken myself and the southern oracle there on a couple of occasions, one of which was supposed to be this saturday following christmas which found the sun shoppe closed and me full of curses.

all ajonesed, we continued out past where nahacky’s aquarium store used to be onto 192 toward what others might characterize as suburban, like jimmy carter blvd in atlanta or south sepulveda in los angeles but to me wasnt able to be diverted from anything but 192 in atlanta, where there used to be sawgrass before there was a mall and where the schoolbus probably took the hicks from my highschool out into the swamps at the end of the day. already somewhat sour, into the incandescence of house of joe we fumbled. one poor pregnant girl, in the chin-up stoicism of a girl by herself at the prom, worked alone making endless crossandwiches and specialty coffee beverages for the parade of regular-types. i got a black coffee to streamline her efforts and allow her to help a wheelchair bound old lady into the can.

my family grouped together on a cluster of chairs and a couch which were all just too far apart from each other. the room was large and placing them in intimate proximity would have certainly looked as awkward as a raft adrift in the ocean. the graciousness of the spacing was heightened by the fact that we could not hear each other speak over the pop radio playing through a speaker mounted in the dropped-ceiling directly overhead. it was not even satellite radio, or a disc compacte, or pandora over a laptop, just fucking bj105 your number one hit music station. it played intermittent modern christmas songs (look no further than paul mccartney’s ‘wonderful christmas time’ for incontrovertible evidence that he was the lousiest beatle) and chaka kahn jams for 10 minutes then commercials for car dealerships for another 10. when i was a preteen, in between bouts of playing ‘pro wrestling’ or ‘contra’ on my friend’s nintendo entertainment system in his stale room with the curtains drawn, he and i would call people pretending to be from bj105 and ask them for the ‘phrase that pays’, a common contest in the local area at the time, when they said “bj105 MY number one hit music station” we would die laughing, it must have been incredibly irritating; about as irritating as the noise playing in a coffeeshop.

et cetera:
against the wall leaned a single ratty particle board desk with a computer on it where you could pimp your myspace page while talking to your bro on the celly about your rims..

from website: remember orange julius? House of Joe has recreated the great taste in it’s new orange creamcicle slush… a tasty blend of orange juice and vanilla!

directly in my field of vision a small painting of zelda(?) (not the one from pet sematary) made me remember that i cant find anything about the nexxus coffee and gaming bar in seattle where a someone dressed in exactly that outfit was spotted and whose memory i have had to clutch like judas in my jaws without outlet of tableau.

I woke up on the couch early. It seemed like only an hour or two since Fibber and her roommate had come in the previous night. I had tried to stay up by reading Sebald but finished the text before they arrived so I blinkingly rested, awakening partially twice as they came in separately, and then a third and complete time when the roommate left at dawn in flip-flops carrying some paperwork. Assuming Fibber would be long in waking I put my shoes on, having slept in my pin-striped slacks and t-shirt, and strolled up Damen. I thought about going back to Atomix but instead, in the name of your continued entertainment, I ventured into Barista Coffee House, Inc.

Depending on your preferences for humor or polite, stimulating conversation, the entertaining portion of the jaunt screeched to a halt. I was skeptical about Barista Coffee House, Inc. from the outside, when I walked by it the previous night on my way home from Atomix. Crossing the threshold did not boost my perceptions. Having carried my new book with me on the walk and hoping to find an arm chair and some morning sunlight I immediately made the decision to get my coffee to go. As if the gate keepers at some kind of mythological temple, two guys flanked the doorway inside speaking at volumes presumably left over from a club or motorcycle ride the night before, about how sexy a woman’s big, round ass was, about how ‘when that thang moves, everybody moves,’ and how much they wanted ‘one of those.’

Beyond the point of no return, I broke off a coffee nonetheless, in a styrofoam cup, from the pleasant Barista, Inc. who called me baby or sweetie which was really endearing but spoiled by the still embarrassing and assaulting conversation that guarded the door. I left a tip, swallowed to seal my ears, looked at the ground, and darted out the door, and drank the elixir while reading Sam Shepard’s ‘Motel Chronicles’ in its entirety before Fibber awoke.

Now, I am not a prude, and my conversations include no less discussion of the male or female anatomy, I merely prefer a bit more well-crafted, subtle, and transformative treatment of human sexuality, rather than the sad and reductive ‘I’m an ass-man’ sort of bluster that the b’hoys at Barista Coffee House, Inc. were crowing. Also not one to limit expression, they can say whatever they want, I’m sure it isn’t going to help them score with the Barista, Inc. Maybe they could have just used their inside voices. I lament that I won’t ever know how well it played out for them.

It took me about 18 hours to find my spot to sit in Omaha. Lets call it my Loggia dei Lanzi of Omaha. Although I didn’t end up sitting at the corner of 11th and Howard for ten hours without food and water for fear of losing my spot it did act as a brick magnet that drew me from the blank and rank corners of the city (try 10th and Abbott) when I needed to feed on human flesh (visually).

In fact I not only watched people but engaged them in methods as dry as the charade of old market felt. One passer-by, watching me draw on a little 4″x6″ postcard brought me a large sheet of paper. I told him I didn’t need it and that this was my preferred substrate. He said he was an art teacher and that it was ingrained in him. He seemed to also be a sidewalk caricaturist who, after he had offered me the paper, ventured across the street to jaw up the band with the saw player and was replaced by someone who seemed to have some mental issues evidenced by his barking, literally, at passers by, fortunately leaving me alone.

The beer I had at Julio’s before hitting the bricks began to creep up on me, and not wanting to patronize another business that evening, I wandered south to take a leak between the steel beams under a bridge, passing a couple that saw me heading down the dirt embankment and made eye contact with me as I disappeared.

It was dusk when I returned to my spot, and after sitting just a moment, the couple who had seen me sneak below the bridge passed by. I have previously tested in other cities a hobby of following couples around (most excitingly following a doomed american tourist girl around the 4th arrondissement with Thos. and Vidal) and decided to follow this couple. I find it more titillating to follow people who I know have seen me already. They headed west down Howard and then took a left at 12th before going into the iced cream shop there. I stood in the twilight behind a dumpster at the curb while the streetlights came up. When they came out they headed back east up Jackson, toward where I had seen them from under the bridge. I went the other way up 12th and hustled through the alley parallel to Jackson to cut them off at 11th. When I came up 11th they were turning south from Jackson and saw me crossing the road, positioned just ahead of me, and as if sensing my hesitancy to overtake them they stopped to fumble around for something in the girl’s bag. I can only assume it was pepper spray, so I just kept walking straight down to Aromas, which I had seen that morning, along with the area under the bridge, when making an 8 mile circle around the CBD on foot.

Frustrated by the fools in front of me ordering something off of the Starbucks menu I stepped back out onto the street. The couple was gone, most likely at the Omaha Police Department over by my hotel, so I went back in and ordered a tea. In the deep part of the shop, far from the windows, trying to pay attention to the fact that I was somewhere new but feeling cheated out of the remainder of the evening by my stalking cut short, I took out the postcard I had drawn at my corner and painted listless and uninspired documentation of the midwest chiaroscuro that brick buildings soak up out here.

As the place cleared out I ended up moving to a couch that I sank into and read a bunch of ‘Austerlitz,’ as usual wanting to be one of Sebald’s disembodied ghostly ‘Is,’ but obviously, from my bumbled chase, too corporeal to really meander the city like a dream or a memory. But the more I read the more I felt like I was not there, and not where I was by choice, but feeling like I didn’t know where I was, or why I had ended up there, or why I felt like I couldn’t leave. The feeling was incredibly distracting and I left without taking a single picture, and vowing to return the next morning, which I did not do, instead hitting Caffeine Dreams before fleeing to Lincoln… came back in the afternoon, after hitting Jackson St Books, looked in the window but did not enter and went back to to Howard and 11th to wait in the twilight for some more squares to freak out that could lure me back to Aromas.

Yes, yes, yes, I know their full name… Quack’s Bakery. And yes I know they serve sandwiches and soups, but so does Java Monkey and 18th Street and Kavarna, all of whom call themselves coffeeshops. And jesus, Mani’s is called Mani’s Bakery but I never ever went there JUST to eat a cupcake. So what is in a name anymore, and what is left of the criteria that we established for this site? Obviously it is a lot more difficult to quantify what establishments belong on here among their peers than it is to establish futile rules to endlessly squash the tableau trolls who seem to think that just because their girlfriend is a barrista at a place or can wordlessly get their desired drink without ever having to stop talking into their bluetooth headset that all of our experiences counter to theirs are somehow delusional. So yes, Quack’s is a coffeeshop. Get bent.

Quack’s was lit like a place where people get shit done. And to be sure the place was filled with university students of all stripes and ages. Some looked like they were working on group projects, others toiled silently on laptops that I couldn’t see the display of (probably updating their Facebook pages), and a few were having conversations sans agenda, probably on some perennial campus topic like post-something or meta-something. Cups were strewn across tables, empty chocolate-smeared dessert plates stacked one atop another, and sweating tall glasses of chai or iced coffee glimmered from the tepid spring evening. If the rapture came upon this room of saved souls just as I, a heretic, happened through the door, I would describe, from the evidence strewn through the empty room, the place to be a coffeeshop. And satisfying myself with this, would most likely have followed through on my plans of sampling one of the sinfully unraptured vegan peanutbutter cups and a palpitating mug of black coffee. Although we would all have snooped around behind the counter for mugs had we been left the last man on earth, in reality I appreciated Quack’s everyday use of the mug rather than a paper cup.

I took the treats outside, facing the parking lot of the designer grocery store across the street, and turned my back to Quack’s. I set my wares on the metal bistro table and waiting for my counterpart observed the grain of the fresh peanut butter in the cup, tasted a bite and then swirled it in my mouth with the coffee and my heart raced and eyes swelled. When Matt came out we talked about his work at school and his summer plans of traveling to India. We talked about them as one would at a coffeeshop and the light from behind me through a large plate glass window fell on the parking spots and windshields like light from a coffeeshop, warm, busy, endless.

I have no reservations about its peerage on this site. There is no formulaic checklist to provide admittance. Formulas don’t quantify atmosphere or spunk. These are things that we have to see for ourselves, and Quack’s, with its life, its goods, its intentions, was up there with the big boys. Who am I arguing with anyway?