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.

1. “That’s not gluten free is it?”
“No.”
“Good.”

2. Can’t abide by a place that sells underwear, toy Sasquatch arms, wallets, moleskin nbs, greeting cards, and “70s style running shorts.”

3. “Dude, it’s a, yeaaah”

1. The Queen in heat accepts the slant-ins from several ardent Toms in a noisy chorus of superfecundity.

2. Thos.’s mug is handmade.

3. Ali Baba’s woman:

• If the other 2 people hadn’t come in Thos. would have started crying
• “Sometimes I think you want to fail.”
• She was drinking a 44oz. Mountain Dew and doing a word find.
• The kids in front of Boise Fry Co. were laughing at us for eating there.
• Worst falafel on the planet.
• Jews make the best falafel

4. Victimized conservatives in the ‘fly-over’ states are just as culpable for the sorry state of our country as deranged and deviant liberals.
-they are upset at being disenfranchised even though they like the exact same reality television and foods stuffed into other foods as coastal elitists, but their caginess is more a product of shame for not being attractive and hip.

5. “I need 4 shots! Gotta get my buzz on!”

6. This is the best place on the trip so far.

7. The barista thinks Thos. is ignoring JH like the guy’s wife on her device in Sweet Melissa’s, Laramie.
-JH lives in the moment

8. If you barely fit in your stretchy sundress you probably don’t need a Coke for breakfast.

Padcast Eight of JH and Thos.’s tableau roadshow.

1. Thos. doesn’t pretend to think NYC was cooler when it was overrun by criminals, but Ogden seems too nice, like a Twilight Zone episode where robots come up and pick up trash and kill strangers.

2. Kenn Allen should have written a sequel to Westworld where he sleeps with Roman slave-boys in Roman World.

3. 8 DEAD ON I-80

4. JH has never heard so much reggae in his life as this week.

5. this place needs a “suitor’s gallery” like Java Lords in Atlanta for the vanilla mountain hipsters to have a place to sit while they cruise the barista.

6. Yoda watercolor

7. Incorrect perspective in ‘some Velazquez’ painting

8. What flavor is Orgeat? (something to do w/ almonds)

• what are these flavors for?
  eg. watermelon?
• steamers?
• go to hell, steamers.

9. 8 coffeeshops in five days, becoming a blur.

10. Sandwiches prepared by other people than myself are vile. -JH

11. Flatbread and pita bread are not the same.

Padcast Seven of JH and Thos.’s tableau roadshow

- Plain bagel, toasted, $2.25

- Republican debate, What’s so funny about Newt thinking everyone’s stupid but him?

1. JT wanted to come here.

2. Despite accusations from Micha Issitt, etc., CT does not have the power to put anyone out of business or convince anyone of anything.

3. This place was out of coffee.

4. [diagram nullifying douchebags who wear their Oakleys on the back of their necks when indoors]

5. Luby’s massacre, wish it would happen right here, right now!

6. Wash your wand, lady!

1. Things Thos. doesn’t know: What is so edgy about charging for soymilk?

2. I’ll take it black.

3. Edgy coffee shops

• Every thirty minutes coffee comes out of fire sprinklers
• The ceiling is constantly getting lower
• Free soymilk on the counter
• Cats
• No gum chewing policy

4. Is that girl really tall or are we just sitting really low?
-It is the height of two motel stick pens

5. Elliot [sic] Smith killed himself in a badass way.

6. Thos. was happy when Kurt Cobain died, now he feels bad.

7. Amy Winehouse’s death that too late to be cool, unless she subscribed to the Richard Manuel School of Suicide, ie, the most pathetic way possible, in a Quality Inn in Winter Park, FL.

1. What is a snickerdandy? Is snickerdoodle copyrighted?

2. People with sunglasses aren’t attractive.

3. Archway monument, I-80

4. Butler Building strip clubs

5. Bad Gene face

6. Guy on scooter @ drive thru window. Gets off and stands @ window. why wouldn’t you just walk through the front door?

7. People in the great plains exclusively drink ridiculous coffee drinks

1. Roller derby, don’t get it.

2. Flies everywhere.

3. Loser geek @ Big Lots like[s] Akira t-shirts.

4. Comcast only monitors for people stealing their shows.

5. My first time here I left because it looked like somewhere that sells hard candy out of a barrel.

6. Retrograde motion and tennis balls thrown out the window.

7. “Isn’t it always night in space?” -JT

8. I’d look at anyone naked in public if they offer. -Thos.