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.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if someone knew what they wanted when they came in?”

Well, let me you this, jackass, this horrible world is overflowing with filthy Burger Kings where I am certain you may find plenty of greasy mouthbreathers to stagger to your work station and demand a ‘#2′ or the ‘Valu-Kit’ or whatever they name the rubbish they box for sale in national chain restaurants. You could skate over to MLK Blvd and fill out an application immediately, forgoing the reading the remainder of this surly rant. As it happens, you choose to work behind the counter in a boutique coffee house where the menu is not reduced to efficient numerical packages, and the overwhelming majority of the populace does not have a comprehensive and intimate knowledge of every cake and tart in your case.

One wonders, as I do, what it was that you were doing that was so important that made my approach to the counter such a distraction. I would expect that you are in this cafe for the term of your shift, which is the same number of hours regardless of what any moment’s task entails, whether it is cutting eight dollar slices of peanut butter cake, hosing human fæces from the bathroom sink, or standing sedately at the register when a customer tries to order.

Given a choice, what else would you do with your time at the cafe? Were there many lives depending on you checking the messages your iPhone? Were you on the verge of breaking through a gene sequence that would prevent cancer or provide telepathy for future generations of humans? Was Obama texting you for advice on how to get 30,000 troops to haul ass to Afghanistan before accepting a Nobel Peace prize?

Not Gallery Espresso.

In the event, no one asked you to stop what you are doing and ‘wait for me’. I walked into the building and stopped five feet, minimum, from the counter to have a look. This tableauxist is the one least known for meticulous descriptions of a cafe’s physical complexion and superficies, but I do take notice. For these are those ‘things I can’t live without’ that are listed in my online profile, but they are not something I can sit down and catalog in any cohesive form. Why do you think I only write internally monologued biographies?

If my apparent dispassionate observations come across as confusion or befuddlement, maybe I am too easily distracted; perhaps if you tore down the display stands hocking earrings made from seashells and hot glue and demounted the matted laser prints of potted plants and shutters, and you instead put up a massive banner that states ‘No Vegan Items’, then I could rush the counter with out the need to spend a minute scanning every piece of text on site before my approach for a coffee.

What Ho! Can you imagine my surprise when upon my ordering ‘a coffee‘, you had to ask ‘what kind?‘?

“Wouldn’t it be nice if a barista could just take a simple order?”

There is only one thing ‘coffee’ can mean. I didn’t say I needed ‘coffee + soymilk’ or ‘coffee + sugar’ or ‘coffee + hazelnuts’. You don’t pour a sack of flour into a bowl and say ‘here’s your cake’; if you add anything to coffee then it is no longer ‘coffee’. If I say ‘coffee’, all I want in the cup is coffee. There is no ‘kind’, if I wanted a ‘kind of coffee’, I would have asked for coffee with a kind of something.

The only way your question would have been valid would be if you had a dozen varietals and/or roasts to choose from, which you did not, or if you offered a variety of brewing methods, such a vacuum pots, french press, the method method, or cowboy coffee. Even then, I would expect your question to be, ‘How would you like that coffee brewed, superuser?‘, since the ‘kind’ of coffee remains the same, but you only serve the standard auto drip.

This is cafe tableaux; when it comes to writing about about the nature of a cafe’s coffee, or the coffee + smilk, if you please, only I can decide what is apropos. To the reader who wonders, ‘hey brah, why don’t you devote more time to the coffee/baristas/lighting/whatever other hook I feel is so vital?‘, the answer is ‘because this is cafe tableaux‘.

However, in contradiction to my usual affected aloofness with regards to the rabble’s criticisms, to nip that shit, I’ll tell you now: I have found nothing remarkable about the coffee at Gallery Espresso, except that it was convenient and never hot enough. I’ve never touched the food there, but I once rendezvoused here with a couple of skinnies from pie v cake; they could not stop raving about the non-vegan pecan pie, and I recall they went back for second pieces. Also, you need a key to use the head. That should cover everything.

Anyway, this ‘tableau’ is obviously little more than a rambling diatribe. Gallery Espresso seems nice enough; it is just that one barista is a bit of a cunt. It strikes me that Gallery is a place is more suited for tourists to get sandwiches after visiting the Forrest Gump bench or the Girl Scouts house than it is a place for locals to meet for their Sunday morning Reading Circle (this week: The Red and The Black), so a barista could call you a ’shit stain’ to your face for all the difference it would make, as you won’t be around town for a second visit anyway.

This could probably be taken up in klatch – and would have been if anyone used it – but I wonder if cafe tableaux might develop a classification system for the various but limited cafe typologies. It is not for a lack of cafes or trying that this superuser rarely posts new tableaux; you see, unlike JHT, I am unable to eat dung and shit silver – trust me, I have seen the man in person and it coats him like dew every morn. The truth is, believe it or not, I am debilitated by depression and loneliness 9 days out of 10, and the chances that anything noteworthy transpires at the moment I visit a cafe are slim to none; it is this fading of one cafe experience into the next as ‘my life drips like coffee down the drain‘ that unmans me as I stare at an empty jotter night after night.

Allow me to assure the reader, I have tried to enliven events, for your sakes – manipulating craigslist missed connections all week before going in to judge the employees’ and customers’ behaviour, or pouring coffee on a cute girl’s notebook whilst she is in the restroom then telling her that I saw the guy who did it running out the door. However, though we are not objective here, it seems like an impropriety to affect the story with such tactics; this is not ‘gonzo tableaux’.

So! All of these cafes look the same to me. After describing one of each type in the first round of tableaux, I have no zest for listing their details again and again. If this site were to take any lesson from Burger King, we could just stamp out ‘visited a #2′ and maybe keep the attention of the baristas at Gallery:

1. Strip Mall Cafe – Clad with cheap wood veneer, tile floor, and neon. Owned by a wife-husband team or a sole proprietor with another, reliable source of income; they have heard that this Starbucks thing has made billions of dollars, so they want the same from cafe. Bottles of syrup prominently displayed. Everything looks cheap and cash-and-carry, because they put bare minimum of profit back into store, for the rest goes to buy a new flat screen or smart-phone. Lasts 10-15 months.

2. Business Cafe – Run by someone who is not particularly into coffee or cafe ‘culture’, but knows how to run a service business. Usually savvy enough to leave coffee/cafe decisions to someone else. Likely have broader menu than just coffee drinks. On the ball about fixing things.

3. Passion Cafe – People love coffee and will do anything to keep store running, like it is their baby or puppy. Similar to the Strip Mall, but the owners are more earnest, and have quit their jobs and invested all savings into cafe. Trying too many things at once to make everyone happy, they burn out in 8-10 months, putting up a sign that says ‘coming back soon’. Probably would be the type of cafe run by most contributors to cafe tableaux.

4. BoHo – Mismatched chairs and cups. Lamps on tables. Menu is hand written in chalk cute names for ’specialty’ drinks that every other cafe also has (ex, espresso shot in coffee: red eye, shot in the dark, dive bomber, brown star). Meets most people’s conception of a cafe, because it is what they would see on tv or movies, but it is not the actual ‘cafe’ they go to (see 5).

5. Corporate Lite – Not a chain, yet, so you don’t feel like a complete asshole for visiting, but you do feel like an asshole lite. Menu is a printed sign that matches the furnishings. They have store-bought prints framed on the wall. A logo is printed on cups and paper takeaway menus. They are most likely to open a drive-thru.

6. College Cash Barn – Near university or similar high traffic area. Owners don’t have to do anything special but keep the electricity on, and the money just pours in the doors. Could also fit into other types’ classifications, which is unfortunate in the case of Strip Mall or Corporate Lite, as they will last for years.

This is a work in progress; feel free to add your own.

For the sake of disclosure, and to defuse a barrage of charges of elitism and class warfare, it shall be known that this tableauxist was himself a barista for six (6) years and in that time was only gruff with a single customer – in a case that was justified. All disgruntle and crabbiness was directed at the other baristas, until the day I had to quit, so as to avoid being ‘taken outside and taught how to shut [my] mouth‘, but that is a tableau for another day…

However, it was mildly soothing scene in one respect; I was liberated from a specific hunger: soymilk was cheap and tofu was local; I was finally freed from my steady diet of sour apples, budget digestive biscuits, and boxed multi-vitamin ‘dryck’. On the other, hand I was marooned on a barrier island with only sporadic communication with my outside world, narrow as it is, without a bicycle for the first time since 2003, and obliged to a task too grim to describe in the pages of cafe tableaux.


Days were wasted traversing the island on foot to the county library, where I could attach my portable computer to the internet and frantically click through dozens of websites dedicated to polling of detestable groups – NASCAR Dads and War Moms – and to deconstructions of Youtube videos for Senate campaigns in states I never cared to otherwise know about, save for in my dreams of an exhaustive study of highway rest areas about which I have mused to everyone I have ever met.

It’s difficult to imagine now the public mood of those yond days in the context of what has followed. Voting is for suckers; there is no doubt about that, but the manufactured drama of elections can suck almost any cynic into the charade. Now we all know that it does not matter one way or the other who is acting as president when he or she is not doing jack shit, but back then, we were on pins and needles, wondering about some Aryan Nation maniacs assassinating a candidate, dreading the day an air-headed empty suit would succeed to the office upon the death septuagenarian Vietcong Candidate, and tasting something hypocritical in our mouths as the ‘grass roots’ candidate spent more than million dollars on one night of 30 minute teevee commercials.

Despite my obsession with the national conversation, in moments amidst the hours spent at the public library refreshing sites like the hysterical dailykos, the more rational fivethirtyeight, and even the crude wonkette, I pushed the keyboard to the back of my cubicle and scrawled a few ‘notes’ in longhand in the margins of my viking novel-in-progress, which, by the way, was conceived twelve (12) years earlier in a shower across the hall from Peter Zellner’s dorm room near Boston – not in Sweden the previous month.

It was this penciling of gibberish that caught the attention of one of the library maidens, one responsible for re-shelving audio tapes of Carol Higgins Clark works and giving out 30 minute passes for the computer stations, most likely because I was the first person she had seen inside the building not using a cell phone or arguing over the right to play World of Warcraft without headphones. After thirty days of my warming the same seat in the rear corner of the biography stacks, she approached me and asked what it is that I was always scribbling on a ‘graph paper’ notepad.

“it’s this story about these three months i spent building a cabin in the Ardennes”
“wow, is it true?”
“i only write autobiographies”

She stooped over my shoulder and scanned my spiral bound Pocket Notebook; I fanned my hands to cover most of the thumbnail drawings of battle axes and ravens.

“you should come to our short story salon, ok? we meet every week and exchange stories”
“is that something i can do online?”
“no we meet at a coffee house and give each other feedback”

I am not really one for a salon, but I am one for a comely young dish with a bookish look and, on occasion, a slight aura of crunch.

I don’t know how to compose short stories, either, but I do know how to lie about my name and how to steal things off the web. Thus, I was introduced to the salon as ‘Jagger Herzt Trefry’ before presenting several of my ‘Decay’ pieces the next week, fragments of a narrative edited within the bounds of Creative Commons license to remove the more lurid sexual innuendo in the source material.

It was after the presentation of one of these pieces one night at Sentient Bean, a piece in which I neglected to discern, and therefore expunge, a metaphor for the vulva represented by Sepulveda Boulevard as it climbs away from Venice, that the fine lass from the library approached my easy chair.

“ok, it’s really cool that a guy writer can be so in touch with his feminine side”
“ok”
“no i mean your story you read tonight, ok?”
“yeah that was like really hard to do. i don’t think i’ll do that again”
“dude you totally should. it was so awesome…all these other guys just write about spies and hating their fathers and stuff, ok”
“uhhhhmm, i do have some more things like this one, but it is pretty hard to read them aloud in front of these guys –”
“fuck those guys”
“–especially the guy in the fucking ed hardy shirt and crocs”
“dude those guys are losers, ok? you need to write more like that shit tonight, ok”
“yeah…maybe i will send you something.”
“that would be rad ok?”

I hauled ass back ‘home’ and scoured my namesake’s partner site for more of the effeminate compositions. The best piece with a woman’s touch that I could find was an sketch for a work of awkward erotica about a father and son. I bent the genders a bit and removed the most alarming segment – describing an episode under a tree on Xmas eve – then sent an email to the young library trick from a spoofed account intimating that I would be more comfortable sharing this story in person, on a hard copy, not digitally and infinitely reproducible, suggesting that we meet somewhere peaceful where she could read it without distractions “like maybe your apartment or something.”

Whilst I waited at her kitchen table, staring at her knees and other select parts, she turned over the last of the loose leaf pages onto which I had transcribed the holiday tale.

“do all your guys shoot themselves at the end?”
“no! it’s rare. i actually prefer the notion of a hanging –”
“god that’s morbid”
“–preferably with like a belt or the cord from a motel room blinds”
“dude”
“what’s the difference? in the long run?”
“it’s not funny ok”
“shit, i’m not famous for writing fucking comedies”
“well i have a thing about it because my dad was a suicide victim, ok?”
“hmm” there goes that.
“he did it after my mom contracted breast cancer –”

Jesus Fucking Christ. I wondered if I could text someone to call me with an ‘emergency’.

“– he couldn’t bear to see her all sickly and weak from the chemo, ok?”
“uh ok”

She shielded her face with her hand, fingertips on her forehead, as her eyes began to water. No! No! No! No! No!

“you know when i was in Sweden we had these lamps we had to sit under for like two hours a day so we wouldn’t kill ourselves…because it is dark there perpetually”

Her shoulders trembled as she gasped a silent sob; I looked past her neck at the clock on the stove that indicated only 20 minutes had passed since I arrived…

And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good Norwegian wood.

Shortly after 6am, I scratched out a note about needing to be “on set” at 8am and stuck it to the refrigerator with some ‘Poetry’ magnets spelling out ‘Anticipation Settles Accounts”. I swallowed a few gulps of pulp-free orange juice from the carton, swiped an Odwalla Superfood bar from the pantry, and crept into the hall. I held my breath as I turned the deadbolt to open the door and climbed along the iron handrail down to the sidewalk to avoid stepping on the creaky wooden stairs. Upon reaching the landing, I sprinted down the remaining brick steps and jogged around the corner towards Broughton Street.

I headed towards my uncle’s sweet shop near Habersham, where I napped on the sidewalk in front of the entrance until he arrived to open for business.  I begged him to loan me his Prius so I could drive back ‘home’, but naturally he refused, suggesting instead that I use the Islands Shuttle that takes people out to the beach from Emmet Park. After using a trip to the bathroom as a pretext to steal two cans of cocoa from his storeroom, I thanked him for the advice and ran to catch the shuttle.

Knowing that no place serving coffee on Tybee would be open and feeling a little gypped by the promise of ‘Super’ in the Odwalla bar, I implored the driver to let me exit the shuttle at the traffic light in front of Davis Produce and Circle K, and I walked the half-mile to Johnny Mercer at low tide, the path reeking of sulfur and the flinty stench found in an old tackle box or the shitter at a Captain D’s.

By ten o’clock, I had reached the ‘Islands Center’ strip mall, figuring this would be the closest I ever found myself to the Savannah Bagel Cafe at ‘breakfast time’, so I crossed the street at the sight of their mildewed sign and anonymous box of shit and stucco, dripped sweat all over their floor and tables as I drank overcooked coffee from a foam cup and ate the best rosemary and garlic bagel outside of New York City and West Los Angeles. I never again saw the interior of the island’s library.

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?

i lost my notes. i know i took some, but it was so hot, and i kept on my long sleeve shirt and soft hat, that the purple runnels of text on my 89c spiral notepad that i thought were from a rain or spilled drink accident might actually be my sweat-redacted jots from the patio-cum-theater backyard of common grounds. i do still have the pictures, and my laser intentions of forcing myself to down a styrofoam cup of black-joe in the 90 degree east-central texas heat just to be able to write about it here would have been foolishly entered into if i didnt have a somewhat articulate memory of places (less so of people), knowing that i also cant save pocket-sized notebooks worth a darn.

“im thinking of stopping in waco on the drive (from austin to dfw.)” “waco is just a blip on the map.” i guess in reality whomever said that was right, but in a drive that bleak, a blip looks like an oasis, and indeed the flowing streams and heat-bedraggled college kids seemed like a sunken city beneath the highway that the relentless east-central texas landscape just continued to flatten over, although i can only speak about the air-conditioned endless shanty world that was common grounds and the crick-walk on the baylor campus, which, although hot as woolly balls, were all dappled in shade tree shadow and the silence created by heat slowed voices and exhaustion.

someone had told me that baylor university was in waco, and it turned out that common grounds was practically on its campus. the entire sprawling establishment was filled with college kids. the one note i remember having written down was “is baylor a girls’ school?” 95% of the kids in there were young ladies, all with their laptops, ipods, and accouterments spread across tables throughout the interior where nary a seat was vacant in the enfilade of rooms and side parlours where muted light padded like the flickers of late stage heat stroke. there were a few anxious guys standing around, but i assumed they were suitors or townies.

i took my cup out to the patio and sat with my forearms on a vinyl counter overlooking a big fred-sanford-decorated gravel yard with a stage presided over by the unmistakably unnameable roof typology of a pizza hut. there were platforms with seating on them that i can only assume became, after-hours, some lukewarm christian hybrid of hee-haw and club mtv. flyers for a solo show by some young beau-hunk stating that he was ’still single’ further fueled my perception that this place was a seething amazonia, and as i watched girls sleeping and lounging and propped up on their elbows or with their feet on tables, all in small groups a fire was lit, like the wink of an arsonist, when a pop-collared, capri-bepant’d, frat-mopped goon strolled across the patio, through a wooden gate, carrying a puppy. he could not have had a more smug and self-aware look than if he was the last man on earth and responsible for propagating the species with a village of young ladies. shrieks and sighs and coos rose up from all around the patio as i watched in straight-lipped contempt all of the girls rush to this tool like iron filings in a junior high magnetism experiment, knowing not what they did, but knowing that the magnet controlled them, and that his magnetism was as easily procured as rubbing against another stronger magnet, or in this case, by brandishing a puppy at a fucking slumber party. not that i was concerned that i had caused no commotion myself, but the gang bang quickly grew irritating after the quiet studious and languid peace of my first twenty minutes in waco.

on my way back through the joint, foreseeing the immediate diuretic effects of the beverage in the heat, i stopped in the can, and knowing thos’s affinity for the cans of the world, took a photo of the watchful glowing owl that lit the dark room like the inverse of the white world and black moments in the blinding daylight of waco.

and into the bleak sun that swooped me back slightly into the texas sky i walked onto the baylor campus, and still unsure of its gender affiliation, feeling like an awkward wolf sure to be caught leaning against a henhouse, i chose a low road along a concrete creek or spillway that had a meandering sculptural promenade. a bell tolled in the distance. at the end of the promenade a steep stair led back up to a parking lot where i could see, from below, a net or enclosure that looked like it might have been an aviary. hoping to perhaps see a real owl i climbed the stair where a group of children out of their strollers were milling around.

after they were quickly dispersed by the arrival of a large bee, i was able to see through a thick window in a phony rock wall what they were looking at. two living bears were wrestling in a phony rock cave just on the other side of the window. i watched for quite a while, for some reason not wondering why there would be bears in a pen on a girls’ college campus. as the children returned i got my head out of the window and read a placard describing the bears’ origins, or at least the origin of the rationale for the bears. apparently the bear is the mascot of baylors’ slow-pitch softball team or their volleyball team.

luckily, all my questions were answered, especially the burning one that came to mind as soon as i saw their brown fur and snouts in the shade, “do they still drink dr. pepper?” of course, the only two things us highway bullets think when we see the signs for waco are ‘branch davidians’ and ‘dr pepper,’ and why wouldnt it stand to reason that a waconian bear would drink dr pepper. unfortunately, they have stopped forcing them to drink the questionable elixir, much to the locals disappointment it sounds like, and i can only assume that the net spread over the top of the enclosure was to keep rowdy baylor boy-toys from throwing two-liter bottles of dr k or something over the fence to watch the bears lose their cool. the sign didn’t address the branch davidians; i can only assume they still allow the bears to eat them.

did i mention how fucking bleak it was out there?