The location of Earth Cup is pretty cool; it is a tiny box sort of tucked between a castle and what we like to call the “Los Angeles Block”. A few tables and a deck hollowed out of a tree-lined residential street, it is situated as more of a neighborhood spot than say, Satellite or the not-yet-tableaux’d Green Line | Powelton Village. It is akin to the other non-tableaux’d Green Line Locust. (NOTE: At this summer’s Cafe Round Table’aux discussion, there is a workshop scheduled towards charting a new method of describing coffee shops that do not rely on the Green Line/Satellite models.)

California Dreamin

Despite the evocative name, there is something utterly mundane about Earth Cup. It is built along the lines of the off-the-shelf aesthetic like that shithole in Green River [Get Real – Ed.]. It feels like you are in mom’s kitchen – not my mom!, but someone’s mom – whilst she is making her first latte since seeing one on Food Network and running down to the retail restaurant supply shop to buy the cheapest stainless steel and plastic appliances on the shelves. “OK, I fill the cup with the espresso.” Checks notes. “Now I should add milk.” Pours milk into cup. “Wait, I need to heat it first!” Steams milk and espresso together in paper cup. I admit, I am out of touch with food television shows; I regret if that vignette was a failure. Christ, that place in Green River was a mess.

Well, then, I once was arguing with a trick about a terrible Hong Kong cop movie, the one on which ‘The Departed’ (A+) was based [Infernal Affairs / 無間道 – Ed.]. This crap of a film was reduced to the precise action and dialogue that was ‘relevant’ to the chain of events of the narrative – no scene building, no establishing shots, no musical interludes – fuck it, I don’t know that much about movies, but the point is that the film was utterly dry, with no atmosphere or tone; it was like watching the news with the sound off. ‘Coincidentally’, less than a week later, JHT sent me a series of text messages, presumably sent from the driver’s seat of his Volvo whilst still in the theater parking lot, raving about the chick flick, ‘Driver’, starring Ryan Gosslings: “Dude Driver is so awesome. It is like boy meets girl, boy saves girl. Just the order of the universe distilled to its essence. And the main guy wears the like sweetest satin jacket like evar [sic].”

Anyway, I think the film analogy has gone off the rails, too. Maybe you can you could check those ‘films’ out of your local library to get an idea of what Earth Cup is like. Or maybe I should just text JHT that he would love Earth Cup since his thing now is to see everything stripped down to the bare mechanics. Ha! Ha! I doubt it. I have seen JHT’s favourite cafes, and I know what he is into these days; they must be full of unmatched plush wingback chairs, lamps shaped like Ionic columns (merely the 3rd best style), 50′s bentwood tables, teak wall paneling, a chalkboard menu, and a circle of friends gathered ’round the hearth. “Have a seat, brother! Warm those weary dogs by the fire.”

JHT Dreamin

Tangent #3:

I was grabbing some chaat at Mood Cafe*, when I overheard some Chads complaining about going to Earth Cup because they ‘never have anything vegan’. Then don’t go there! You don’t have to go. I’m taken back to my salad days, growing up in the Godless Red House, and all the days since: “I hate having another can of cold beans for dinner“, “I hate spending X-mas alone“, “I hate eating an entire tray of Nutter Butters in one sitting.” They are choices I’ve made. I know that Earth Cup is the only place on the block, and we all want to support the local shop; if we feel obliged to reward them with our service in spite of the constant disappointment, how will they learn?

On the other hand, I already know that I am only going to visit Earth Cup once a year (see below), and only an asshole would demand that they stock all my favorite treats when it is unlikely that I will ever buy them. If Cafe Tableaux placed an order every time some drifter tramped in and told us, “You guys should totally sell walnut haystacks/Zagnut bars/Cheerwine because I like them,” we would have gone under within our first six years! Rather than support a coffee shop that isn’t good enough, just go to the coffee place two (2) blocks down 46th, on Locust, and get a vegan chik’n sandwich or some shit. The point is, independent places aren’t naturally awesome and should rely on merit as much as, if not more than, corporate chains that have the momentum of name recognition of ‘How can 1 billion customers be wrong?’ I’m looking at you, Unitea.

Holy Eff, is that enough rationalization to allow me to say something less than flattering about an independent coffee place without being accused of being a Starbucks devotee or wanting my neighbors to fail? Now we’ll write about Earth Cup, acknowledging the one thing that makes it the coolest cafe in Philadelphia, at least once a year:

X-mas 09: I took a break from chipping the ice from under my rental car’s tires with a trash-picked IKEA pasta server to attempt to drive out of the slush again. As I floored it, I noticed a couple of greying bohunks seated at an outdoor table in their Patagonia fleece, watching my wheels spin on the black ice for 10 minutes. The tires touched asphalt; and the car lurched into the traffic lane; I gave them a “Thumbs Up” as I skidded by them, but they were too ashamed for not helping me to reply.

X-mas ’10: Knowing Earth Cup to be open on X-mas, I planned ahead. I had this Romantic notion of snuggling at a table for a relaxing morning. I would throw off the yoke of yuletide traditions that had burdened the individual for generations: spending 3 hours on the road between 4 houses, explaining the veg*n diet to grandparents, listening to rants by racist siblings, conversing with an 8 year old. A real tableur makes his own luck! And lucky me would calmly enjoy the peace and quiet of a coffee out followed by a tofu hot pot dinner in chinatown and film showing at the neighborhood multiplex. I’m trying to wind this tableau down, so I will have pity the reader and just say that this day played out in a wholly disappointing manner.

X-mas ’11: I was only back because I had been there the previous years. Knowing better than to chase the wild dreams of 2010, I merely followed the wretched script without consideration, no better than the monkey in the cage, flinging shit at passersby every hour on the hour. Merry Christmas! I ate some homemade biscotti in the cold and reflected how a year has passed with me in the exact same position as before: same town, same ‘job’, same road bike, and now sitting in the same seat with the same treats, followed by the same dark dinner in chinatown.

X-mas ’12: I am gulping espresso on my private terrace overlooking Saint-Germain-des-Prés, glancing over a proposal by Plan B Entertainment to option my latest collection of short stories, an empty carton of Nuttér Buttérs at my feet.

Please visit Earth Cup.

==========

*a) Not a cafe.

*b) I’ve never eaten at Mood Cafe, but I wish someone would, so I wouldn’t have to cross the street every time I stroll down Baltimore to avoid the embarrassment of walking past the perpetually empty space. Mood family, if you are reading this, try hanging some tapestries or get a poster or something for the wall; maybe strategically stage some ficuses to block off particular areas from each other. Your open kitchen takes up more than half of your cafe’s floor plan; no one wants to eat on a stool in a bare room with a guy standing next to a mop sink, staring at them. This design advice as been provided pro bono, courtesy of the work.group.

None of these are particularly representative or singular to Eugene. However having them all roaming around one city seems special. What Eugene would have you believe is an endemic, or at least native, species, is the duck. Yeah, whatever kind of duck, it doesn’t matter. Thanks to the university’s sports team mascot the word duck and the cartoon presence of ducks is almost as common as the living waterfowl who seem to fare less favorably, in a tiny pond at the start of Pre’s Trail on the godforsaken north bank of town and forgotten in a floodprone creek (as much a creek as the L.A. River is a river) running through town. Of all the birds in town, except for maybe the mercurial owl, I feel the most affinity for the little common ducks. I have been analogized to them with their peaceful coasting silence on the surface and the nonstop effort and motion of their webbed paddles unseen in the murky water. Whether it is accurate or not I have taken it to heart and taken them under my preferring wing.

Having somehow burned through two loaves of bread at the same time I was left with four fermenting ‘hills.’ I believe people more typically refer to the end pieces as ‘heels.’ However in our household, due to my wife’s north Georgia mountain heritage, where they likely referred to them as ‘heels’ as well, though in that accent ‘heel’ is a homophone of ‘hill,’ she just ran with ‘hill.’ It seems the more gentle term to me and I end up preferring it. These hills could have gone into the neighbor’s compost, but rather than climb their fence yet again I decided to break a standard natural law and go down to feed the ducks in the creek. It was something that I doubtlessly would privately curse someone else for doing but that is the paradox of social distaste.

I made my way down the ‘banks’ of the creek. Bleached pages from a dirty magazine withered in the tall grass inflected the already suspicious and unsavory tableau of a middle-aged man feeding ducks on a weekday afternoon by recalling more the first twenty seconds or so of ‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’ than a peaceful nature lover on his day off. I cast it from my mind and sat on a culvert standing out from the steep banks and started crumbling out the sour bread into the creek. A few male and female ducks trolled about snapping them up. Then the gulls descended, their titanic wings arching to stall them in the ballistic trajectory of my crumb tosses. As an underdog myself, my above-noted empathy for the wayward seafarers was easily trumped by the comparably diminutive ducks, their more awkward attempts at flight, and of course the peaceful composure of their bodies as they swam. Within the duck paddling I soon settled on a preference for the homely females who were intimidated by all others from taking the crumbs. They being more intelligent did not follow the diversionary crumbs I tossed downstream and remained right there with me to be fed proper. Two even made their way up the bank toward the culvert and ate crumbs that I tossed into the reeds, their brazen proximity a clear demonstration of why one doesn’t feed wild animals. But were these wild? I sensed that their domestication occurred long before my late arrival on the Eugene scene. It was only a few weeks prior had I seen two mothers with walking strollers in tow loosing a flurry of Cheerios from the little bridge that led over to Albertsons. At that point, prior to my election to do similarly, I, of course, privately condemned their actions.

Mid afternoon conditions in Eugene are unpredictable. My own were even more so. The time difference from my home base of operations usually meant that after about three o’clock my responsibilities dwindled, but not always, and I was ever vigilant to the perception that I was loafing, not carrying my weight, or on permanent vacation. Checking my messages I felt the confidence, stepping up out of the creek, to bet against the threatening clouds and prolong my peaceful ramble with a coffee. I never ‘need’ coffee. Those who flex their addiction never seem anything but preposterous to me. I in fact take pride in my coffeeshop visitation practices which are rarely ever in a state of rote distraction, always a choice, an indulgence in a black celebration. However, invested as I was in the immersion and mindfulness of another narrative my cup from Eugene Coffee Company accompanied me back to the creek bed. After sampling a number of different ersatz seats, on curbs, embankments, the patio of the coffeeshop, a tree in the Frisbee golf park, I had settled upstream from the culvert atop a standpipe covered with rusty checker plate. A brown tabby cat (I will save the study of cats in Eugene for another tableau, perhaps Wandering Goats) stalked the tall grass at the water’s edge. He sat back on his haunches amidst cries, crows, clucks, quacks, screeches, titters, chirps, caws, and warbles, at peace with the plenty.

Sike! I don’t have a house or a bed; I sleep on a curb alerted futon mattress on the cement floor of a basement SRO efficiency. In any event, I would have typed that lede a year or more ago – the day after whenever Grindcore House had its grand opening – a mediocre year or more ago at that: one amounting to nothing, sans accomplishment, sans highs and lows, quite distinct from the previous year, which should be 2009 — it’s difficult to determine without referencing a calendar – as that was the year of complete darkness, the accumulation of hundreds of hours of alternating between hammering my fists against my knees and lying catatonic on the carpet envisioning circles of ravens as black fog closed against me, until the latest DVD of Battlestar arrived from Netflix. At least I had time to bicycle to the top of Mount Washington once a week. This past year of squatting on the Grindcore tableau lacked such drama; it was only day after day spent sitting by the radiator and/or box fan, moving some text or photos of bison up and down the screen one pixel at a time.

Unlike other editors, I don’t have the focus and discipline to seat myself before a blank sheet of vellum and fill it with 1000 lines of text before my 9am coffee break. Almost certainly, I have described my bouts with [Edited to add: literary] impotence to our readers before today; unlike the artist known as Prince, however, I never revisit my own work. I burn my ships when I reach the shore, so I can not verify what I once may or may not have proclaimed. Regardless, as a result of this literary flaccidity, over the years, many worthy tableaux have fallen before they reached maturity: Metro (r.i.p.), Jittermugs (r.i.p.), the Lund Trilogy, and the one-word Unitea (r.i.p.) tableau.

Putting off this Grindcore piece for so long has its advantages, however. First, it is still in business, unlike, say that coffee place that replaced Walnut Bridge after it went out of business. Secondly, and more importantly with regards to the Cafe Tableaux Manual of Style, the time has given me pause enough to abstain from gushing like a pasty, sycophantic fanboy and to set my gaze upon a negative angle to bitch about like the ‘fucking pretentious idiot‘ our clients have come to expect:

What’s the deal with all the fucking dogs at Grindcore House? Without fail – without fail!! – every visit this tableauxist has made has involved an encounter with a customer standing in line with one or more dogs. These aren’t Pekinese or Chihuahuas, either; they are human-man-sized Kangals and Leonbergers trying to sniff everyone’s shit and barking at full volume. One old prick in a two-tone Columbia sports jacket let his Golden Retriever off leash in at the counter, whilst a couple brought a baby stroller (don’t get me started) and two dogs in to the back seating room so they could lay in the middle of the floor where people carrying hot coffee and platefuls of biscotti had step over and around them.

Though the atmosphere is slightly more hipster at Grindcore, there is some overlap between the South and West Philadelphia cultures. The crust punx, trust fund students, and aging granola types who inhabit West Phila coffeehouses sure as shit have dogs; quark only knows you can’t sit in Clark Park with your hoagie without one trying to rub its filthy snout on it within seconds, but you never see one holding up the line at Green Line or Earth Cup; even the “scum fucks” at Satellite have the decency to lash their animals to a bench when they hike over for a smoothie (Though the cat from Firehouse Bicycles is welcomed into Satellite at any hour, which is perfectly acceptable).

Satellite Coffeeshop

So why do the dogs Occupy Grindcore? I presume the ‘vegan’ sign over the door encourages it. “Oh, they don’t eat animals in this coffee shop, so I wouldn’t be acting like a selfish prick if I brought one into the confined space and allowed it to bark at people.”

Of the three (3) responses my online personal ad has garnered since August 2010, one was the inquiry, ‘Just wondering, how can a vegan dislike dogs*?’ *It actually said ‘children’, but they are synonymous to me. I didn’t reply to the message, because she was not my type and I have unwarranted, delusional expectations, but I will answer here, in case she is still googling ‘thosxxxmore’: appreciating something conceptually does not preclude hating a manifestation of that concept individually. I ‘appreciate’ art, but I think Banksy is a hack. My queue includes ‘Dark Stylish Thrillers’, but I gave the Vince Vaughn ‘Psycho’ ½ a star. I do not want to see my two nieces killed by a mad woodsman, but I also have no desire to ever see them again. Similarly, the fact that I do not want to see animals, as a whole, abused or used for my vanity does not mean that I also have to be friends with every one of them personally. Some of them, I would; tigers, elephants, sea turtles, all could move in with me. Now, consider the cow: They are cute in cartoons and Far Side calendars, but the real ones have a terrible stench and are covered with flies; my apartment has enough of both, already. Cows can be set to roam freely on the plains or the range or whatever their habitat would be if humans had not restructured it; put it to a vote and I would vote for it, if elections actually made a difference, but I do not want to hang out with them. Dogs and children are in the same lot.

Speaking of which, as long as I am on a tear with criticizing things I can’t explain, I am no longer certain that an anarchist, non-commercialized, industry-free society is ideal. The following tirade will likely be the most conservative, reactionary, and chauvinist thing you will ever read by this tableauxist. NOTE: thos. more has none of the personal characteristics listed in the previous sentence. I have this theory – though it is probably not that, since there are some rigid scientific guidelines as to what constitutes a logical theory. I have this thing that I thought, based on this time I read some musing on the salad days of NASA, when all the dudes working there wore skinny ties and white short sleeve shirts and existed within a basically confined, limited social structure. Those guys had no freedom or expression, but they still put people on the moon. Now we have Casual Friday every day of the week, open-ended hours, in-office daycare, and Dell can not make a laptop adapter that lasts more than a year.

Look, the day I wear a suit is the day I get married, but it has to be more than a coincidence that wearing Airwalks and Hollister t-shirts to the office coincides with the loss of two space shuttles in flight and the U.S. reliance on Russia to send its astronauts to the International Space Station because we can’t make rocket capsules any more. Yes, the country was more stifled and repressed than today, if your yardstick is the sexualization of toddlers in tiaras and the airing of ‘Weeds’ on teevee, but things still got done, and people who raged against the machine produced Catch-22 and Stranger In A Strange Land and Paint It Black; now you can bring your daughter to work day and wear flip flops when you meet the president, but at the cost of producing artists whose only output is abstinence parables about vampires who sparkle and Hungry Games (tl;dr). This laissez-faire attitude is what causes the hippies responsible for supplying vegan foods under their homemade, boutique brand to coffeehsops to lapse after two weekends of deliveries, because baking 24 muffins in their co-op’s kitchen collides with time they would rather spend tweeting about ‘The Walking Dead’ or ‘Gossip Girls’ or ‘The Kardashians Show’.

As a result of this condition, some local coxcomb gets hooked on coffee cake on his first visit, but upon every return to the coffeehouse, he finds the display case empty because his freewheeling do-the-work-you-love generation can not be bothered to get out of bed before noon, so he has to order a day-old bagel that is the same as a bagel he could get without traveling four miles first thing in the morning! Now, this unnamed hot buck is not going to say ‘life was better in the 60′s’, though it quite clearly was by almost any measure, assuming you were a white male of means who did not get drafted and end up in a tiger cage in Vietnam, but can we at least bring back brutally rigid working conditions of putting on a tie one day a week (preferably Saturday night) in order to produce some coffee crumb cake for the masses — or at least for the one guy who gets to the cafe early enough? Furthermore, as long as we are imposing absurd draconian measures, why not institute a moratorium on the ‘Bottomless Cup’? Because little else will stop this tableauxist at four refills, which the above spiel proves is more than anyone needs.

Success!

Postscript: This is why we need more than one tableauxist in each city – someone to post about G’core’s shows, readings, movies, library, community meetings, etc, and about how you are, spoiler alert, less likely to hear grindcore over the speakers than you are Fugazi, Count Basie, or Joni Mitchell. Grindcore House is truly an awesome place that serves its neighborhood by providing more than just coffee and treats; the type of quality A++ tableau that it deserves unfortunately is not what I do.

Fuck Yes

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.

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 Eight of JH and Thos.’s tableau roadshow.

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!