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

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

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

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

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

there have been 2 shops in my short life thus far that, for any appreciable length of time, usurped my home as consistent theatre of operations or sitting parlour. one was the 18th street coffeehouse in santa monica and the other was jittery joe’s at five points in athens. for about 1.5 years i spent almost every sunday evening here or the surrounding environs, watching the clear spring sunday dusks cool over the intersection, dissected by wires and swollen with the rush of lights in the apartments and houses up milledge as the sun disappeared completely, wandering in late summer sunsets, fighting the sane urge to forego a soy latte in the putrefying heat yet stepping into the airconditioning, as the dusk sweat clings my ‘mad butcher’ tshirt to my back, and ordering one up anyway from my boy todd and drinking it in the window until the sun went down, sitting in the breeze on the stoop in front of the laundromat on lumpkin after dropping lwat81 off at 5&10 for work with my notebook on my lap until the autumn chill set in and i took my coffee into the laundromat until full night before going back to jittery joe’s, where, when the night was dark, the glass would turn such a reflective black on the insides that the warm little banker’s lamps on the tables and the generally low glow would create such a dissociative vessel that upon leaving, after a few hours, my stomach would sink at the emptiness that claims the night air in north georgia, as if the powers of the coffee were only effective within the warmth of the shop, and, immediately without the effects of the caffeine, i drove back to lwat81′s little duplex disoriented to cook a warm meal to ring in the week.

like 18th street, where i learned that i could only write in .5mm mechanical pencil, i cultivated a pleasant writing habit of seeking out one of the extremely small round tables, which were fairly low, and pulling my chair as close as possible so that the table post was between my legs and the edge of the table was almost against my stomach, and i would spread out my notebook to write as though i had a wooden lap. around the room were books for sale, a good selection of penguin paperbacks, vineland in hardcover, a jgballard text, and a number of large format ‘how-to-garden’ and ‘how-to-fix-shit-around-your-house’ books i would look up from my writing often to look around at people, look around at books, look at myself in the steamed over glass, or get up to use the bathroom outside, where i would perhaps make a lap around the building, peek in 5&10 to see if i could catch an undetected glimpse of lwat81 working, survey the skies, and breath some dark air. the atmosphere changed over time, a new owner came on, slicked it up a little bit, got rid of the round communal couch in the middle of the room (which was presumably sent back to the seraglio from whence it came), and cut through the clutter a bit, and although i liked the clutter, i didnt mind because it told me what jittery joe’s was, and still is to me, after i can no longer physically lay claim to it, it was that intersection at five points, it was the sky arcing all the way over lumpkin, it was the lights of the greek houses up milledge, all seen through and reflected in the glass roll-up doors, and it had clearly been all of these things even when the building was still a service station, and would be even when it was no longer jittery joe’s.

We duck across the patio and into the warmth. Two espresso beverages please. Much like Stumptown in Portland, Favorite is filled with all the latest slick magazines telling you more than you ever wanted to know about martinis, turtlenecks, and Lenny Kravitz’s house. But the rags are not prominent, they are nestled into a space that is confidently detailed, seductively lit, and rich with colour. Although slightly austere, and lacking the patina of dust and worn fabric I might generally nestle into, the space welcomes my scrutiny and allows a more external experience rather than beckoning me to retreat into book or mind. The windows in the front space where we sit are completely black (the wind having blown the light back out to Cedar Street), freezing, punctuating the panoramic wallpaper of some tropical setting, a third trope we float amidst. Reconciling the inside out jungle with the ice fishing shack with the University campus is a delight for the mind as it races with brown liquid replacing blood. How many cups? If we assume this mug holds 1.5 cups of coffee, we would need to drink just over 14 to replace our blood with the beverage, provided there was some way that transferal was made anatomically possible through small slits in the vessels latticed about the stomach or some sort of coffee embalming process. Then! we could understand the magic of this little floating mystery, and perhaps be warmed from within on our trudge back up Prince Avenue.

Although I would never go out of my way to get a beverage here, I have a nostalgic memory that still provides me with some humor. Two of my friends have gotten fired from Jittery Joes, and I actually had the uncomfortable pleasure of seeing my friend Cara get fired after she indulged in a wild night of magic mushrooms. Apparently, that following morning she came into work at around 6 a.m., still tripping and making frequent visits to vomit in the bathroom. Unable to hide her obvious intoxication, she told her co-worker Rachel, who was therein referred to as a mega-bitch. Some background information is needed on the Cara/Rachel relationship. Cara described Rachel as an overweight eat-beast, who was jealous of her because she attracted the affections of some regular smarmy European men. According to Cara’s sensibilities, Rachel’s malicious jealousy was the motivation to rat her out to the boss-man Mark, Mike, or something.

Cara was going to cut my hair one day (think Frenchie. . .beauty school drop-out), and before doing so we went to get coffee. As we were leaving, boss-hog came up to her and asked if he could speak to her. They walked over to one of those concrete tables, and not knowing what to do with myself, I was left to just stand there. He must have looked in my direction, because Cara said, “Oh, anything you have to say to me, she can hear too.” Although I would have preferred to withstand the sweltering heat inside the car, I awkardly sat down and heard a “Cara, you really need to shape up” speech. In an effort to defend herself, she explained that Rachel was just jealous of her, and that she had alcohol poisoning after having a couple of shots of tequila around 7 p.m. the previous evening. She was officially fired two days later.