Visiting Fibber in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood of Chicago was not in the underdrawing of my travel plans when I touched down on a Sunday morning in Kansas City. No sooner than I had coasted into the ominous silence of downtown Omaha, secured a cold bâtard accompanied by a hummus tub, and sat on the side of a planter waiting for someone to walk by I became lost in calculations on my recalled geography of the prairie states. Chicago was certainly no more than a couple of hours away. Then and there abandoning my plans to futz around Iowa for two days, I just had to fight through two full days in Nebraska.

The drive into Chicago from the west is stifling. I was hypnotized from the eight hours that it had taken me to cross Iowa and Illinois, often envisioning myself flying through space at eighty miles per hour without a car, just me seated and flung. As the city rose and set over the interstate chute I recalled the highway scene in Solaris and saw right through the skyline every time it peeked over at me.

After a knight’s tour of Wicker Park I pulled into Fibber’s road and parked in the following morning’s street cleaning zone. My physical excision was destined to continue. Fibber was at work til late and had arranged for me to get the key from her mailbox in the front door and make myself at home in the bottom floor apartment of her building. The mail slot was a narrow, rusty affair that ground into my steering-numbed hand. I could feel the envelope amidst the junk mail and could even see my name written on it but couldn’t clip my aging fingers around it. I felt like I was fishing a golden ticket out of the sewer and was about to give up and drive to a Super 8 I knew in Remington, Indiana when the door swung open, having never been locked in the first place. I took the key, dumped my bindle on the couch and went off floating on foot.

Partially spectral with cornfield ennui, stumbling around Six Corners was the equivalent of the beating I longed for sitting on my planter two nights into my stand in Omaha when I felt that I had not even been touched by a voice since debarking the plane. I became completely turned around like a country mouse and headed off down the wrong spoke a klick before making my way back to Wicker Park to stew in the slow city dusk.

In full night I marched back up the compact city streets with little bodega storefronts tucked in beneath the umbrage of street trees clouding orange lamps and the wide sidewalks alternately steely white shining through shadow and agitated with feet and voices in clumps blazed straight to a bustling intersection with some laundromats perhaps, light icy windows, a breeze, and a glimmering neon and verdant window across the street where Atomix glowed, just as Fibber’s note to me had made a point to landmark. Its impression of a future of the not-too-distant past showed its hand even from afar. I noted upon returning to Atlanta to research my tableau that ‘The Future of Coffee’ didn’t have a website and mused that its pantomime must have been staged in 1995 as seen from 1955. Strangely tactile though, the aqueous sheen of its atomic age styling baffled by the houseplants was exacerbated by the blue hues, fluorescent lighting, and the bizarre coolness that had gripped the city immediately after sunset.

Rarely does coffee not seize me up. I become staccato and distracted. However, I don’t think I would blame the tired sag that came over me on the coffee either. With narcotic perfection I sat in the cold room, with my mouth and stomach warm, staring at the words on my offbrand MP3 player: Ukrainian Insurgent Army. So far on the trip the looseness, the serendipity that I count on to make meaning of my travels had eluded me behind the stifling bleakness, the staying alone in the hotel after dark when I could have seen through the fire glazed sky to the stars, and the pathetically foiled, wordless attempts to overlap with other folks. Here was a schism of temperatures and sensations whose lucidity crystallized the Ukrainian Village around me into the place I was meant to be at that time and let my movements melt into the sensations of easy purposefulness that I rarely feel.

Dipping my fingers in coffee and rubbing them over the watercolor pencils and graphite bars in my rucksack, dragging them over intently penciled territories, a small scene emerged on the paper in front of me. A little Ukrainian Insurgent Army, for some reason dressed as hoar-bearded elves armed with some sort of hooked staffs, marched down out of a hillscape. I know that it was right because I now cannot recall the sensations or visions that engendered the markings as I could when I was drawing ‘a building’ or ‘a landscape’ in eastern Nebraska. This little puddle of pigment was precisely the absence of myself in the moment and the complete control of the environment and situation over me.

Back in the dark of Cortez I had to move my car from the street cleaning zone long after the main exodus had plugged all of the suitable opposite curb parking. Ending up blocks away and walking again through the neighborhood I felt the poultice of Atomix flaking away in the whir of the passing cars on Damen.

At Fibber’s kitchen table a bottle of wine somehow appears in my photographs and a tall tumbler filled next to my implements served as the medium well for my second Ukrainian Insurgent Army drawing. But the time was then past and I had already sunken to parody of that fleeting recent moment. Spreading out my tools photogenically, connecting my MP3 player to Fibber’s laptop, and dipping my fingers in the wine, the weakness of the resulting new drawing showcased my inability to kindle situations for my benefit.  The movements were too clear in a way that made them ineffectual, their powers misused. I had tried to shoot the gun again, to make it work on my own, but fired into the air, into an arc, doing nothing but make a heartbreaking racket and depositing its charge where it could strike no one. It didn’t matter much. I still hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone, nor they to me.

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.

The mood/atmosphere is that of any coffee house which resides in a college/university neighborhood… quiet. This stillness is somewhat hard to achieve when walking up the creaky stairs, to sit in a pew and then sip the fresh not too tarish coffee. You might get a stare or two if your voice is one that carries.

To authenticate the experience (in the winter), prop yourself in front of the fireplace in a nook toward the back of 2nd floor lounge. The art that occupies the walls is somewhat inconsistent. Once they had beautiful hand knit scarves, hats, and mittens on display and for sale. This time was some sophomoric photographer from Depaul, and her trip to the Latin world.

Every time that I have been to the Bourgeois Pig, I have felt cozy at home and comfortable. However I would never be able to study here, as I often grimace in hearing existential/philosophical debates in hushed tones buzzing around at all times, so headphones might be a necessity to those who find inane banter bothersome.

you enter a chamber containing a scepter, a tiara covered with baubles, and a suit of studded leather armour. something tells me it was left by someone of high standing, possibly, Storm.

there is not much that can parallel the entertainment i get from eavesdropping on coffeeshop rpgs (role playing games!). i would much rather listen to a stereotypical bimonscificon dm (dungeonmaster) lay out, in a staccato pace that allows phe to construct the flimsy narrative as phe goes along, a potboiler of a fantasy scenario in a nasally, wheezy voice, whilst accepting cues and decisions on the fate of the characters from their player(s) than see some twerp (or adult) reading harry potter or see the lord of the rings films gross enough green to purchase arkansas. even if it is weak, tired, and tedious, the look of satisfaction they get from hashing through it themselves and cultivating ownership over their fantasies is fruit enough for me.

such was the discovery of this little shop in northern chicago, possibly evanston, so i thought. we had passed it an evening or two before when trying to discover ourselves a place to sup, the name of course, as they so often do, planted an associational seed in my head that crept, over the next days in the city, into desire bordering on missionary, to imbibe at the curious place. after packing all of our things for the drive back to atlanta, via dry ridge, kentucky, we headed to ennui for a morning beverage, some air to last us through the car ride, and as it happened, our only cafe experience in chicago. it was a very comfortable place, perhaps a bit spacious for my liking, broad picture windows wrapped around its corner position; it could have been a shop or showroom at some point. we drank outdoors, at a patio table, surrounded by dogs (oh! he isn’t usually like that!)(like what? a dog?), and the aforementioned gamers. not that ennui was ‘weak, tired, and tedious,’ it was quite pleasant, but it was somehow merely occurring. it was not an overly stylized place, nor was it overly bland, its presentation was stuttered out, its clientele ad hoc. like so many other shops, its name delivered a prompt on the feeling you just could not put your finger on about the place. although a worthy shop, and completely admirable and inspiring and warm, the sun that day and the empty quality of the space, all floating out the windows above the lowered seating area, just left me with a listless yet lucid attentiveness for my own feelings and desires.

but as i feel the definition of the word implies, i take ownership of my ennui. it was not one of dissatisfaction, but one of watching the world cycle past, being out of my element. the narrative of the gamers gave pause to my spaceout, in which i was able to see, against the streetscape giving way to a starbucks one block up sheridan, the satisfaction, of the independent creation that was ennui, that was the gamers’ interactive story, and in my choice to enjoy my morning there.